Alan S Maltz Gallery

The Alan S. Maltz Gallery opened its doors on Duval Street in Old Town Key West on January 1, 1999, and it is the home gallery of the Official Fine Art Photographer of Florida. That title is not a marketing line. It was conferred by VISIT FLORIDA, the state's tourism organization, and Maltz separately holds the designation of Official Wildlife Photographer of Florida from the Wildlife Foundation of Florida. In 2019 he was inducted into the Florida Tourism Hall of Fame. If you have ever picked up a piece of Florida tourism material and thought the photograph was doing a lot of the work, there is a reasonable chance it was his.

The subject is Florida, worked across a series of collections rather than one look. There are sunsets and scenics, wildlife and flowers, the Everglades, Key West architecture and street life, black and white work, and the Old Florida collection, which is the one people come in asking about: the palm-lined, hand-painted, screen-door version of the state that is disappearing a building at a time. Nearly four decades of shooting sit behind the walls, so the gallery reads more like a body of work than an inventory.

The printing is a large part of what makes a visit worth the stop rather than a scroll through a website. Images are produced on canvas, aluminum, glass and other substrates, in sizes running from around 12 by 18 inches up to pieces measured in feet rather than inches, and the framing is done largely in house with some one-of-a-kind options. Seeing the same image on metal and on canvas side by side is the kind of thing you cannot do online, and it tends to change which one people take home.

Maltz has also published five coffee table books, including Key West Color, Miami City of Dreams and Florida, Beyond the Blue Horizon, which was chosen as the official welcome gift for Super Bowl XLI, with a sixth on Old Florida in the works. His work hangs in collections worldwide, among them the Carter Presidential Library in Atlanta and Florida House in Washington, D.C. The gallery sits at the quieter end of Duval, which is a pleasant surprise if you have just walked the length of it.