An Artist and Collector With Several Names
Judy Ellis Glickman is also known as Judy Glickman Lauder. She is a photographer, collector, and philanthropist whose work has included portraits, Holocaust sites, and people connected to Denmark’s rescue of Jews during the Second World War. I find the strongest thread through her biography in the relationship between making photographs and preserving them.
Her own pictures and the collection she assembled belong to separate but connected activities. A photographer chooses what to place within a frame. A collector chooses which images to bring into relation across time. Judy has worked in both capacities, building a public career that cannot be described only through her marriages or her philanthropy.
She was born in the late 1930s and grew up in northern California. Photography was part of her family environment from childhood, well before she began her own sustained artistic work.
Irving Bennett Ellis and the Early Camera World
Judy’s father, Dr. Irving Bennett Ellis, was a physician and an accomplished pictorialist photographer. Her mother was Louise Ellis. Family portraits made by Irving later became part of the material associated with Judy’s collection and exhibitions.
I find that connection especially interesting because her early relationship to photography included being seen through someone else’s lens. The later photographer and collector had first encountered the medium within her own family, where pictures of familiar people were being made.
Her father’s combination of medicine and photography also shows that the camera was not necessarily tied to a single occupation. Art could develop alongside another profession. That background gives context to Judy’s later practice without requiring the claim that her own path was predetermined.
The childhood environment matters, but the serious work she undertook in the 1970s marks a different stage. Early exposure and mature artistic practice are related without being identical.
Becoming a Photographer
Judy began making photographs seriously in the 1970s, pursuing study through settings including the Maine Photographic Workshop. Her work developed into a sustained practice, with black-and-white images becoming a central part of her public identity.
I would describe that development as an undertaking rather than a pastime automatically enlarged by later recognition. Study, repeated work, and long projects all appear in the biography. The resulting images entered exhibitions and museum collections.
Portraiture became one important area. Her photographs also turned toward historical places and people whose experiences required careful attention. The subject matter brought memory and testimony into the visual work, while the images remained photographs rather than written histories.
Black and white can draw attention to light, surface, and expression. In Judy’s work, it also belongs to a wider photographic tradition that she explored through collecting as well as through her own camera.
Beyond the Shadows
Her major project Beyond the Shadows addressed Holocaust sites, survivors, and the Danish rescue of Jews. It brought images of places into relation with images of people, connecting historical memory with individual faces.
I see that combination as a crucial distinction. An empty site can show a location where history occurred, while a portrait brings a person into view. Neither form can substitute entirely for the other. The project uses photography to hold those different kinds of attention together.
The work has been exhibited widely and published in book form. Its public life therefore extends beyond the moment each photograph was made. Exhibitions allow viewers to encounter images together, while a book gives the project another sequence and setting.
The subject deserves direct language. These are photographs connected to the Holocaust and rescue, not decorative treatments of an abstract theme. Judy’s long commitment to the project is one of the most substantial elements of her artistic biography.
A Collection Built Across Decades
Alongside her own photography, Judy assembled a collection of more than six hundred prints, with accounts often placing the total around six hundred fifty. It includes pictorialism, portraiture, photojournalism, and images concerned with social experience.
Collecting over decades can create a conversation between photographs made in different eras. I think of the collection as a room with many voices, each image retaining its own author and circumstances. Judy’s role lies in bringing those works together and making choices about their preservation and public availability.
The Portland Museum of Art became a major destination for the collection through a promised gift. The exhibition Presence and an accompanying Aperture volume brought selected works to wider attention in the early 2020s.
A promised gift should be described accurately. It establishes a commitment to a museum, but is not automatically identical to saying every work had already transferred at the moment an exhibition opened.
Albert Glickman and Maine
Judy’s longtime husband, Albert Brenner Glickman, worked in real estate and was active in Maine philanthropy. Their life together included Cape Elizabeth and a close connection to the Portland Museum of Art. Albert died in 2013.
The Maine relationship belongs to both family and cultural history. It connects Judy’s photographic study, collecting, museum involvement, and philanthropy with a particular community rather than leaving those activities floating in an unspecified art world.
Albert’s family included children and grandchildren named in accounts of his life. Their presence should not become a basis for assigning uncertain biological relationships to Judy. The established connection is her long marriage to Albert and participation in that family network.
The museum gift is a public act of cultural support; it does not provide a complete private balance sheet.
Leonard Lauder and a Later Marriage
Judy married Leonard A. Lauder in 2015. He was the chairman emeritus of the Estée Lauder Companies and an important collector and philanthropist. His first wife, Evelyn Lauder, had died in 2011.
Leonard’s sons, William P. Lauder and Gary Lauder, belong to that earlier family chapter. They are not described as children jointly born to Judy and Leonard. I find that distinction useful because accounts of a later marriage can otherwise blur generations and parentage.
Leonard died in 2025, and Judy was named as his surviving spouse. Her artistic career, however, preceded their marriage by decades. The later Lauder surname is part of her personal history, while the photographs and collection remain work she had long been developing.
FAQ
Are Judy Ellis Glickman and Judy Glickman Lauder the same person?
Yes. Both names refer to the photographer, collector, and philanthropist discussed here. The Lauder name reflects her later marriage to Leonard Lauder, while Glickman is associated with her longtime marriage to Albert Glickman.
What is Beyond the Shadows about?
It is Judy’s photographic project addressing Holocaust sites, survivors, and Denmark’s rescue of Jews during the Second World War. It has circulated through exhibitions and publication, making historical memory a central part of her artistic work.
What connects her to the Portland Museum of Art?
She has been involved with the museum as a trustee and through a promised gift of her extensive photography collection. The museum’s Presence exhibition presented work from that collection, and an accompanying book brought it to a broader audience.
