Photography and the Art Market

Lund Humphries

Contents

BUYER AWARE

Caveat emptor, or 'buyer beware': this is the warning that has, since classical times, attended our forays into a marketplace of which we have little experience. The suggestion is that if you do not know what you are doing, you may get 'burned'. According to Artprice.com, 'Since the second half of the 20 century, the Art Market has completely changed from a highly opaque market to a transparent and efficient market.' It is true that the specialist trade in art is more transparent than ever (in the pursuit of a larger client base), but there is still a perception that the market for art photography is tricky to navigate and built upon less solid foundations than other art-market sectors. Not only is it widely believed that a good print, once purchased, might quickly fade but also that photographs in general lend themselves more easily to fakery and bad practice. Other concerns include the fear that recent prints will be passed off as vintage photographs and that prints, once purchased, will be devalued by the issuing of more prints than is stated by an edition. Over the years, I have met with countless people interested in art photography, either as a would-be collector or a would-be dealer (or both), who long for a definitive 'how to' guide to the market for art photography. But the knowledge that they require cannot be packaged into a step-by-step guide. There is no test that will authenticate a photograph as genuine nor distinguish a vintage from a modern print. You can, however, navigate these issues very effectively by gaining a better knowledge of how the market for art photography operates. The first step is to understand that it is the perception of the market that is negative and not the actuality: art photographs are no more irrational a choice of purchase than any other art form or collectible.

What follows sets out the basic principles on which the market for art photography is founded, and offers useful principles that will help the uninitiated to navigate it. It does so in the form of 'Frequently Asked Questions', those queries raised at nearly every talk or lecture on the subject of the market for art photography or collecting. These 'FAQs' are answered, but not perhaps in the way that the reader would expect. What is set out below is designed to put the FAQs in their proper perspective – i.e. to set out how the market, rather than being undermined by those elements that are particular to photography (but not all photography) such as the negative, an undocumented number of prints in circulation or the existence of both vintage and more recent prints from the same negative, evolved in ways that take account of these particularities. Many novices think they need to acquire a lot of detailed, specialist knowledge in order to protect themselves from bad practices. But this is not the case. It is in the interest of everyone working commercially with art photography to protect that market. When a scam does arise, it is very unlikely that the novice buyer will fall prey to it and lose their money – unless, that is, they are trying to buy photographs from a source outside the art market. This is not 'buyer beware' but 'buyer aware'.

Frequently Asked Questions about the Art-Photography Market

FAQ: What makes a photograph valuable?

When we ask this question of a specialist in the market for photographs traded as art, we might expect the answer to be found in an analysis of certain quantifiable factors such as the fame of the photographer, the iconicity of the image, whether the photograph is a vintage or recently made print, its size, its condition and its rarity. We might imagine that specialists have a scale of values for each of these elements, from which the mean score would help us to determine whether a photograph is likely to be a good investment. While this does happen, such value judgements are always relative rather than absolute and a novice could rate a particular print of a photograph very highly simply on the basis that they had not yet seen better prints of the image. Not only are there no hard-and-fast rules but there are also exceptions: for example, although rarity is an important element in determining value for most art photographs, there are some photographs that are known not to be particularly rare and yet sell extremely well and have proved to be a good investment.

Economic value is significantly determined by symbolic value and vice versa. What follows provides a case study that supports this claim. In 1972, three albums of photographs by David Octavius Hill and Robert Adamson, who collaborated on the making of photographs in the period 1843–6 (see Chapter 7), became 'the most expensive set of photographs in the world'. The question we are likely to ask is 'why?', but this book argues that the better question is 'how?'.

After Adamson's untimely death in 1848, Hill was assiduous in his attempts to identify their photographs, praised by contemporary critics as akin to Old Master prints in their modelling and chiaroscuro, as both artistically and culturally significant. In 1851, he made a gift of 500 calotypes (paper photographs made from paper negatives, prepared according to William Henry Fox Talbot's patented process), mounted in four albums, to the Royal Scottish Academy in the hope of founding a national collection of artistic photography. At the turn of the century, Pictorialists identified Hill and Adamson as early pioneers of artistic photography. For example, in Charles Holme's Art in Photography (1905), the first two works illustrated were by Hill and Adamson; this model was oft-repeated in later books and exhibitions. Examples of their work were exhibited at Alfred Stieglitz's 291 Gallery in April 1906, with six of their images appearing in issue no. 28 of his elegantly curated art journal Camera Work (1909), and nine in no. 38 (1912). In 1931, Hill was the subject of a monograph, only the second to be dedicated to a photographer (the first was on Julia Margaret Cameron), written by the Viennese curator Heinrich Schwarz. Schwarz's book informed Walter Benjamin's essay 'A Short History of Photography', published that year in a literary journal in Germany. According to Benjamin's analysis, unlike traditional art in all its 'overweening obtuseness', Hill and Adamson's studies, such as that of Newhaven 'fishwife' Elizabeth Johnstone, were 'seared' with 'the tiny spark of contingency, of the Here and Now' (see Plate 1).

In 1936, works by Hill and Adamson featured in the International Exhibition of Contemporary Photography held at the Louvre. This is said to have raised Hill to the equal of Nadar (the French photographer Gaspard-Félix Tournachon) as 'the incarnation of the genius of the pioneers'. Contemporary modernist photographers responded to their portraits as triumphs of straight photography. The following year, 1937, the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York acquired two albums of their calotypes, including 272 prints. This institutional acquisition undoubtedly informed the attempt to stimulate a market for their work: in 1939, a sales catalogue issued by the Paris-based book-dealers Maggs Bros included works by them. In 1941, their works featured in the first exhibition staged by the Museum of Modern Art's photographic department, Sixty Photographs: A Survey of Camera Aesthetics. Schwarz was a collector of their work as was Alfred E. Marshall, the sale of whose collection took place in New York in 1952 (see Chapter 9).

In 1972, in order to raise funds for another project, the Royal Academy of Arts in London decided to sell the three albums that Hill had gifted to it during his lifetime. The sale, which was to take place at Sotheby's auction house in London, came shortly after the ruling that certain historical photographs would be subject to export-licensing control: in effect, they were to be treated as national treasures. The National Portrait Gallery began fundraising in order to purchase the albums from the Royal Academy. The value put upon them was £32,178.50 (approximately £400,000 in today's money), which made them 'the most expensive set of photographs in the world', in the words of curator Colin Ford, the prime mover in the acquisition for the NPG. After a single benefactor came forward with the full purchase price, the albums entered the collection of the gallery, which staged an exhibition and published a book within six weeks of the acquisition. Hill and Adamson now became symbolic of both the newly acquired high cultural status, and value, of early art photography in the Photo Boom of the 1970s (see Chapter 10).

The symbolic value that accrues to an image from the 1840s, especially one that earns the epithet 'iconic', may be greater than that accorded to one made only recently, but the indicators of, in this case, potential value are broadly the same. Imagine you go to see an exhibition of an artist unknown to you, and you want to learn more. You are likely to consult the listing of their exhibitions and their publications, which are usually found online at their website or that of their dealer or representative. The institutions that own examples of their work may also be given. What you have is, in effect, a listing to date of the formations that are validating the artist's work and so can assess the prestige (or fashionability) of the relevant museums, galleries, dealers, fairs, arts organisations and publishers, forming an idea of the artist's profile as an emerging, early or mid-career, or established talent.

When evaluating individual photographic images from any epoch, the questions to ask are more or less the same, only the tense will be different: What is/was the artist's profile? What exhibitions has/did this image appear/appeared in? Which books is/was it published in? Is/was it the cover image? Which collections, public and private, hold/acquired this print or have/had a print of the same image? Which galleries show/showed the work? Which represent/represented the artist? What price range does/did it sell for on the primary market (i.e. galleries)? Does it have a secondary market (a resale market, tracked according to auction sales)? If so, is it healthy? (see Chapter 3 for how to research auction records).

The answer to the question 'what makes a photograph valuable?', therefore, is this: it is the symbolic, and economic (if yet applicable), status that it has accrued to date and the status (both symbolic and economic) that it may accrue in future based on its current profile and the 'buzz' that surrounds it in the art world. As is demonstrated in Part Two, no single art-world system formation is decisive in conferring value, symbolic or actual, and the process is cumulative.

FAQ: How do I become an expert in art photography?

The first step in feeling comfortable in the photography marketplace is to let go of the idea that you have to be an expert. Knowledge should be acquired on a 'need to know' basis. There are some photographic processes that are hard to differentiate by eye; and novices can feel a great deal of anxiety about this. Sometimes it is possible to identify the process simply by using magnification; for example, when a specialist suspects what looks like a photograph is actually a halftone print (a mechanical, ink-based reproduction), they will look for the dot-matrix pattern that can be seen under magnification (to recognise this pattern, magnify the picture on a postcard). But how likely is it that you will be called upon to identify a print process or to confirm an art photograph as either genuine or vintage? If you are concerned that you are considering buying something that might not be what it is described as, then you need to consider who you are purchasing photographs from. The onus is on the seller – whether a dealer at a table-top fair, an online vendor, a private dealer or a high-end art gallery in a major metropolitan centre – to describe the object correctly, not you. Your responsibility is to check their terms and conditions and, if satisfied, make sure that you get a receipt for the purchase that states artist, title, date, process and monies paid.

There are various vetting processes at work in the market that you can take advantage of, such as whether a dealer is a member of AIPAD (Association of International Photography Art Dealers); another is whether the vendor has taken booths at respected art or photography fairs, as they will have been vetted by the fair organisers in order to gain inclusion. With photography considered a latecomer to the art world, many dealers encounter the negative perception of art photography as an investment on an almost daily basis and have spent a great deal of time explaining the market to sceptics. They themselves are often leading experts in the field, and many are leading experts on the art that they represent. Most dealers will be willing to answer your questions without the expectation of a sale, and if you become a client they may offer guidance to you as part of their client service.

FAQ: When I see the word 'print' should I assume that this is not an actual photograph but a reproduction?

One would be forgiven for assuming that a 'print' was a reproduction of an original photograph, perhaps akin to those 'prints' after famous photographs that are traded on low-value Internet sites. However, if you are somewhere where actual photographs are being traded – like an art fair, gallery, auction preview or online auction – and you encounter the word 'print', then it is almost certainly the conventional art-world and art-market usage that refers to a genuine photograph as such. In these contexts, it is likely that you would not see the object described as a photograph but as, for example, a silver print, albumen print, salt print, platinum print, colour print, dye transfer print, C-print or iris print. Giving the print type describes the photograph more fully and explains on one level some of the value attached to it (on the basis that a more expensive process is suggestive of a greater aesthetic investment in the work). It is likely that, in these contexts, the print will be catalogued as an object that is unique, even when it is a multiple. How is this possible? Well, every object has its own history, its own provenance, condition, signatures and other inscriptions; possibly its own frame or support; and so on. No two photographic prints of the same image are the same. The market speaks of 'the print' as the material object that is being traded, not 'the image' that we see reproduced in books, exhibitions and online.

FAQ: What is the definition of a vintage print?

One of the most important distinctions to understand about photographs is the difference between 'vintage prints' and 'modern prints' (also known as 'printed laters'). There is no strict definition of these two categories (and scholars, dealers and collectors have no common code), but the general rule that we use is that a print is considered 'vintage' when it was printed from the negative or digital file near the time that the photographer first created the latter. The use of the term 'near' is relative not absolute. As is so often the case with the art market, there are a series of gradations when it comes to value. For example, if the original photographic 'shoot' took place in the 1920s and the print you are looking at was printed in the 1930s, this print would generally be considered as vintage. If the print was made in the 1990s, however, it would be a modern print. If it was made in the 1960s, the classification is not so straightforward: it would be a 'printed later' but distinguished by its early date, and so is unlikely to be identified as such. Instead, it is more probably going to be described in this way: Ansel Adams, Monolith, the Face of Half Dome, Yosemite National Park, 1927 (printed 1960s). Some vendors might describe the latter as vintage to make the point that this is high-end material owing to its age and rarity. Magnum is offering at the time of writing a set of what it is calling 'Period Prints' from its well-known exhibition In Our Time of 1989. The term 'period print' is being used to describe the fact that the prints are old but not vintage: they come from a set of prints made in 1989 of some of the images in the show, the negatives for which date from the 1950s to the 1980s.

The hierarchy of value placed on prints by a particular photographer is based on a notional proximity to the artist: a print made close to the time of the original shoot is seen to most closely express the vision of the artist. Here again, we are presented with one of the ways in which the market adapts to the particularities of photographic practices: although we are talking about proximity to the artist's vision, it is quite common that vintage prints were not made by the photographer themselves. It has been common practice since the medium was first made known in 1839 for photographers to have others print from their negatives and/or process the image. The market accepts both this and the fact that the printer's identity is very rarely known. It is somewhat like architecture: we tend to attribute buildings to architects without (rightly or wrongly) concerning ourselves with the identity of the construction team.