A Photographic Frenzy in the Art World : New respectability for camera art has created a price explosion and celebrity status for some photographers

When attorney Michael Whalen was put in charge of his law firm’s art budget in fall, 1988, he had to come up with a fine art collection for under $300,000 at a time when contemporary paintings were sometimes running that much--or more--apiece.

So Whalen, who’s been buying photographs himself for years, plunked down every penny for 250 photographs, enough to fill all nine floors of Latham & Watkins’ new downtown digs. “I was convinced--and I convinced my partners--that we could take the budget that we had for this art project and create an important collection of photographs,” says Whalen. “But we couldn’t take the same amount of money and buy painting and sculpture and end up with something we could be proud of.”

But the days of acquiring so much so easily are numbered, and it may not be long before major photography collections will be unattainable for under seven digits. Photography, the last major chunk of the art market to remain relatively affordable, is going the route of painting and sculpture. At last year’s auctions, record crowds vied to pay prices that topped the $100,000-per-print mark for the first time.

“A year ago, you probably could have assembled a very fine photography collection for $300,000 to $400,000,” says Christie’s director of photography, Claudia Gropper, “and in our last sale we sold one lot for $396,000.”

Dealer sales have similarly heated up. G. Ray Hawkins, one of the biggest photo dealers in the country, reports his best quarter ever and plans a move in May from Melrose Avenue to Santa Monica. And two of his former employees have opened their own galleries, on La Brea Avenue, that are doing good business. “In 1984, most important photography dealers had sold a $10,000 photo,” Hawkins says, “but few had sold a $20,000 photo. By 1987, most important dealers had sold a $25,000 photo and a few had sold $40,000 photos. Currently, most have sold a $40,000 photo and some of us have sold $100,000 photos.”

The photography business today versus 1979, when he first opened Fraenkel Gallery in San Francisco, is “the difference between BC and AD,” says Jeffrey Fraenkel. Adds former San Francisco dealer Simon Lowinsky, now in New York: “People buy it now. You don’t have to sell it.”

From virtually nowhere, photography rushed to the marketplace in the ‘70s, toppled with the recession of the early ‘80s, then recovered and shot skyward again. The 1984 acquisition by the J. Paul Getty Museum of several major photography collections gave the market a big push by endowing photography with new art-world respectability.

Then last year, the 150th anniversary of the discovery of photography gave the market another shove. San Francisco’s Friends of Photography counted up 600 exhibitions at 350 institutions worldwide, and the frenzy continues this year. The biggest crowds these days at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art are there to look at photographic exhibitions, says trustee Byron Meyer. Houston’s biannual FotoFest, the nation’s largest photo fair, is under way amid expectations of topping last year’s attendance of 300,000. Still on view (through Feb. 25) at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art is “On the Art of Fixing a Shadow,” a major traveling show saluting photography’s 150 years, and opening Wednesday at the Museum of Modern Art in New York is “Photography Until Now,” that institution’s photographic retrospective.

Outside the museums, photography has also achieved a loftier profile. Publications from Time magazine to L.A. Style have produced special issues during the last year on photography, and photography has joined other contemporary artworks on restaurant and movie theater walls.

Given all this attention and the relatively new respectability of photography in the world of art collecting, it’s hardly surprising that people can’t seem to get their money out fast enough.

Just last week, long-time Los Angeles collector and dealer Stephen White sold his huge, comprehensive photography collection to the Photographic Center of the Tokyo Fuji Art Museum in Tokyo. The collection spans the years 1839 to 1988, and includes about 15,000 illustrated books, vintage projectors and cameras, albums and in-depth print holdings of such masters as Karl Struss, John Thomson and Lotte Jacobi. While White declined to reveal the purchase price, which certainly is in the low millions, he concedes that today’s feverish marketplace contributed to both their approaching him and a very nice price.

The current market covers the whole spectrum--from vintage to contemporary. Sotheby’s director of photography, Beth Gates-Warren, defines contemporary photographers as people whose reputations as photographers were established after 1960, such as David Hockney or the late Robert Mapplethorpe. She estimates that 90% of the material that comes up for auction today is vintage material.

In the galleries, however, it’s a different story, with the percentage of early or recent work varying from dealer to dealer. In fact, as vintage works get rarer and rarer, a growing cadre of new photography dealers and existing fine-art dealers are peddling contemporary work. And a photographer such as Herb Ritts is becoming as celebrated as the movie stars he photographs, drawing turn-away crowds to a gallery opening. (See accompanying story on Page 90).

Another element that has contributed to the hyperinflation in the photography market is controversy. Mapplethorpe, the artist whose graphic photographs of male nudes became a part of last year’s furor over National Endowment for the Arts funding, both contributed to and profited from the media attention--rocketing to stardom and record prices. With plenty of Mapplethorpes on hand, Sotheby’s reported a “sense of urgency” and Christie’s “a mad rush” of buyers at last fall’s photography auctions.

The time is here when even those people who had doubts about photography’s importance as either a collectible or an art form seem convinced. “People who collected photographs used to put them in plastic and in drawers,” says New York dealer Holly Solomon. “Now people are putting them in the living room.”

Photography is the most familiar art form. It comes to us every day in the magazines and newspapers we read and in the images we see on television. Anybody can take a picture--one reason for the low esteem that photography long held as an art form. But it takes only one glance at Edward Weston’s sensuous 1930 photograph of a simple pepper to remind us that not all photographers see things the same way. From Weston to Hockney, photographic artists interpret old landscapes and reveal new ones, whether geographical or spiritual, real or imagined.

But despite its rich, 150-year history, photography is relatively new to the marketplace. Although Alfred Stieglitz opened his “291” gallery in New York in 1905, activity was pretty minimal for decades. Sotheby’s and Christie’s didn’t even start having regular scheduled photo auctions until 1975 and 1978, respectively. And here at home, Los Angeles photographer Darryl Curran counted just 14 art photography shows between 1959 and 1969.

Then came the ‘70s. Collectors and speculators boosted the market to such a high level that by 1979 New York dealer Lee Witkin was able to splurge and take his nine-member staff to the Bahamas for five days to celebrate his 10th anniversary. But it turned out to be too much too soon, and the market essentially collapsed in the early ‘80s. The number of photography galleries around the country dropped from about 200 in 1980 to under 70 by 1983.

When the Staley-Wise Gallery in New York opened its doors in 1981, at the depth of the recession, somebody asked co-owner Etheleen Staley, “Shall we congratulate you for buying a ticket on the Titanic?”

But Staley--who is now able to compare business to traveling on the Concorde--simply waited; she and others felt growth would come--slowly, but it would come.

Things had started back up again when trustees of the J. Paul Getty Museum sniffed opportunity. In 1984, the Getty acquired more than 18,000 photographs in the collections of Arnold Crane, Samuel Wagstaff and other American and European collectors, becoming one of the world’s foremost photo repositories for a sum reportedly less than the $26.4 million it paid last year at auction for one painting--Edouard Manet’s “Rue Mosnier with Flags.”

“The first generation of collectors--people like Crane and Wagstaff--who had fueled the market so completely had begun to taper off and there suddenly was a vacuum of individuals prepared to pay premium prices for the best there was,” says Weston Naef, Getty curator of photography. “ It meant a genuine flattening of the market and a window of opportunity for the Getty that director John Walsh and the trustees were perfectly poised to seize.”

The rush was on. “By taking that much off the market permanently, the Getty certainly contributed to the rarity of great things coming on the market in the future,” says Sotheby’s Gates-Warren, “and in terms of vesting photography with credibility, having a major institution like the Getty take that plunge so quickly and so wholeheartedly had a major impact on the way collectors began to view photos.”

A mere five years later, in 1989, Christie’s and Sotheby’s together sold about $11 million worth of photography--as compared with under $170,000 each at their initial sales in the ‘70s. Estimates for the U.S. photography market today are running as high as $100 million. Howard Read, director of photography at New York’s Miller Gallery, is so confident that he recently rejected a $250,000 offer for a Man Ray triptych called “Yesterday, Today and Tomorrow.” Read had bought the triptych for $20,000 in 1980, sold it for $40,000 a year later, and got it back last summer on consignment--he’s holding out for $325,000.

There is evidence of buyer resistance to these high prices, however. Even as prominent a collector as retired real estate developer Leonard Vernon says he’s “consistently” frozen out by high prices these days. “You plan to bid and spend more than you ever conceived you would for a specific image and you don’t come close,” he says. “A (Edward) Steichen we wanted went for $110,000 at the last auction and we weren’t even in the running.”

With all the publicity surrounding last fall’s auctions, everybody knows what’s happening at the top of the market. But the inflation isn’t limited to the top. Like paintings, prints and sculpture, photography is a multi-tiered market, and photographs at every level are appreciating. Dealers and auctioneers also report inconsistencies and volatility in the marketplace, with prices varying thousands of dollars from one moment to the next for prints in identical condition.

“The tremendous success of photography as a collecting medium has made it impossible for a lot of serious collectors to continue collecting on the level they’re used to,” says one Los Angeles collector, who prefers anonymity. “You can understand people being closed out of paintings at $500,000 that were going for a tenth of that 10 years ago, but you don’t think of people being closed out at $20,000. But a lot of us aren’t necessarily wealthy.

“I bought some (Paul) Outerbridge platinum prints in the mid-’70s for $1,200 to $2,000 each that are worth more than 10 times that now. I didn’t buy those pieces because I thought they’d some day be worth a lot of money. I bought those pieces because I loved them and they were expensive to me then. There are pieces I would dearly love to have today that cost $20,000 or $25,000 and I can’t think about spending that kind of money for a piece of art. So I have shut myself out, or been shut out, from collecting the same kind of work that maybe 10 years ago I could collect.”

Controversy sells.

Prices paid for the works of Andres Serrano, the photographer whose work first provoked last year’s National Endowment for the Arts controversy, have doubled and tripled since then, says New York dealer Stefan Stux. Stux says that Serrano’s now-notorious photo “Piss Christ,” which depicts a crucifix in Serrano’s urine, is sold out and “very heavily in demand on the secondary market. It sold for about $2,000 two years ago, and you couldn’t get one today for $10,000.”

Nowhere has the frenzy been greater than for Mapplethorpe, whose photographs went at last fall’s auctions for prices as high as $38,500 apiece--considerably more than what the auction houses estimated. In the late ‘70s, says New York dealer Holly Solomon, she was selling Mapplethorpe photographs for less than the cost of custom silk frames that Mapplethorpe used. “If you bought the photo the way I sold it, the photo cost $150 and the framing another $300.”

One of the photos from that framed batch resold for $32,000 at auction last year, she says, and fortunately for Solomon, she bought some herself. She turned down a dealer’s $12,000 offer in 1987 for “Tan Head and Flower,” she says, which she sold last summer for $30,000.

It isn’t just controversy fueling the market, however. Big names from other art forms generally draw more money. Like Degas, Andy Warhol and Ed Ruscha before them, a great many painters and sculptors began in recent years to work both in and with photography. Artists such as Cal Arts’ John Baldessari use photography as building blocks, influencing his contemporaries as well as his students. And when such work was exhibited in traditional art galleries alongside far more pricey paintings and sculpture, dealers were comfortable asking for prices they might have shied away from in traditional photography galleries.

When Hockney started selling his photo collages in 1981, for instance, prices ranged from $6,000 to $20,000, and although L.A. Louver is pricing his “Graffiti Palace, New York, December, 1982” at $45,000--and sold his “Grand Canyon Looking North, September, 1982,” last year for $35,000--prices are still low compared to Hockney’s other work. Prints can run as high as $120,000, and at the gallery’s most recent show of Hockney paintings, prices ranged from $200,000 to $450,000.

While photographers used to print as many as 50 to 100 images of a given print, today’s photographers have tried to limit their prints to the lower numbers common to lithographs and other original prints so as to reassure buyers that they’re getting something relatively rare. Edition sizes today can be as small as two or three, and never run so large as the hundreds of prints made by such earlier photographers as Ansel Adams. Herb Ritts, for instance, works in editions of 12 or 25, depending on a print’s size, and says his negatives aren’t destroyed but rather are carefully logged and “retired” at edition’s end.

Consider also the one-of-a-kind assemblages by the 28-year-old Starn Twins, “photo objects” that dealer Stux is selling for $5,000 to $75,000. As recently as 1986, before the twins were canonized by the art world, works sold for $200 to $300 that are today going for $2,000 to $3,000. At a recent Christie’s auction, says Stux, “one object we priced at $10,000 sold at auction for $25,000, and another priced at around $10,000 or $12,000 sold for $34,000.”

“Given the money involved, even photographers who would have worked traditionally 10 years ago are working in mixed media, on canvas or linen today to be part of the contemporary art market,” says dealer White. “It’s a way to have their work accepted, plus get better prices.”

There are other reasons, of course. Photographer Jo Ann Callis went back to drawings and sculpture she had worked with earlier, combining her interests in multimedia work on linen that sells for about $8,000. Today’s lines are blurred, concedes Callis, recalling a time not so long ago when “the distinction of artist or photographer determined the price of your work, which galleries and general status. You could be very well respected in the photography community and the art community still may not have known who you were.”

What also happened, explains Willis Hartshorn, director of exhibitions at New York’s International Center of Photography, is that “as photography becomes more of a collectible, it has taken on more of the vocabulary of painting. It’s big, colorful, and able to stand on its own on a wall.”

Prices for contemporary photography were also suppressed for a long time because prices for historical photographs were too low, adds Mark Johnstone, local photographer and curatorial consultant. “You could buy a fairly good quality 19th-Century piece for just a little more than the price of a contemporary work. When historical work started getting what it deserved, a lot of work came out on the market, which ended up in collections where it wouldn’t move very quickly. It dried up the market for 19th-Century prints and as a consequence started pulling up the prices for contemporary work.”

Sometimes, the price can even go up during an exhibition. At a recent show of photographs by Herb Ritts at the Fahey/Klein Gallery on La Brea Avenue, for instance, prices shot up in just days as the supply dropped. The price for Ritts’ large work (24-by-30-inch), “Djimon with Octopus,” which has an edition of 12, started at $2,500 each when the show opened on Dec. 1. The first six prints were sold at that price, says Fahey. Then the price went up to $3,500, and prints No. 7 and No. 8 were each sold at that price. After that, prints 9 and 10 were sold at $4,500 apiece, and 11 and 12 at $6,000 each.

Yet despite all the inflation, Washington dealer Kathleen Ewing and others swear that great buys are still available. “Some of the finest photographers of the ‘40s like Walker Evans are still available in the $2,000-to-$5,000 range,” says Ewing. “Were you to look at paintings or drawings of a similar quality, you couldn’t come near it.”

Attorney Whalen talks of buying fine-quality prints as low as $750, and at Security Pacific Corp., Tressa Miller, vice president and director of cultural affairs, says “a lot of corporations are buying photos because you have really good artists working with the photographic process and it is still an area that’s reasonably priced.”

Following the most basic law of economics, the appeal of photography has played a part in inflating the market: More collectors, both individuals and institutions, are competing, particularly for rare, older prints at the top end of the market.

“Ten years ago, I was one of a very small group of serious collectors,” says Robert Shapazian, director of Lapiz Press here. Dealers say the number of collectors locally has jumped from maybe half a dozen in the ‘70s to hundreds today. Hawkins boasts that 600 collectors have bought from his gallery alone the past three years.

Locally as well as nationally, dealers and auctioneers alike report a broadening of the collector base to include new private buyers, many of them baby boomers. Photography collectors, says Sotheby’s Gates-Warren, “tend to be under 45. They are people who have grown up with photography and television and the media. They are emotionally affected by that and relate very easily to photography as an art form and means of expression that moves them.”

The pool of local collectors has certainly grown with more and more movie people diving in. Dealers Hawkins and White both went to film school here, and photography dealer Jan Kesner estimates that half her customers are in the movie business. Hollywood collectors “are artistically oriented and work with images, narrative and photography,” Kesner says.

Competing with all these new private collectors are the museums. The Museums of Modern Art in New York and San Francisco have been collecting photographs since the 1930s, but most museum activity is a development of the ‘70s or even the ‘80s. At San Diego’s Museum of Photographic Arts, director Arthur Ollman says the 7-year-old institution is one of at least 65 new museums started during the past 10 years in countries from India to Japan.

Rock musician Graham Nash is one private collector who is worried about how the competition will hurt the museums. “People willing to spend $1 million on a great painting and now being charged $5 million may put that money into classic photography and drive those prices up,” Nash says with a sigh. “Add that to the Bush policy on donations, and museums are hurting. It could mean that museums won’t have the budget to establish major collections.”

Nash, who holds a multimillion-dollar collection that is one of the nation’s most highly regarded, is selling most of it at an April auction at Sotheby’s. “One of the reasons I’m selling (my photographs) is that I’ve always been affected by waves of energy,” says Nash. “In the ‘60s, it was rock ‘n’ roll music and still is. In the ‘70s, a lot of my passion was spent searching for and buying photographs. In the ‘90s, I feel a tremendous amount of creative energy is being shown by computer nerds. They’re really moving forward, and I’m very turned on by what they’re doing in photography.”

The musician is planning to donate to the County Museum of Art his most recent collection of computer-generated, experimental and other very contemporary photographs. He is also planning to share with the County Museum of Art a substantial chunk of the proceeds from the sale. And, says the musician, he’s planning to ask photographer celebrities Hockney and Dennis Hopper to help him bolster County Museum activity.

Berkeley-based photographer Leland Rice estimates there are probably a dozen world-class private collections in the United States today, forecasting that financially-pressed museums will probably be wooing those collectors for donations, not to mention entire collections. Just last fall, for instance, New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art received a joint gift of about 500 photographs from the Ford Motor Co. and New York collector John C. Waddell.

Photography, says dealer White, “has achieved respectability as an art form. There isn’t the concern you have when a field is just starting. The field has arrived, and it’s very rare you get into something at the ground floor and see it being developed right before your very eyes.”

THE PRICES PEOPLE WILL PAY

These lists of vintage and contemporary photographs are compiled from an informal survey taken by Calendar of Sotheby’s, Christie’s and selected galleries nationwide. The selection represents only a random market sample of top-tier prints and the most recent price paid for each and does not constitute a “Top 10” price list for photography sales.

Vintage

Photographer Title Recent Sale Former Sale Man Ray “The Primacy $121,000 (1989) Never of Matter Over Thought,”1931 Edward “Shell,”1927 $115,500 (1989) $28,600 (1981) Weston Edward Portrait of $110,000 (1989) Never Steichen George Frederick Watts,1901 Man Ray “Le Violon In excess of $16,000 (1985) d’Ingres”, 1924 $100,000 (1989) Edward “The Little $80,000 (1986) Never Steichen Round Mirror,” 1901 Paul “Venice,”1911 $68,000 (1989) $22,000 (1984) Strand Henry Peach 19th-Century $50,000 (1984) Never Robinson photo (c.1870) Similar sold in 1970s: $5,000 Ansel “Moonrise, $35,750 (1989) $8,000 (1979) Adams Hernandez, $800 (1975) N.M.,” 1941

Contemporary

Photographer Title Recent Sale Former Sale Gilbert & “Civil” $45,000 Never George (1989) Robert “Untitled” $40,000 $1,500 Mapplethorpe Self-portrait in drag (1989) (1981, retail) Robert “Untitled” $38,500 Never Mapplethorpe Self-portrait (1989) with star and gun David “The Grand Canyon $35,000 $6,000-20,000 Hockney Looking North, (1989) (est. price 1981) September, 1982” Starn Twins “Lisa” $32,000 $1,500 (1989) (1987) Cindy “Untitled” $25,000 Never Sherman (Madonna with (1990) false breast) Robert “Hyacinth” $22,000 $12,000 (1988) Mapplethorpe (1989) $3,500 (1986) William “Valentine” $20,000 $500 (c. 1980) Wegman (1989)