01.04.10
Who Buys Photography and Why?
Jocelyn Phillips, Head of photography, Bonhams
Photography brings in a wide range of people, certainly from what we see from the auction side of things; private collectors, dealers, gallerists, people who are looking to invest. When it comes to private collectors, you’ve got established people who have been coming to photography auctions since they first started in the 1970s, and then you’ve got a lot of new and young collectors. I think photography in particular draws in new collectors because in many ways it is an accessible medium; if you look at the range of prices achieved at auction across all media, relatively speaking, photography is affordable, and that attracts people who are new to auctions and new to collecting.
There are lots of different motivations for people to buy work. There are people who are passionate about photography, who take great pleasure from it and have a great love of photography. There are people who come at it from more of a business or investment perspective, and there are also people who research and study the subject. We often encounter institutions that are looking to build their photographic collections as well. Everybody has a different motivation, but I think many people are drawn to the accessibility of the medium. It’s very immediate – people have grown up with photography in magazines, on posters, in newspapers – it’s a medium that’s been at the heart of the visual culture of the 20th century.
In recent times, there has been a trend towards collecting 20th century and contemporary work. There’s definitely been a great interest shown in fashion photography and celebrity culture, which I think is part of a broader cultural shift. In recent years the prices for these kinds of works have been strong. Work from contemporary photographers has also been riding on the wave of the great contemporary art boom. In addition, I think it’s arguably harder to find top quality 19th century material on the auction circuit today. If you look back at the seventies and eighties when photography auctions were near the beginning of their lives, a lot of the top quality 19th century material came onto the market. Now a lot of it has gone into private hands and into institutions, and it’s not necessarily going to come back out again. Recent economic conditions have caused collectors to take stock and think about what they really want to buy, and they are now looking for quality pieces and pieces that are harder to come by. That will include earlier vintage material and, therefore, we could see a shift back to earlier works.
When valuing a photograph there are various things to take into consideration. First, we look at who the photographer is; arguably, there are photographers in the history of the subject who’ve been shown time and again to be the names that are most sought after and most collected. Secondly, we look at what the image is. Within a photographer’s work, there are always a certain number of images that are seen as ‘iconic’ – the ones that if you were to trace their auction history would reveal the greatest prices. There are always one or two who capture people’s imagination. So you have to look at the image in front of you – is it particularly representative of the photographer’s work? Is it something that many people are drawn to? And then you’ve obviously got to look at the object itself – is the print a vintage print, is it a later print, is it limited in its edition, how many might there be out there, what is the condition like, what is the size of it? All these things come together to determine the value.
Can I sell my work at auction?
At auction, it’s more difficult if you are an up-and-coming photographer who is at the start of your career. Auction is, of course, a secondary market so you need to begin with the primary market, which would be commercial galleries. It is only when a photographer is established to a certain extent in the primary market, having exhibited at galleries and done some shows, maybe been included in institutions and catalogues and been collected in the primary market, that their work then comes around to the secondary market. So to forge relationships with commercial galleries in the first instance is key. Try to take your work to as many different gallerists as possible. There are also portfolio reviews across the year with specialists from all walks of photography, who are happy to look at photographers’ work, give them advice and point them in the right direction.
Jocelyn Phillips
Philippe Garner, International head of photography, Christie’s
An incredibly wide range of people buy photographs, both geographically and financially. I think one needs to see the whole subject in its broadest perspective and realise that somebody who puts together a pinboard of photographic images that interest them – maybe postcards or photos torn from magazines – is, in a way, collecting photographs. At the other end of the scale might be the super-rich collector or a great national institution like the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, who have set themselves a very specific and ambitious agenda to collect the finest representations of different aspects of the history of the art of photography.
People come at the subject from a variety of different directions, but, essentially, they are drawn to the images, either because they have an interest in the subject matter, or because they are intrigued by the mysteries of the medium. So I know there are people who collect things as specific as, say, military history, or anything relating to Palestine or the Canary Islands. There are endless sub categories where the collecting process is very much subject-led.
Another type of collector is the one who will ask themselves about the history of the medium, about the way in which it has become so embedded in our visual culture. They’ll be fascinated by the potential of photographs to reach out to such big audiences to be used as document, as propaganda, as inspiration, as seduction. They will then also be intrigued to take their curiosity a step further and explore the achievements of those photographers who have created work characterised by the strong stamp of their individual character and perspectives.
People buy a vast range of images. This can be anything from a close-up of a shell by Edward Weston to some heroic vista of an urban landscape by Gursky. There is no limit to the subject matter; photography embraces every facet of the world and its history. There are photographers who are exploring things the eye can’t see, who are working – or effectively sculpting, some might say – with light, or working beyond conventional vision using X-ray, infrared and so forth.
So the subject matter is truly unlimited. The value of a photograph is determined by market forces: supply, demand, a pattern of consensus on what is desirable. If something is deemed desirable and is in limited supply, clearly it will attract a premium in terms of potential financial value. At its most basic, I would say that, for a photograph to be worth a substantial sum of money, it needs to be by a photographer who has already established his or her credentials within photo history. So they need to have had a good degree of peer recognition and scholarly endorsement. It would have to be a work that is a good example of that particular photographer at the top of their game. As well as being a terrific image, the work has to be a print that satisfies all the criteria of condition and print quality. And also, of course, a degree of rarity, because some works of parallel importance won’t necessarily be of the same value, as some photographers might be a little more prolific in creating prints than others. In the end, once you have explored all those criteria, it comes down to the laws of supply and demand.
Can I sell my work at auction?
Auctions serve the secondary market rather than providing a primary shop window for contemporary work. So the first step for any photographer is to find a gallery that will introduce the work to the market. Our role in the auction world is to fulfil the demand for work that is no longer available on the primary market. It is the rarity that creates the competitive element that is essential to a successful auction result.
Philippe Garner
Francis Hodgson, Photography critic, Financial Times
All sorts of people buy photography because it’s a demotic and democratic art form. Anyone who has run a gallery of photography, as I have, will have learnt very quickly that you cannot judge your clients by the smart suits they wear. All sorts of people buy photography in a very serious way who are not used to buying other art forms. For example, lots of corporate art collectors buy photographs because they are relatively affordable, and it’s pretty much guaranteed to appeal to the widest possible cross section of staff, clients, suppliers and so forth. It’s an art form that has broad appeal; therefore it has all sorts of buyers. I’ve sold photographs to people who had to save every penny to buy a relatively inexpensive print that they adored. I’ve sold pictures to people who have never bought pictures before; I’ve also sold pictures to the global rich.
The starting point of buying photographs is spending a pound or two on a postcard that you like as a simple photographic reproduction, or tearing a page out of a magazine and pinning it to your door. It’s the beginning of a collecting habit that becomes more serious and more targeted. It is perfectly normal for people to collect £1 postcards of the places they’ve been. We regard this as not being a particularly cultural phenomenon and certainly not being part of the collector’s phenomenon, but it is. That’s the place where people acquire their early literacy in photography. It’s the same thing with photographic books. There are large numbers of people who try to buy all the books on the subject matter that interests them, or who try to buy a lot of books in a broad range of photographic areas. I think of those people as being in the same world as people buying very fancy photographs.
There is a sub section of people who buy photographs who are the natural target audience of a small group of 40 or 50 American galleries that specialise in photography, and their clients form a fairly cohesive and identifiable group of collectors who have been trained into being the market for those galleries. But they represent a minority in terms of the global spend. Within the specialised photography markets there are two great splits. The first are traditional, mainstream photographic history collectors. Then there’s the contemporary art market, which has slightly different rules and includes many photographs, but is thought to be a market broader than photography.
There are all sorts of ways of valuing a photograph. Clearly, rarity is a part of it; to have a late print of something of which there are many hundreds is not as exciting as having a very rare print nearer the time of the making of the negative.At its expensive end, the market looks to prove that the print comes from as close to the time of the negative production as possible. So there’s an early version of value. Beauty, of course, is another one – the beauty of a photograph is not the same as the beauty of any other kind of art work, because photography over many years has changed our notion of aesthetics. So pain, ugliness and squalor slide on to the photographic paper as gracefully as elegance and proportion. Therefore, war photographs fit the canon of photographic beauty, even though no one would think of them as being particularly pretty, as it were. And then there is the subject matter itself. There are more people who are interested in the graceful nudes of women than there are people who are interested in the architectural studies from the 19th century. So a Helmut Newton has a wider potential audience than a Linnaeus Tripe, for example.
The prices paid for fine print photography – that’s to say in the art market – were recently tabulated in a magazine, compared to the prices paid for paparazzi or celebrity portraiture. The top three or four figures, to everyone’s amazement, were in celebrity portraits. I think the amazement that people have at the idea that someone might spend a million dollars on a photograph, is tempered by the fact that advertising campaigns and magazines pay very heavy rates for photographic output. It’s a market like any other; it finds value within a complicated relationship between supply and demand, meeting the marketing skills of the sellers fighting for the attention of potential buyers. And it’s a thriving market.
Can I sell my work at auction?
In theory, auctions deal only in material that is no longer available elsewhere. With photography, that should mean only editions that have already sold out. No reputable auction house will accept pictures that are still available for a known fixed price from a gallery or any other channel. So photographers need to think of a successful sale at auction as something to work towards as part of a careful marketing strategy. However, auctions are unpredictable. An unsold piece will set a print-selling campaign back by several years, for the same reasons that a good sale will give it a boost. Achieve a worse result than anticipated and your name might well be burned for several years to come. So my advice? Leave the auction market until you have a very successful presence through galleries. And then the market will come looking for you.
Francis Hodgson
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