Photography and the Art Market by Juliet Hacking

Photography and the Art Market by Juliet Hacking

Author:Juliet Hacking
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Lund Humphries
Published: 2018-11-15T00:00:00+00:00


Alfred Stieglitz

The best-documented collection of pictorialist photography is that amassed by Alfred Stieglitz, the photographer, gallerist and presiding genius of art photography in the United States in the first half of the twentieth century. When in 1894 Stieglitz visited the Photographic Salon [exhibition] of the Linked Ring, the leading London-based pictorialist society, and acquired his first photograph, there were, according to curator and scholar Weston Naef, ‘very few collectors of photographs’ and the majority of the exhibits ‘were for sale at prices that ranged from a few shillings to a few pounds’ (three shillings is approximately £16 in today’s money).4 Five years later, in 1899, Stieglitz claimed that he heard twice that year of a photograph being sold in New York for us$100, one of which was a print of Gertrude Käsebier’s The Manger of 1899, a study of ideal motherhood (see Plate 9).5 Paying us$5 a print for photographs by the young pictorialist tyro Edward Steichen in 1900, it is said that, two years later, Stieglitz had to pay us$50.6 In the interim, Steichen had made his name in European pictorialist circles as the enfant terrible of ‘The New School of American Photography’. Steichen’s The Pond - Moonrise of 1904 (see Plate 10) would, in early 2006, become the most expensive photograph sold (to date) at auction – fetching us$2,928,000 (£2,461,594).

The critic Sadakichi Hartmann wrote in 1898 in an article on Stieglitz that ‘artistic photography is still in that idyllic state where a market value of its productions is an unheard of thing’.7 This would soon change, with Hartmann, in 1904, criticising Stieglitz for offering his photographs at inflated prices.8 It seems that Stieglitz saw economic worth and aesthetic value as mutually defining (‘the Veblen effect’). In 1898, he put a price on his photograph Winter - Fifth Avenue of 1893 of us$75 (approximately us$2240 in today’s money), whereas, four years later, the leading British Pictorialist George Davison quoted five guineas (then equivalent to us$30) as the highest price that he had achieved for a single photograph.9 A rare carbon print (for a carbon print, the - monochromatic - image on the photographic paper is formed by pigment rather than by metal salts and can therefore be produced in a range of hues) of Winter - Fifth Avenue would, in May 2007, sell at auction in London for £192,000 (us$380,440) (see Plate 8).

Whether the figures given by Stieglitz were those actually realised is not always known. Naef suggested that a figure of us$30 was the one more often achieved by him; McCauley, assessing the market as a whole, concludes that ‘pictorial photographs that sold between 1895 and 1910 to collectors went for something between us$2–$5 dollars’.10 When in 1915, Stieglitz issued a folio-sized print of his signature work The Steerage, 1907, in photogravure (a photo-engraving – that is, an image in ink from a printed plate onto which the photographic image has been chemically transferred), ‘one hundred persons subscribed to the regular edition and eight to the deluxe …



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