In the late 1940s, with a child to support, Gee, who had trained as an artist, turned to photo retouching as a career. It was the golden age of photo magazines such as Life and Look, and she was good: she did very well.
In the 1950s she went to a photography exhibit at New York’s Museum of Modern Art, which made her realize the artistic potential of photographs. Some galleries had tried to sell photos as art before, including those by Alfred Stieglitz and Julien Levy, but failed. She still took a chance and opened her own gallery, called Limelite, in 1954, and it did well, which helped to establish photography as marketable fine art. She sold work by now-notable photographers such as Edward Weston and Ansel Adams, but it wasn’t until the 1990s that photography as an art form really took off. She died October 10 in a Manhattan hospice. She was 85.