Stellar L.A. Photo Collection Heads for Japan : Photography: In a landmark deal, Stephen White sells 15,000 photographs and related items to Tokyo Fuji Museum.

Los Angeles photography dealer Stephen White has sold his collection of about 15,000 photographs and related items to the Photographic Center of the Tokyo Fuji Art Museum in Tokyo. The multimillion-dollar deal is believed to be the biggest sale of a single photography collection in the history of the medium.

White declined to disclose the selling price but said that it exceeded the J. Paul Getty Museum’s individual purchases of the Sam Wagstaff and Arnold Crane collections, which he pegged at $4 million to $5 million apiece. The Getty in 1984 bought the two collections along with others, reportedly paying around $20 million for a total of 18,000 photographs.

White’s collection has enormous breadth and depth in the history of photography. It includes photographically illustrated volumes, almost 200 albums from the 19th Century, important books on pioneering technology and large groups of work by Karl Struss, John Thomson and Lotte Jacobi. The collection represents such leading figures as Alfred Stieglitz, Edward Steichen and Eadweard Muybridge.

A traveling exhibition drawn from the collection has crossed the United States and visited Copenhagen, Frankfurt and Paris, offering a wide view of photographic achievements. The show--which opens at the San Diego Museum of Photographic Arts on May 18--includes sections on industrialization, the interaction of landscape and architecture, portraiture and nudes. Among the 124 images in the show are a portrait by William Henry Fox Talbot (inventor of photography’s negative/positive process), arresting pictures of American laborers by Lewis W. Hine and a Paris street scene by Jean-Eugene-Auguste Atget. There are vintage photographs of exotic landscapes, European architecture and turn-of-the-century transportation as well as sensuous nudes by Edward Weston.

All these photographs will be lodged in a fledgling cultural center in Tokyo that is expected to expand into a large science and art museum complex. At the present, the privately funded institution’s sparse photographic holdings are housed in an art museum, White said. A separate photography center, now under construction, is expected to be completed in two to three years. Other planned facilities will display photographic equipment and illustrate technical processes.

White said he was approached by the Japanese, who have been actively buying photography for the last two years. Negotiations on the deal have been in process for six months.

“Life is too short to pass up opportunities like this. Every collector’s fantasy is that his collection will be kept intact and utilized,” White said, and he believes that will happen in Tokyo.

“The collection will be the basis of a lot of books and exhibitions in Japan, and it will be handled in a way that no American museum can. The Japanese got an instant collection of material they couldn’t get any other way. They will use it in a reference and resource center that will function on a worldwide level,” he said.

White, 51, began collecting photographs as a hobby in the early ‘70s but turned the activity into a profession in 1975, when he opened his first gallery near the Los Angeles Design Center in West Hollywood. Two years later, he moved the business to La Cienega Boulevard and began to represent such artists as Karl Struss, an Academy-Award winning cinematographer and photographer from the Photo-Secession period. White’s wife, Mus, joined him in the gallery as he struggled to make a go of it and to interest a wider audience in photography.

While building his business, White educated himself and became a scholar of photography. He has written books on 19th-Century Scottish photographer John Thomson and a history of the first 50 years of photography. He also developed European sources and began to buy photographs abroad, bringing them home, displaying them at the gallery and adding them to his collection when he couldn’t find buyers.

He took his biggest financial plunge in Stockholm in 1980 with the $45,000 purchase of an album of Thomson’s prints of Peking. Since then, the photography market has boomed right along with the art market, making five- and six-figure sales of photography increasingly common.

White said that he never dreamed that photographs would make him wealthy. In his exhibition catalogue, he wrote, “I often look at the fruits of my labors in amazement and wonder whatever possessed me. The explanation is quite simple: I fell in love with the material and became addicted to the excitement of the chase.

“First and foremost, the inspiration for my passion grew out of a love for the beauty and mystery of a single image. Being able to gather many images was fortuitous fate. I was not rich enough for it to have been my heritage, or clever enough to know it was my destiny. My collection emerged from love, not from high ideals concerning the value of past artifacts for future generations, and not from potential economic gain.”

The Stephen White Gallery, now located at 7319 Beverly Blvd., will remain open for awhile, White said, and he will continue collecting but “on a much smaller scale.” He plans to devote most of his time to writing photography books and curating exhibitions.

“I’ll do what I have always done but without the pressure of earning a living on top of it all,” he said.

* BOOMING PHOTO MARKET

Sunday Calendar will examine recent inflation in the last major segment of the art market to remain relatively affordable.