Photography and the Art Market

By Juliet Hacking

The first part of this essential handbook provides an art-business analysis of the market for art photography and explains how to navigate it. The second is an art-historical account of the evolution of art photography from a marginal to a core component of the international fine-art scene. In tracing the emergence of a robust art-world subsystem for art photography, sustaining both significant art-world presence and strong trade, the book shows the solid foundations on which today's international market is built, examines how that market is evolving, and points to future developments. This pioneering handbook is a must-read for scholars, students, curators, dealers, photographers, private collectors, institutional buyers, and other arts professionals.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Lund Humphries
• Release date: Dec 28, 2018
• ISBN: 9781848223417

Book preview

2018

INTRODUCTION

The notion that photographs can have equal aesthetic value to works of fine and graphic art has, in less than 50 years, gone from marginal to mainstream. Many of the key elements of the art-world network that facilitated this transformation (including museum collections and departments, private collections, commercial galleries and international auctions, and academic scholarship) came into being, or achieved visibility and prominence, in living memory. Not only do we have a wealth of market data to help us navigate the current market for art photography, we can also chart how this market came into being and, in so doing, gain an understanding of the principles upon which the collecting of photographs as an art form is based. Art photography – whether bought for pleasure, for investment or for both – has performed extremely well even in difficult economic times. Nonetheless, would-be collectors are hesitant to enter the field. This is partly owing to the idea that the market is difficult to understand and partly to other negative perceptions such as the idea that photographs will fade to nothing if hung on a wall. Part One of this book, ‘Navigating the Market for Art Photography’, offers expert analysis and guidance for understanding today’s trade in art photographs. Part Two, ‘How Photography Became Art’, charts how, across a period that spans nearly 200 years, a new picture-making technology became a collectible art object.

Since it first became possible, almost two centuries ago, to fix a photochemically made image, photography has evolved into the pre-eminent mode of visual communication. In the twenty-first century, photography, long since popular for its social uses, has become even more integral to our daily lives in the form of digital images shared on smartphones and posted on the Internet. At the same time, everywhere we look in the art world there is evidence of photography’s enhanced symbolic, and sometimes rarefied, status. The purchase by the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in New York, in 2001, of private collector Thomas Walther’s collection of modernist photography was described by MoMA’s director, Glenn D. Lowry, as ‘one of the most important acquisitions in the Museum’s history’.¹

An institutional commitment to art photography is today an expression of national cultural prestige. A recent example of this is the opening, in September 2015, of the Foto Museo Cuatro Caminos in Naucalpan de Juarez, north of Mexico City, by the Fundación Pedro Meyer, the organisation founded by Meyer, a photographer, to promote and stimulate the appreciation for photography in his home country. The size of the museum complex, at 5000 square metres, and the choice of architect signal the aspiration to also create a major international cultural centre. In 2016, the Canadian Photography Institute (CPI) was officially launched by the National Gallery of Canada as ‘a world-class, multidisciplinary research centre’ dedicated to the medium.² To create the CPI, the already extensive national collection of photography is being enhanced by a series of major donations of images, books and objects by David Thomson, scion of Canada’s wealthiest family, who, in addition to being the chairman of Thomson Reuters, is a major collector and philanthropist. Canada’s Scotiabank, another partner in the project, has donated c$10 million (over £500,000) in funding – the largest corporate financial donation that the National Gallery has ever received.

Art-photography exhibitions and events now regularly feature among those temporary (but often epic in scale) art-world initiatives that serve as expressions of soft power. A recent example is the Dubai Photo Exhibition, which was staged for just four days in mid-March 2016 in a purpose-built temporary museum erected in Design Zone D3. The show, under the direction of Head Curator Zelda Cheatle, brought together 868 photographs from the nineteenth to the twenty-first centuries from 23 countries. There were 18 curators from around the globe, each of whom represented a different country. The exhibition, held under the patronage of the Crown Prince of Dubai (and staged with assistance from the World Photography Organisation) is part of a wider project to position Dubai as a major cultural centre, which also includes the Hamdan Bin Mohammed Bin Rashid Al Maktoum International Photography Award (HIPA) with a prize of US$120,000.

Globally, art photography is well represented at leading art fairs, a key driver for today’s international art trade. In 1989, in an initiative masterminded by the art-photography gallerist, collector and benefactor Kaspar Fleischmann, the 150th anniversary of the announcement of the invention of photography became the platform for the creation of a section dedicated to art photography at Art Basel, the pre-eminent international art fair that takes place in the Swiss city each June. Today’s Art Basel sees major photography gallerists take their place alongside their fine-art peers, many of whom include photography in their offering; since 2016, there has also been a satellite fair dedicated to the medium, Photo Basel. An online source lists 165 photography and/or photobook fairs or festivals internationally.³ The geographic dispersal of these fairs is worthy of the over-used epithet ‘global’: in addition to listings in North America; Europe; South Africa; Australia; the BRIC countries (Brazil, the Russian Federation, India and China); and three out of four MINT countries (Mexico, Nigeria and Turkey),⁴ there were also events dedicated to photography in countries with much smaller national economies such as Myanmar, Cambodia and Uruguay. Whereas fairs are generally based around trade and festivals are not, this distinction does not prevent them from serving similar, and significant, ends: both raise the profile of the country or locale and stimulate cultural tourism.

It is often said that photography is now recognised as an art form. The assumption underpinning this assertion is that this recognition is a recent one, as if at some point in its development this ‘infant giant’ was put to the test, proved itself and awakened the art world to its (previously overlooked) powers. Although there is no consensus as to when this moment came, certain events are frequently cited – of which, perhaps the most commonly repeated is the establishment, in the early to mid-1970s, of regular, dedicated photography sales at the international auction houses. This book argues that these were in fact manifestations of a process that began when photography decisively entered the (western) public’s consciousness in 1839. Indeed, the announcement of its invention occasioned the forming of a special commission in Paris into its value, not only in terms of general utility and to the sciences in particular but also to archaeology and the fine arts. Throughout photography’s history, we find individual practitioners who claimed that the medium could be artistic (in the right hands, that is). Some of those claims are detailed in Part Two of this book. But the account that you will find there is not a conventional history of art photography. ‘How Photography Became Art’ is based on a novel proposal – namely, that to understand the criteria by which we evaluate art photography in the current moment, we need to know something of the history of photography both as a creative instrument and as an art object that is traded.

Although in the nineteenth century the view that the new technology could be used for purely aesthetic ends was a minority one, the ink spilt arguing that photography had no claim upon the aesthetic realm demonstrates the significance of the issue for contemporary commentators. The most well-known critique of photography in these terms is that found in Charles Baudelaire’s review of the 1859 Salon des Beaux Arts, the pre-eminent national art exhibition in Paris, in which the poet and critic gave over a section of his review to the topic of ‘The Modern Public and Photography’. Baudelaire castigated the French public for being in thrall to the real instead of works of the imagination; for wanting in art an exact reproduction of nature; and for confusing photography, which seemingly replicated nature more faithfully than painting, with art. Baudelaire’s provocative and sardonic review, designed to satirise contemporary tastes in art, bracketed photography with a series of derided terms such as progress, industry and the mechanical, which were, he said, inimical to art, poetry and beauty. Despite photography’s significant place in today’s art practice and art world, the view that it is of a lower order to the fine arts is still with us. In 2016, megadealer David Zwirner said of William Eggleston on the occasion of his departure from Gagosian Gallery to join Zwirner’s stable, ‘Eggleston is really a living legend of American art. And it’s important for us - and for the artist - that he is contextualized as an artist and not just as a photographer.’⁵ Claiming a photographer as an artist not only elevates their status, it also raises their prices.

Modern-day art-world practices and theoretical writings have contributed to the idea that photography, despite (or perhaps as a defensive response to) its huge presence in the art world, is ‘always the bridesmaid and never the bride’. In the early 1980s, the leading British conceptual artist Keith Arnatt satirised what he saw as the illogical nature of the distinction between ‘artists’ and ‘photographers’ guiding the Tate Gallery’s acquisition policy. Arnatt inferred that drawing a distinction was akin to saying that sausages were not food. In 1993, US scholar Arthur Danto drew a line between photographers and what he called ‘photographists’, the one making ‘photography as art’ and the other using ‘photography in art’.⁶ Danto’s idea that only certain photographic practices are worthy of the epithet ‘art’ is still with us, despite the fact that examples of ‘photography as art’ can now achieve high-art status. Even today, when the representation of the estates of classic photographers such as Diane Arbus has been taken on by mega-dealers such as, in this case, David Zwirner (in partnership with long-term representative Fraenkel Gallery), the art world and the art market continue to produce a distinction between, to use the updated version of these terms coined by Alexandra Moschovi, ‘photography-as-art’ and ‘art-as-photography’.⁷ This is, I would argue, because the distinction does not lie with the photographers or the photographs but is a product of the conventional taxonomies of the art world and market. When an artist is looking to build their career, they are presented with a contemporary art world with multiple opportunities but which is difficult to break in to, and with a robust but smaller international network of galleries, dealers and awards that is entirely dedicated to photography. The artist is likely to seek to build their career using both art and photographic formations. Despite this fluidity, there is a hierarchy at work: however successful the artist is, they have not truly ‘made it’ unless their work is validated by the higher-status contemporary art world.

A distinction between ‘photography-as-art’ and ‘art-as-photography’ is also drawn, sometimes strategically, when situating photographic practices in relation to the art of the past. Some art-world figures will cleave to a model of art photography as having a lineage going back to the early nineteenth century and others will present it as a phenomenon that has its roots in the 1960s. The distinction is also at work in the market for art photography; a sustainable market sub-sector emerged at a time when collecting was still dominated by what is old rather than new, when collecting taste was dictated by connoisseurship (seeking the best print of the most iconic image) and when good investments were those that were low risk. Those formations, which began life in this market environment and which are often exclusively dedicated to photography, today coexist with a new and powerful art-market sector that is not ‘medium specific’ but instead is contemporary both in its art offering and in its business practices. Using the terms ‘photography-as-art’ and ‘art-as-photography’ in what follows does not mean that I am endorsing Danto’s exclusion of the former from the realm of high art; instead, it allows me, at a time in which art photography is everywhere to be seen in the contemporary art world, to address the fact that when we speak of ‘photography’ as a discrete category in relation to art-world formations, collecting and the market, it means that we are usually dealing with a scale of values that is not always the same as when photographic artworks appear under the rubric of contemporary art.

When we place the word ‘photography’ in conjunction with ‘the art market’, as in the title of this book, we know that we are discussing that tiny portion of photographic imagery that is claimed for art. I use the term ‘art photography’ throughout this book in order to insist upon the point that this account does not attend to the dizzying array of applications of a technology that itself cannot be defined by the presence of a lens, a camera or certain chemicals. Although it might be supposed that this term is simply the modern version of what used to be called ‘creative photography’ or ‘fine-art photography’, it is important to acknowledge that those phrases belong to a previous era in which the majority of photographs made for pictorial value alone had a more marginal status within the art world.

My approach in what follows is substantially informed by the critical writings on photography that first emerged at the time of the Photo Boom (see Chapter 10) – those of scholars such as Martha Rosler, Rosalind Krauss, Abigail Solomon-Godeau, Christopher Phillips, Douglas Crimp and Andy Grundberg, and those of the critic A.D. Coleman. It is also informed by more recent critical writings: those on contemporary art by Julian Stallabrass and those on photography by Alexandra Moschovi, Sara Knelman and Anne McCauley. These writings, and those of others cited in this book, cumulatively posit that little of substance can be said about art (photography or otherwise) unless one takes account of what Rosler called ‘the art-world system’. This was defined by her as the network that unites ‘the producers of high art, a segment of its regular consumers and supporters, the institutions that bring the consumers and work together, including specialized publications and physical spaces, and the people who run them’, which ‘also encompasses all the transactions, personal and social, between the sets of participants’.⁸ Today we would call this an ‘actor-network system’, acknowledging that artists and arts professionals accrue symbolic capital in the same way that certain institutions and other formations do, each playing a significant role in conferring enhanced status upon certain practices and their makers, and with none being able to do so alone. The art-world system – or ‘ecosystem’, as it also called – is that which brings art objects and artists to prominence and that which may confer further status and value by way of prestigious exhibitions, publications, prizes and awards.⁹

Art photography is, for the purposes of this book, photography co-opted by the art-world system. That is not to suggest that the maker’s (or makers’) artistry or conception plays no part, but this study attends to what happens to the artwork after it has been made. In addition, neither being an artist nor artistic intentionality are common denominators for what is traded as art photography. Collected, exhibited and traded in the same spaces as authorial artworks are examples from a wide range of applied and vernacular imagery (including, for example, domestic images, scientific photography, fashion imagery and selfies) – some attributed and some not – that have proved of interest to leading artists, curators, scholars, critics, collectors and dealers, and have thereby entered the art-world system (see Chapter 9 for an account of how this broader definition of art photography emerged).

Established in the 1970s, the international art-photography market has experienced exponential growth. And yet, many would-be buyers hesitate to enter the market. A group of students studying for their ma in Art Business at Sotheby’s Institute of Art once told me that, in their opinion, it was one of the hardest art-market sectors with which to get to grips. It is true that there are certain aspects of the market that, unless explained, can seem irrational. Chapter 1 addresses the concerns expressed by would-be buyers, and explains why none of them constitute a barrier to collecting photographs (whether as a private individual or for an institution). It is important before going into specifics, however, to make the wider point that there could not have been an international market for art photography for nearly 50 years – with sales at the leading auction houses Sotheby’s, Christie’s and Phillips alone generating between us$30 and us$50 million per annum since 2010 – if the market had not developed mechanisms to deal with these issues.¹⁰ It perhaps takes a little more work to keep up to date with market activity as a great deal of activity relevant to the field occurs in the contemporary art market, where symbolic values and market practices are often very different to those informing the market sub-sector dedicated to photography as a separate category. Part One of this book, ‘Navigating the Market for Art Photography’ will guide you through the key issues for understanding both sectors. Part Two of this book, ‘How Photography Became Art’, takes you deeper, tracing how both sectors emerged, and how the contemporary-art model now dominates if not museum then certainly market activity.

This book is the first to explain how today’s market for art photography works (Part One) and the first to provide a historical account of artistic photography that acknowledges the missing strand of its development: its emergence as a collectible art object (Part Two). Although this structure might be said to reinforce a distinction between market knowledge and art history, it is one of the aims of the book to demonstrate that neither qualitative nor quantitative analysis is alone sufficient to explain either art or the art market. What follows in Part One is an art-business analysis that draws on art history, followed by, in Part Two, an art-historical account of the development of an art-world sub-sector and its place within the art market.

Why include a history of art photography in a book about its market? The German cultural theorist Walter Benjamin wrote in 1936 that ‘photography’s claim to be an art was contemporaneous with its emergence as a commodity’.¹¹ According to Benjamin and to his friend, the photographer and scholar Gisèle Freund, in the 1840s there was an artistic flowering of photography that withered in the 1850s with the advent of the entrepreneurial commercial photographers of France’s Second Empire.¹² Today, the canonical status of Benjamin’s cultural theories is uncontested; nonetheless, his assertion of an interdependence between photographic art and photographic commerce has been little discussed. The classic histories of photography rarely include references to how artistic photography was traded. The good intentions of these scholars is not in doubt: writing in the face of significant resistance to the idea that photography could be an art, their approach was to build the case for its kinship with the fine arts and to distance it from any association with the economics of labour, production and distribution. Rewriting the history of art photography in terms of how its recognition as an art form was in part dependent upon its emergence as a collectible commodity is, to my mind, a necessary corollary for understanding today’s trade in photographic pictures.

Part One of this book, ‘Navigating the Market for Art Photography’, comprises six chapters. The first sets out the ‘Frequently Asked Questions’ posed by those interested in understanding the market for art photography. The second is concerned with ‘Authenticity and Ethics’; it sets out important examples of fakery and forgery, and practices that pose ethical issues, both of which have significantly served to shape the checks and balances in the market for art photography. Chapter 3, ‘Buying’, addresses the issue of how to research the value of art photographs and sets out the myriad ways one can acquire them. Chapter 4, ‘Keeping and Selling’, explains how to look after them, how to maximise their value and what to consider if you decide to sell them on. Chapter 5, ‘Analysing the Market’, shows how art-market data is used to analyse the market and examines the issues arising with the use of art-market reports to inform investment decisions. Chapter 6, ‘Investing, Monetising, Speculating’, looks at recent attempts to exploit art photography’s potential as an investment, and considers emerging markets and collecting emerging artists. Resources that will help you to both learn more about art photography and to navigate the market for it are set out in the Appendix.

Part Two, ‘How Photography Became Art’, gives a historical account of how photography emerged as an art collectible. Chapter 7, ‘A New Way to Make Pictures’, is a brief historical overview of photography claimed for, and traded as, art in the first 50 years after the official announcement of its invention in 1839. Chapter 8, ‘The Modern’, examines the period from the advent of pictorialism, the first international movement dedicated to making an art of photography, to 1940, the year in which the Museum of Modern Art in New York opened the first museum department for photography. Chapter 9, ‘Art and Society’, examines the period 1941 to 1968, which saw photography highly valued as a means of mass-media communication but less so as an expressive art form. Chapter 10 is dedicated to the Photo Boom, the period from 1969 to 1980 in which photography became a fashionable art-market collectible. Chapter 11, ‘The Postmodern’, examines the 1980s and 1990s, when art photography became no longer bound to its modernist or conceptual incarnations and was often large, colourful and plural in its references. Chapter 12, ‘The Contemporary’, considers the effects of the bull and bear markets of the 2000s on the market for art photography, and the impact of the emergence of contemporary art as the defining art-world paradigm.

The first five chapters in Part Two take a similar approach to each other – that of setting out the development of the formations that together created an ecosystem that produced and sustained a higher practice of photography. As this ecosystem became more robust, and the idea that photography could be artistic gained in currency, this fostered more institutional and private collecting, which in turn was a spur to the commercial trade in art photographs. This growth in commercial activity was a stimulus to further institutional and private collecting. What I mean by ‘formations’ include mechanisms such as societies, exhibitions, journals, criticism, galleries, auctions, private and public collecting, scholarship and prizes. Each chapter is different in emphasis, as befits the period under discussion. Occasionally, the reader will find that I have chosen to focus on some formations and not on others; this is purely for the sake of readability.

Chapter 12 breaks with this model. Attending to the twenty-first century, with its explosion of art-world and art-market activity centred on photography, it would be impossible to cover here all the formations in which art photography is seen and sold. Instead, the chapter drills down to the question of how the growing dominance of contemporary art impacted, and would change significantly, the established market sub-sector dedicated to ‘photography’. As contemporary works began to make the world records for photographs sold at auction, they brought a new criterion of value, both economic and symbolic, to the market for art photographs. But contemporary (usually associated with the progressive contemporary art that emerged in the 1960s) did not eclipse classic photography (beginning in the 1830s); the two coexist, and the distinctions between them imposed by the infrastructure of the art world are, as we shall see, being blurred.

Pictorial photographs were put up for sale, commissioned, purchased and collected right from the beginnings of the medium. This activity was not separate from, but central to, the process by which, over time, a selection of names and images accrued significance and symbolic value. The notional canon (with some national differences) proposed by the various histories of photography shaped the emergence in the 1970s of a developed and sustainable international market for art photography. This art-market sub-sector is not simply an outgrowth of art-world interest in