A little while ago I was at a Lartigue exhibition in a private gallery.  I was the only one in the place and the atmosphere was flat.  Somewhere stage right a woman’s voice drawled endlessly into a telephone about ‘New York prices’.  I guess gallery owners can smell money and in that sense I am odourless so my presence seemed to excite the attention of no one.

I was about to leave when a couple bounced in with that saveloy tan and freshly laundered look which carry the unmistakable aroma of spondulicks.  They whispered excitedly to one another, pausing here and there. The owner appeared as if from nowhere and locked onto them.  I decided to hang around, metaphorically tying a shoelace, to see what would happen. 

They pointed to a photograph.  How much was that, they wanted to know.  The owner said there were no prints of that one left.  Their gaze roved again and they picked out another: how much was that?  A price was quoted.  It went on like this for some time.  How much was that one?  And that one?  Their attention seemed to bounce around like a pinball off the cushions.  In the end I lost interest and left them still skittering haphazardly around the walls, the owner in pursuit.  Presumably his skill is to turn this random interest into a sale.

I thought of this couple when I was digesting the list of highest priced photography auction lots for 2019 on the Collector Daily website.  (Collector Daily is a site which reviews shows, photobooks, auctions and so on for collectors.  It’s a serious and well-informed website with many good exhibition and photobook reviews.)

For 2019 the top ten prices paid at auction for a lot ranged from $1,820,000 to $569,850: you can see all the details on the link above so I won’t repeat them here. The names are all well-known and so are the photographs. If I’ve understood the table correctly it is listing lot prices and not necessarily prices for individual photographs.  The $1,053,990  for the August Sander lot was in fact the total paid for some 70 portraits from his People Of Our Century.

 If you click on the Previous/Next under the Helmut Newton photograph on the link above you have the details of each lot.  It is here, in the auction titles, that you can see the faultline which has always bedevilled the world of photographic art.  Some of them (Gilbert and George; Cindy Sherman; Andreas Gursky; Wolfgang Tillmans) are sold under the banner of Art (“Contemporary Art Evening Sale”) and some are sold under the banner of Photography (Lissitzky; Newton; Avedon).  In her book Photography And The Art Market* Juliet Hacking writes (see my review, January 2019, below) that it is always in the Art sales that the really big prices are paid.  For example, Cindy Sherman’s Untitled #96 (1981) sold for $3.89m in May 2011; and Andreas Gursky’s Rhein II (1999) sold for a world record $4.3m a few months later.  Yet the top three prices in the Collector Daily list are all from photography rather than art auctions.

The website suggests that the market is currently reliant on classic or vintage photographs since contemporary work is not appearing much at auction.  You might think that by and large the work of dead photographers would fetch more since supply is terminated while contemporary photographers keep on producing. But, as the figures for the 2011 Sherman and Gursky works show, recent records have been set by the living and not the dead. And it must be quite hard, too, to promote a dead photographer to the ranks of Artist posthumously.

Whether or not the distinction (between artist and photographer; not the living and the dead) is becoming blurred I suspect that something on the artistic horizon will obliterate it completely before long: computational imaging.  My rudimentary understanding of this is that it is a ‘vision system’ that uses algorithms to create images from incomplete data. So you might start off with an image on a sensor in the conventional way but by the time you have finished reconstructing it ( spatial filtering; depth map augmentation; pulse stretching; spatial light modulation. Are you ready for this?) it bears so little resemblance to the original that it can no longer be called a photograph. In fact, what would have been seen traditionally as the essential characteristics of a photograph are now considered to be its “limitations”.

Another way of expressing it might be to say that photography up until now has been non-fiction whereas computational imaging, in an artistic context, would be fiction.  Another analogy might be biological: analogue photography is one species of image; digital is another; and computational is an evolutionary new third species.

Back in that private gallery with the Lartigues: it is not by any means beyond possibility that as you approach an image in a gallery of the future it will ‘read’ you (as digital adverts in the street now can), access personal information about you and start to change to make itself more attractive to you.  Where that leaves prices is anyone’s guess.