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Photography - the new painting? By Gerry Badger, from Ag25 |
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Of course, all this is for so-called ‘vintage’ material, of immaculate provenance, prints made within five years or so of the negative, and authenticated as such. There is, in this kind of market, an ‘antique’ as well as simple aesthetic element. Factors such as signature, physical condition, provenance and rarity are increasingly important, indeed vital. But the effect from the lofty pinnacle of the market has filtered down. ‘Late’ prints by such eminent figures as Cartier-Bresson, Brassai or Brandt - largely printed in the 1970s after the photographic market first began to attract attention - sell for several thousand pounds. Cole Weston’s prints of his father Edward’s negatives now retail for $2,500, and I have seen what is presumably a ‘vintage’ Cole print of his father’s famous Pepper No. 30 offered at $4,500. But perhaps even more astonishing is the recent rise in prices for contemporary photographic art, photography that of course is not photography. A print by the German photographer, Thomas Struth, Parthenon, Rome, fetched some $270,000 in a Christie’s New York contemporary art auction in May, 2000, and Andreas Gursky’s Prada II achieved the same price at Christie’s November 2000 sale. This continued the trend begun in December 1995, when all 69 prints in Cindy Sherman’s Untitled Film Stills series were sold to the Museum of Modern Art in New York for a sum rumoured to be over $1,000,000. In short, at the beginning of the twenty-first century the art of photography is booming as never before. And yet, there are still anomalies: London’s Tate Gallery, for one, still does not collect photography in the manner of the Museum of Modern Art in New York or many other international museums. The Tate, astonishingly, has no department of photography surveying the whole history of the medium. It does not buy photographs by ‘photographers’, only photographs by ‘artists’, which are not called ‘photographs’ but ‘pieces’. Next Page >> |
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