Frequently Asked Questions

About the gallery…

How do I find you?
As you may know, there are no numbered street addresses in Carmel. The good news is Carmel is a small town and we are very easy to find! The gallery is located on the SE corner of Dolores Street at Ocean Avenue – 1 door down from the clothing store, Paloosh, except on Dolores St., not Ocean Avenue. While we are closer to Ocean Avenue than 7th Street, we are on Dolores between Ocean & 7th. If you get lost, please give us at call at 831-625-1587 and we’ll happily assist.
Oh no! I’m in Carmel on days you are not open and would like to visit the gallery.
In addition to our public hours, we are open daily by appointment. While 24-48 hours notice is preferred, please give us a call anytime at (831) 625-1587 and we’ll do our best to accommodate your schedule.
What is your mailing address?
1) If you are mailing us sensitive materials such as original photographs, or checks/money orders, please ship them FedEx to the following address:
Photography West
Dolores St. at Ocean Ave.
Carmel by the Sea, CA 93921
2) If you are sending us a casual note, or fan mail, please ship it USPS to the following address:
Photography West
PO Box 5306
Carmel, CA 93921
Do we need to RSVP for artist receptions and gallery events?
While we appreciate you notifying us, an RSVP is only required for webinars and Zoom receptions, not in-person events at the gallery.
What is your payment policy?
All payments should be made in USD and are due at time of sale. Payment methods include all major credit cards, cash, check and wire transfer. Interest-free layaway options are also available. Items purchased on layaway are not released until they are paid in full. For additional information about our various payment plans, please contact us.
Do I have to pay sales tax?
That depends! There is a 9.25% sales tax for all purchases within the state of California. Currently, sales tax is not applicable on purchases shipped out of state. International shipments will be charged import taxes upon receipt. We strongly suggest contacting your local customs authorities to determine what that tax rate may be.
How do I arrange a pick up?
If you purchase a photograph through our platform and would like to pick it up in person, please select “pick up” instead of shipping during checkout and we’ll contact you with an estimated time frame for when your order will be ready. If there is a specific day/time you would like to retrieve your order, please let us know in the order notes, or contact us directly.

About the art…

I saw a photograph at the gallery a few months ago and didn’t buy it. May I buy it now at the same price?
That depends. While prices and availability are subject to change without notice, some of our artists have scheduled price increases. Please contact us for current pricing and availability.
I saw a few photographs online and would like to see them in person. Can that be arranged?
Absolutely! Please email us a list of the images you’re interested in and we’ll have them in the gallery ready to show you at your convenience.
Are all the original photographs made from the same piece of film, identical?
No. Each work that is individually handmade from film is unique. While most artists do their best to be consistent, they are not the same. Some artists, like Roman Loranc, make no effort to be consistent. Other artists, like Ansel Adams, make conscious changes over the years to how they develop some photographs, which is part of their creative process. As a general rule, while the photographs made say an “edition of X,” each work is 1/1.
If I’m not 100% happy with my photograph, may I return it?
We want you to be happy with your purchase.
Our top priority is for our customers to be happy. If you are not satisfied with your original photograph(s), we will accept returns for exchange or store credit (minus shipping charges) within 7 days of delivery. If you would rather receive a refund for the original photograph(s), we will issue you a refund minus the shipping charges and a 3% processing fee as soon as the items are received at the gallery. Again, returns must be initiated within 7 days.
Return shipping expenses and insurance are the responsibility of the client. Please note: any and all private acquisitions purchased on client’s behalf from a third party are also final sales and not subject to return. Books and posters are final sale and non-refundable. That said, if a book or poster is defective, please let us know and we will happily replace it for you. Please review our Terms and Conditions for more detailed descriptions about our return policy.

About shipping…

How do you ship?
With the exception of Christopher Burkett’s “Museum Edition” Cibachromes, which must be shipped by a specialized freight service (via Craters & Freighters), we will make a point to ship via the method you select during checkout. Generally speaking, however, books ship USPS Media Mail with tracking information, unless you select otherwise. Posters and original photographs will ship either FedEx or UPS. Larger or framed artworks are shipped in custom pressure-treated wood crates. As soon as your order ships, we will email you the tracking information to confirm. Items are shipped signature required, no exceptions. You may make a special request to waive the signature, but in doing so accept full responsibility if the package is lost or stolen. You are also welcome to arrange for your own courier or transportation service. Simply select “pickup in store” and we will contact you to request the details.
What if I am not home?
All orders require a direct signature to acknowledge delivery. If no one is available at the address to sign for the delivery, FedEx or UPS will either leave a note to redeliver the package, or we will send you an email informing you of how to rearrange delivery or collect the products from a local facility. If, after a failed delivery to you, you do not re-arrange delivery, we will contact you for further instructions. Any undeliverable items will be returned to us and we will refund your original payment method minus the shipping charges.
How long does it take to receive my order?
We currently ship packages on Thursday, Friday and Saturday. If you order on Wednesday, it will likely ship on Thursday or Friday. If you order on Saturday, it will likely wait until the following Thursday. Some products may be shipped the next day, whereas some items may need to be produced, framed and shipped before they reach you. Please allow for 3 – 6 weeks from the date of order for the delivery of these items. We operate as a very small team here at the gallery and at particularly busy times of year (Christmas, exhibition openings etc.), please allow 5-7 business days for your order to be fulfilled. If you need the item sooner, please let us know and we will do our best to accommodate your schedule. Thank you!

Carol Williams never talks about her own work as a photographer, which is a surprise, considering the company she keeps in her gallery – Ansel Adams, Morley Baer, Christopher Burkett, Paul Caponigro, Kenro Izu, Roman Loranc, Don Worth and Edward and Brett Weston, to name a few. Williams co-founded Photography West Gallery in Carmel-by-the-Sea, California in 1980, with dear friends and fellow photographers Ron C. James (1937-2013), Claudette Bargeen Dibert (1942-1982) and the legendary Brett Weston (1911-1993) widely regarded as the child genius of American photography.

The gallery shows only accomplished darkroom masters using film, archival photographic papers and wet processes, each piece hand-crafted by the artist. “Brett used to tell me the integrity of the photograph depends on the photographers doing the darkroom work themselves,” Williams says of the late Brett Weston, with whom she had over a decade of “photographic adventures” spanning the Monterey Peninsula to the Big Island of Hawai’i. Not only has Williams persisted for 40 years in showing only artist-produced film photography, but Photography West Gallery is perhaps the only photographic gallery in the world today that holds this distinction.

The light and the rugged beauty of the Monterey Peninsula has famously attracted artists, writers and photographers since the early 1900s, with locales such as windswept Garrapata Beach and rocky Point Lobos. Edward Weston (1886-1958), who is credited as being the most influential American photographer of the twentieth century, moved to Carmel in 1929, and it was the images he created here that eventually would bring him international acclaim. He had four sons: Chandler, Brett, Neil and Cole, and it was Brett who would follow in his father’s footsteps. Brett’s career launched at age 13, when Edward brought him to Mexico, where he encountered the likes of Frida Kahlo and Diego Rivera. By the time Ansel Adams moved to Carmel in 1962, Brett had had already established a name for himself, having won a Guggenheim fellowship in 1947 and exhibited internationally. Williams tells an anecdote that before Ansel Adams moved to Carmel in 1962, he called up Brett Weston and asked, “Do you think Carmel is big enough for both of us?”

At that time, photography was unrecognized as fine art. “In the 1970s, photography was taught in the journalism departments and not considered a legitimate art medium,” says Williams, who singles out a particular 1970 issue of LIFE Magazine as one of her early influences. She cut out images by photography icons Imogen Cunningham, Don Worth, and Jerry Uelsmann, mounting and framing the black and whites and displaying them in her dorm room at Western Washington University. “We were studying surrealism, and it was Uelsmann’s allegorical images that sparked my initial realization and conviction that photography should be included in the history of modern art,” she says. “It was this undeniable link to surrealism that really launched me into seeing photography as very significant modern art,” Williams says. “Jerry Uelsmann was the original catalyst for me.”

After graduating in 1974, Williams moved to Carmel, attracted by the art and photography scene of the Monterey Peninsula. Photography – indeed the arts – had largely been a man’s world, but Williams says that women in the area started taking up photography in the ‘70s. “It was a very free-spirited decade in California culture, particularly in Big Sur and Carmel. Many women were exploring their identities, and many used a camera to discover who they were or might be,” says Williams. “I definitely was investigating that genre in my own work.”

In her twenties, Williams worked by day in the library at Monterey Peninsula College and took photography classes at night. When she had a chance to meet Brett Weston at a Christmas party in 1976, she recalled thinking, “Oh! My opportunity to have a conversation with Brett Weston! I’ll ask him what light meter he recommends for a beginning photographer,’” The meeting proved pivotal: “Brett Weston declared, ‘no good photographer uses a light meter. If you can’t read the light on your skin, you shouldn’t be a photographer.’”

Owing to this unexpectedly shocking revelation, Williams never bought a light meter and changed her approach to photography. “I realized that photography is a significant exchange and interaction with light,” she explains. “It’s not just what you see with your eyes but involves the whole body. Your body is a light meter.” She continued to explore this concept in her work and photography classes.

Williams had never imagined ever owning a business. The idea of starting an artistic cooperative was contemplated with fellow photographers; however no one had either the time or money to make it happen.

In 1979, for the first time, the Small Business Administration began offering small business loans to women. Prior to that – a mere forty years ago — women needed a husband’s or male relative’s signature to apply for a loan. “I heard Jimmy Carter had a new SBA program to help women start their own businesses, so I went over to the local bank,” Williams remembered. In 1980, she became one of the first single women to be approved for an SBA start-up loan.

In a flash, the news spread around Carmel — a single, 29-year-old woman wanted to open a new photography gallery in town. But the gallery became inevitable once Brett Weston got word: a photographer told her Weston wanted to meet her. “She brought me to his house, and Brett opened the door saying, ‘So, you’re the young girl everyone says will lose her shirt opening a photography gallery; I’ll help you.’”

The two quickly connected. “He was a 51-year resident of the Monterey Peninsula and I was a 28-year-old newcomer, but there was a tremendous simpatica between us. We were just on the same page about photography, we were both totally obsessed and electrified by the images,” Williams recalls.

On October 25, 1980, five hundred people lined the streets of Carmel-by-the-Sea for the opening of Photography West Gallery. The opening featured a show of three new Brett Weston portfolios, seen for the first time: Leaves and Lava – Hawaii: 15 photographs from the Big Island; Abstractions, Portfolio #1, 1927-1980; and Abstractions, Portfolio 2, 1925-80. Copies of Weston’s newly released book, Brett Weston, Selections from Five Decades, were shipped in from New York, and Weston signed books all evening long.

Fine art photography was catching on, and the techies of the Silicon Valley were among its admirers. A young Steve Jobs came into the gallery in the early 1980s, admiring the work of Ansel Adams. “Steve asked if I would take a partial trade for his newest computer. ‘It’s called a Macintosh,’ he said hopefully,” she laughs. “We were both very young and just starting out, so I said sure, to help him out and ended up curating exhibitions for him at Apple and Next for the next decade!”

In 1985, San Francisco photographer Ruth Bernhard (1905-2006), whose images of nudes hang on the walls of Photography West, confided a concern to Williams. “Ruth said she knew there’d be a book of her photography after her death, but she’d hoped there’d be one while she was still alive,” says Williams. “I was concerned her work would be lost to history,” says Williams. “Ansel considered Ruth Bernhard to be the greatest photographer of the nude. But every commercial publisher I approached told me: ‘a woman photographer who does nudes in black and white? It will never sell.’ No one would publish her work. But then, it dawned on me that since I had a gallery, I could sell Ruth’s photographs to raise money for her book, so Ruth and I decided to collaborate.” Thus, a new chapter was born for Williams and the gallery: book publishing.

Adams introduced Williams to his printer, Dave Gardner, who at the time owned Los Angelesbased Gardner-Fulmer Lithograph. “He is legendary in the printing business for his patented Fultone process that by the early ‘80’s created incredible detail in reproduction quality by laserscanning the original photographs,” says Williams. Local photographer and graphics designer, Jerry Takigawa, created a simple design, and Williams published a series of limited edition posters to display in the gallery window. “Ansel would get all excited and dance around in front of his huge fireplace – nobody had ever seen such incredibly detailed reproductions,” recounts Williams.

Ruth Bernhard with her assistant Michael Kenna created five limited edition photographs to sell and raise money to publish Bernhard’s book. “We published Ruth’s book, The Eternal Body, ourselves,” says Williams. “Brett Weston was disappointed with the plate quality of his most recent book, so he also wanted a book featuring his best unpublished photographs. And that was how I got started in publishing.”

No commercial publisher wanted to produce books to the same high quality, according to Williams; it was expensive and there was no known market for them. “However, after my first two books won Photography Book of the Year from Friends of Photography, one of the publishers who had initially rejected Ruth’s book proposal called to tell me, ‘you’ve set a new publishing standard in photography books,’ and offered to buy the entire run. That first edition quickly sold out. The Eternal Body is the only book I ever reprinted – to celebrate Ruth’s 100th birthday.” Williams’ thirty-year collaboration with Dave Gardner resulted in eleven monographs for her gallery photographers. Her final monograph, a collection of fifty European photographs by Polish photographer Roman Loranc, entitled Absolution, was released in 2013. “It won several awards including the United State Literary Award and was my grand finale. Dave Gardner retired that year so I decided it was time for me to conclude book publishing,” she says.

Williams, now semi-retired, makes her home on the Big Island of Hawai’i. Brett Weston introduced her to the island in 1981. “For more than a decade, I would go to Hawaii every year and Brett and I would drive out at sunrise and have these amazing photographic adventures,” says Williams. Weston died in 1993 in Kona, Hawaii at age 82. “Brett was such a gift. A true free spirit, extremely loyal to the people he liked,” says Williams. “And never in my life have I ever met a person so in tune to light. He had a rare heightened intuitive sensitivity, it was always this quest for light.” All of the images that hang in Photography West Gallery are original, individually handcrafted photographs made with gelatin silver, platinum palladium or Cibachrome papers, from medium and large format film. With digital on the rise, darkroom materials are more and more difficult and costly to come by, Williams hopes that traditional light-based darkroom processes will be rediscovered and increasingly appreciated – not eclipsed as a relic from a by-gone era.

Written by Marina Blythe Davalos