ART : Proof Positive : Photography has at last gained acceptance on its own terms, emerging from the recession with a new visibility and respect in L.A.

If the art market is a hare, struggling to recover after running too fast during the late ‘80s and crashing a couple of years ago, the photography market is a tortoise. Perpetually lagging far behind art--in status, price and visibility--photography has made slow but steady strides during the last decade.

This fact has never been more evident in Southern California than it is now, when the worlds of both art and photography are emerging from a recession that experts say is over. While the number of local art galleries has shrunk, photography galleries have doubled. Meanwhile, local museums have taken an increasingly active role in collecting and presenting photography. And Los Angeles has gained a photography trade fair. Photo L.A., an annual exhibition and sale of photographic prints, is scheduled for its second run, from Thursday night to next Sunday at Butterfield & Butterfield auction house galleries.

Apart from David Fahey--who has become a player on the international scene, produced books and promoted such bankable artists as celebrity portraitist Herb Ritts--Southern California photography dealers haven’t exactly sailed through the recession. “This has been a hard year, one of the hardest ever,” says Susan Spiritus, who opened her first gallery 17 years ago in Orange County. But Spiritus has committed 25 years of her life to her gallery, and she doesn’t plan to stop now. Neither do her colleagues. Indeed, as painful as the recession may have been, a long view of photography in Southern California reveals far more gains than losses.

On the commercial gallery scene, dealers G. Ray Hawkins and Stephen White once labored nearly alone in Los Angeles, while Spiritus held forth in Orange County. But two former Hawkins employees, Fahey and Jan Kesner, have long since opened their own galleries and established independent identities. Fahey, who directed the Hawkins gallery from 1975 to ‘86, formed a partnership with Hawkins’ former wife, Randee Klein, and opened Fahey/Klein Gallery in 1987. Kesner, who holds degrees in filmmaking and the history of photography from the Art Institute of Chicago, worked for Hawkins from 1980 to ‘84, became a private dealer in 1985 and opened her gallery on La Brea Avenue in 1988.

Within the last two years--which is to say, the depths of the recession--Craig Krull, Paul Kopeikin and Stephen Cohen have opened galleries in West Hollywood. In addition, British film producer Peter Fetterman has launched a show space in a Santa Monica bungalow, which is open on weekends and features occasional Sunday salons, and various galleries that function as photography shops have sprouted all over the Southland.

Photography’s rise has not been without setbacks in Southern California. A move to start a photography museum in Los Angeles in the early ‘80s never got off the ground. Light Gallery, a prestigious New York establishment, opened a branch on La Cienega Boulevard in 1980 but bailed out the following year. Stephen White closed his gallery in 1991, but his situation is a success story. After struggling for 15 years to build an audience for photography, he sold his personal collection of 15,000 photographs to the Tokyo Fuji Art Museum in Japan.

The relative health of Southern California’s photography scene appears to mirror that of the rest of the country. The Assn. of International Photography Art Dealers has grown steadily since 1979, when the group was founded, says its executive director, Kathleen Ewing. The organization recently added seven names to its roll, bringing the membership to about 90. The highly selective group requires new members to have been in business for three years and be recommended by three of their peers, among other qualifications.

There are obvious reasons for photography’s resilience. For one thing, photographs are generally more affordable than paintings. “You pay more for a mediocre work by a young painter than for a historically important work of a well-known photographer,” Fahey says.

The price of photographs has risen over the years, of course. “In 1975, when I opened my first gallery on Melrose Avenue, my inventory ranged from $15 to $4,500. . . . Max Yavno’s ‘Muscle Beach’ sold for $150,” Hawkins recalls. Today the vintage image costs $3,500, and Hawkins’ gallery in Santa Monica offers works priced at $90 to $250,000.

The art market boom of the late ‘80s shattered photography records in spectacular sales--$396,000 for Alfred Stieglitz’s “Equivalents,” $190,000 for Edward Weston’s “Nautilus,” $60,500 for Robert Mapplethorpe’s trio of floral still lifes and $38,500 for his self-portrait. But photography didn’t rise nearly as fast or as high as Impressionist paintings and contemporary art, so it didn’t have as far to fall. While prices for works by a few big-name photographers shot up--and down--photography’s secondary market remained quite solid, dealers say.

Another factor in the growth and tenacity of photography galleries is that photographs tend to be much smaller than paintings and sculptures, allowing photography dealers to operate relatively small galleries with low overheads.

But cost and size aren’t the only components of photography’s success story. “People in their 30s and 40s grew up with photography. . . . They have more acceptance and awareness of it than the prior generation,” Fahey says.

Photographs offer “a more direct reality” than many other forms of art, Krull says. On the other hand, photographs offer a personal, intimate alternative to the big, bold “power paintings of the ‘80s,” he says. “They also arrest time; there’s a nostalgia quotient.”

While photography has gained acceptance on its own terms, it has infiltrated the entire range of contemporary art. But this phenomenon has not necessarily benefited photography dealers. Many artists who work in photography--such as Cindy Sherman, John Baldessari, Sherry Levine, Barbara Kasten and the Starn Twins--show their work in mainline art galleries and consciously shun what is known as “the photo ghetto.”

Locally, the Ruth Bloom Gallery represents Susan Rankaitis, who incorporates photographic techniques in works that read as painting or sculpture, as well as Boyd Webb, a witty conceptualist who builds elaborate tableaux as subjects of photographs. The Roy Boyd Gallery shows Eileen Cowin’s photographic narratives, and the Linda Cathcart Gallery features photographs by such well-known artists as Sherman, William Wegman and Nicholas Nicosia.

Hawkins says he has advised a few artists to take their work to art galleries, where it will command higher prices and have a greater chance of getting reviewed by New York art magazines. But most photography dealers privately object to the discrepancy in pricing and admit being disappointed by artists who refuse to show their work in photography galleries. Kesner, who considers herself an art dealer specializing in photo-based work, is particularly eager to break the barrier that persists between photography and art.

Another impasse facing dealers who sell photographs is far more basic--the “Yes, but is it art?” question.

“No intelligent person born after World War II questions whether photography is art or if it has a value,” says Kopeikin, who opened his gallery a little more than a year ago.

But longtime dealers tend to disagree. Spiritus, who caters to a general audience in the Crystal Court at the South Coast Plaza in Costa Mesa, spends much of her time educating the public. “I love it,” she says, noting that she writes informative labels for the works on view and sends out a newsletter explaining technical terms and processes.

“I lose patience,” Hawkins says, noting that he has grown weary of pointing out photography’s crucial role in the development of modern art to people who should recognize its importance. But it can be fun to conduct an open-minded novice through his gallery, he says.

Unlike art dealers, who generally concentrate on a particular period, Southern California’s pioneering photography dealers have offered the entire range of photography’s history. “You would never find a painting gallery that specializes in 1839 to now, with all the movements and all the artists. And yet, from 1975 to the late ‘80s, I was required to do that,” Hawkins says.

Fahey/Klein, which also shows a full spectrum of photography, maintains a small gallery for visitors who require a basic education in the field. Hung salon-style, the gallery offers examples covering a wide range of history, techniques and approaches.

Dealers who have opened galleries more recently have a somewhat narrower scope. Kopeikin limits himself to contemporary photography, but aims to represent a full range. Kesner balances her interest in contemporary photo-based art with works by 20th-Century masters. Cohen favors “people pictures” and relatively classical “straight” photographs. Krull says he gravitates toward works that express “a psychological understanding of the universe” or “the interaction between man and the natural world.” As a California history buff, he also likes to show photographs that “say something about California.”

Southern California dealers have come to the trade from various directions. Spiritus and Kopeikin, for example, started as collectors. Spiritus took the plunge and opened her own gallery in 1976 after her employer, dealer Jack Glenn, closed his Orange County gallery. Kopeikin, who had been unhappily engaged in the film industry while eagerly collecting photographs, decided there was room for a new gallery when he realized how many first-rate photographers did not have dealers in Los Angeles.

“Photography has always been my passion,” says Krull, who organized photography shows for the Jan Turner Gallery before launching the Turner/Krull Gallery, on the second floor of Turner’s art gallery.

Cohen’s gallery is a spinoff of Photo L.A., which he organized to gain clients for his formerly private business. Traveling across the country and making sales to small museums and universities, he found that he had more clients in Kansas City than in Los Angeles. “Something needed to be done here,” he says. When he rented an office last year for his first trade fair, he also acquired an exhibition space and decided to open a gallery.

This year’s version of Photo L.A. will feature 30 photography dealers--eight from California, six from the central states, 15 from the East Coast and one from Berlin. They will offer about 3,500 photographs priced from $200 to $100,000.

Photography aficionados are expected to turn out Thursday night for a preview, hosted by singer Joni Mitchell and pop musician Graham Nash, who is also a photographer and a noted collector. Proceeds from the $35-ticket event will benefit the Los Angeles County Museum of Art’s photography department, Cohen says. If this year’s fair is as successful as the 1992 debut, crowds of students, knowledgeable observers, first-time buyers and seasoned collectors will shell out $10 for admission to visit the dealers’ booths on Friday, Saturday and next Sunday.

Visitors who look beyond Butterfield & Butterfield’s Spanish colonial style building at 7601 Sunset Blvd. will see that the fair is not the only photography show in town. More than a dozen museums, community showcases and commercial galleries currently offer exhibitions of photographic art. Photography also turns up in unexpected places, such as a survey of Barbara Kasten’s work at Place Sazaby on Robertson Boulevard (to Jan. 28). Southern California’s exhibition spaces have never kept pace with the riches of photography produced here, but the scene has grown substantially.

One major change is museums’ increasing involvement in the field. The J. Paul Getty Museum cast a spectacular vote in favor of photography in 1984 when it purchased about 18,000 photographs (including several major collections from around the world), established a department of photography and hired as director Weston Naef, then curator of photography at New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art.

The County Museum of Art launched a department of photography in 1983 with a $1-million grant from the Ralph M. Parsons Foundation. But LACMA didn’t give the new enterprise a big push until 1990, when Robert Sobieszek, a longtime curator at George Eastman House in Rochester, N.Y., was hired to raise the photography department’s profile and build its collection. Meanwhile in San Marino, the Huntington Library, Art Collections and Botanical Gardens’ addition of the Virginia Steele Scott Gallery in 1984 provided a new showcase for American art, including photography.

While Southern California’s general art museums increased their commitment to photographic art, two museums devoted exclusively to photography established a strong presence. One of them, San Diego’s Museum of Photographic Arts, has offered a first-rate exhibition program under the direction of Arthur Ollman since it opened in 1983 in Balboa Park.

The other, the California Museum of Photography, became more visible to the public in 1990, when it moved from UC Riverside’s campus to a refurbished building in downtown Riverside. Soon after the move, Jonathan Green, former director of exhibitions at the Wexner Center for the Visual Arts at Ohio State University, was hired as director.

Charles Desmarais spearheaded the Riverside project but moved on to direct the Laguna Art Museum, where he has made photography an important part of the program in such shows as “Proof: Los Angeles Art and the Photograph, 1960-1980” (to next Sunday). Next on the agenda (Jan. 22-March 28) at Laguna is “Watkins to Weston: 101 Years of California Photography 1849-1950,” a survey beginning with the pioneering work of Carleton E. Watkins, organized by the Santa Barbara Museum of Art.

Photography also has been championed by such nonprofit showcases as the city-run Los Angeles Photography Center and the Los Angeles Center for Photographic Studies, which was started by artists in 1974 and incorporated the following year.

Reflecting on the nature of their business--and their passion--dealers say that client service is the name of the game. “I know where every single estate, every body of work, every old-timer is. I have to know where to get that work and how much it is,” Kesner says.

That aspect of the trade is likely to continue, but there will be radical changes in other areas, the dealers say. “I think the kids who grew up with MTV, CNN, cable television and computers are going to create some of the most exciting work and explore new frontiers,” Hawkins says.

“Photographs will be obsolete in time . . . but the new (computer) technology will make (existing) photographs all the more valuable as they become increasingly rare,” Fahey says. “Photography has a PR problem. People think there is too much of it--too many images--but in fact there is very little. There’s less and less great stuff around.”

Collectors will eventually wake up to the importance and value of photography, the dealers say. As to their success so far, accounts vary.

For Fahey, longevity, diversification and global reach (in exhibitions that travel to Europe and Japan) are the keys. “If we have a slow month here,” he says, “there’s a good chance something is happening in some other part of the world.”

Hawkins offers an alternate view after 18 years in the business: “When I was in high school, I could hold my breath under water longer than anyone else.”

Photo L.A.: What, Where and When

Photo L.A., Los Angeles’ second annual exhibition and sale of photographic prints, will take place Thursday night to next Sunday at Butterfield & Butterfield auction house, 7601 Sunset Blvd.

The opening event is a preview, from 5 to 8 p.m. on Thursday. Proceeds from the $35-ticket gala will benefit the photography department of the L.A. County Museum of Art. For information about the preview only, call the museum’s special events office: (213) 857-6542.

Public hours of the fair are 10 a.m.-6 p.m. Friday and Saturday, noon-6 p.m. next Sunday. Admission is $10 for a one-day pass, $15 for a three-day pass. For information about the fair, call the Stephen Cohen Gallery, (213) 937-5525.