Leonard Vernon, who with his wife, Marjorie, amassed one of the country's finest private collections of photography, died Friday in his sleep at his Bel-Air home. He was 89 and had been in failing health with Parkinson's disease, his daughter, Carol, said.
Vernon, a wealthy industrial developer, builder and contractor, was an influential figure, along with his wife, for more than three decades in the Southern California photography community. The couple, who friends said were equal partners in the success of the collection, started buying photographs in 1976 after a chance encounter in Carmel. They built an archive that now stands at 4,000 images.
"Their collection goes from the earliest photographs in the 1840s to current pictures and covers over 700 photographers," Carol Vernon said.
Her father's interest in the subject never waned.
"The day before he died, he was looking at catalogs for the upcoming auctions in New York," she said.
Images from the Vernon collection have been lent to the Museum of Contemporary Art, the Getty Center and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art in Southern California, as well as the Museum of Modern Art in New York City and other major institutions such as the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., and the Art Institute of Chicago.
"It is one of the great modernist collections," said Tim Wride, a former curator of photography at LACMA who is now the executive director of the No Strings Foundation, a philanthropy that funds photographers. "Any historical show that's been done over the last 10 years usually includes pieces from the Vernon collection."
Stephen White, a photography dealer who owned one of the first important photography galleries in Los Angeles, knew the Vernons -- and their collection -- well.
"It is probably one of the few major private collections left from the beginning days of collecting in the 1970s," White told The Times. He described the collection as heavy in Western photography with images by Ansel Adams and Edward Weston and noted that many photographs on display at the Getty in an exhibition of Weston's work are from the Vernon collection.
Their collection reflected their humanistic life view.
"I don't know how to describe it or explain it," Vernon said in a 1999 interview with The Times. "But from Day One, absolutely, we didn't have to talk to each other. We would drive the dealers crazy. They would show us 24 prints or so, and I would know, and Marjorie would know, right away which one we were going to get serious about.
