About Us

PCPP’s Mission

PCPP was founded to preserve the photographic record of our history and culture by addressing threats to some of the best such work in the last 100 years. The threat arises from a gap between chronically backlogged, overworked institutions and massive, unorganized collections whose creators or heirs find the issues of archiving, digital storage, physical preservation, and rights management overwhelming. Very few important collections avoid this fate. 

PCPP serves as an advisor and consultant for artists seeking to preserve their work, but also proactively identifies such imperiled cultural, historical, and educational assets in order  to see that they are properly placed and preserved. We help organize the collections—including letters, notebooks, and other ephemera—and facilitate their accession by the best possible institutional steward. While PCPP acts as a good-faith advisor to all parties, our allegiance is to the work, and our sole mission is to ensure that it is made available to scholars, the public, and future generations.

We also serve the work we represent by drawing together interested professionals, including curators, gallerists, appraisers, archivists, collectors, and experts in fine art photography and photojournalism. 

To date, PCPP has helped to place Charlotte Temple’s work at Duke University, Robert Nickelsberg’s at American University, and John Dominis’s at the Dolph Briscoe Center for American History at the University of Texas. We have also advised the Ben Martin Estate, the Josephine Hennerick Project, and such prominent living photographers as John Loengard,  Sarah Hoskins, and others. After more than two years working with Shawn Walker and the Kamoinge Workshop, the Harlem-based collective of African-American photographers, PCPP arranged for the Shawn Walker Collection to be acquired by the Library of Congress in 2020.

our staff

Karen Gaines, Co-Founder and Executive Director

Karen Gaines is an archivist and former editor of photography and picture researcher at Time magazine, People magazine, and other Time Warner Publications. In her career as a picture editor and at PCPP, she has assigned, edited, and worked to preserve the collections of some of the best and best-known photographers of our time. Among other projects, she ran photographic coverage for the official record of President Barack Obama’s 2009 Inauguration and worked with the Smithsonian Institution on its exhibition of those pictures. She is a graduate of Tufts with a BFA in Photography and received her M.S.L.I.S. (Masters in Information and Library Science) from Pratt Institute.

Catherine Fukushima, Development Director

Catherine Fukushima is a consultant in the areas of art, culture, philanthropy, and fundraising working primarily with libraries and museums. Prior to consulting, she was a senior program officer for the New York-based Wallace Foundation. She worked for fifteen years in the field of museum education, holding positions at The Metropolitan Museum of Art, The Brooklyn Museum, and the Museum of American Folk Art. Catherine has taught in Seton Hall University’s Museum Professions Graduate Program and in New York University's Heymen Center for Philanthropy and Fundraising.

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