February 21, 2007
Buying history
Artprice.com
The boundaries between photo-reportage and art photography are ever more blurred as collectors increasingly seek out the work of photojournalists. Artprice.com, a French company that monitors the international art market using a database of 21 million prices at auction, summarizes some examples of the trend and explain which photos sell and why.
Christie's sold Henri Cartier-Bresson's 1938 "On the banks of the Marne" for $110,000 on Oct. 10, 2005 (€90,827).
Collective memory and photography
The photojournalism market is booming. Turnover at auction has risen by more than 500 percent in 10 years and the trend is strong in the USA, France and the UK.
For many years, photojournalism was considered a secondary form of art, much like scientific or ethnographic photography, because photojournalism's original goal is to disseminate information. Since the 1950s, however, photojournalism has built a reputation on its aesthetics and techniques as well as on its testimonial values partly thanks to World Press Photo with its annual contest celebrating the year's best journalistic photographs, and due to a number of exhibitions in museums underlining the news photo's dual role as documentary testimony and aesthetic artifact.
The great names of photojournalism - Cecil Beaton, Henri Cartier-Bresson, Robert Capa, Raymond Depardon, Robert Doisneau, Walker Evans, Dorothea Lange and Marc Riboud - all documented their times through sensitive images of undeniable cultural significance. Many of these are now finding their way into cultural institutions, prized for a combination of the iconic value of the shots and the photographers' commitment, as well as aesthetic considerations (definition of the image, framing, etc.).
In auction houses, the price of these historic pictures is mostly determinated by the year of the print. The date the photo was printed must be as close as possible to the date the photo was taken.
America in crisis
In the 1930s, Walker Evans and Dorothea Lange were hired by the US Farm Security Administration and produced a magisterial record of rural poverty during the New Deal. Walker Evans's index has more than doubled since 2005 and Lange's has tripled since 2004.
The highest priced photojournalistic picture ever is White Angel Bread Line by Lange, which captures the depth of America's crisis between the two world wars. Lange took this photograph in San Francisco during the Depression, where a bread line was set up by a woman known as the "White Angel." In the foreground of the image, a solitary man seems to pray, his face above his empty cup. On Oct. 11, 2005, Sotheby's in New York sold a print from around 1936 for $720,000 (nearly €600,000). Another print of the same subject, printed around 1955, was offered at New York's Phillips, de Pury & Company sale on Oct. 19, but this one failed to command the same interest and sold for its high estimate of $45,000 (€35,897). Prior to that, the highest price paid at auction for a photograph was a relatively modest $120,000 for Migrant Mother, Nipomo, California (Oct. 22, 2002, Christie's New York).
Despite these record sales, though, around half the Lange and Evans pictures that come up are later prints and can be bought for less than €5,000.
The commitment of Robert Capa
Robert Capa, co-founder of the Magnum agency along with Cartier-Bresson, David Seymour and George Rodger, carried his camera through the Spanish Civil War in 1936. There, he captured live the Death of a Republican Soldier, an image that was picked up and reprinted worldwide and came to symbolise this war in the collective memory. Despite the picture's fame, subsequent prints are often not sold because photojournalism collectors are highly selective and would rather pay €5,000 or €10,000 for a contemporary print than bid up a later print.
Two years later, Capa reported on the second Sino-Japanese war for Life, before going on to record the allied landings in Normandy on June 6, 1944. Working among the soldiers, he took 119 pictures of which 108 were accidentally destroyed by a Life photo lab worker. Auction houses regularly auction D-Day images printed between 1960 and 1990. These tend to find buyers for an average of €3,000 to €7,000.
Oddly, Capa's records at auction were not set by images stemming from his committed journalism but by two self-portraits taken around 1938, that went for three times their estimate at €15,000 to €17,000 on April 25, 2003 (at Phillips, De Pury & Luxembourg, New York).
Two classic figures: Henri Cartier-Bresson and Edward Steichen
Cartier-Bresson prices have risen sharply since his death in 2004. Enthusiasts rushed to buy his pictures and the rate of bought-in [unsold] prints fell from 50 percent in 2002 to 10 percent in 2004.
While the majority of transactions range between €1,000 and €5,000, Cartier-Bresson's work generated record sales at auctions in 2005. Christie's sold On the banks of the Marne for $110,000 on Oct. 10, 2005 (€90,827). The photo shows a picturesque picnic scene along the Marne River and depicts the changing French society of the 1930s. It dates from 1938, just two years after the French won the right to annual holidays and is thus in historical context. The print itself is a later version (1955), and collectors - who are demanding about print dates - tend to prefer vintage prints dating from between 1930 and 1950. On the banks of the Marne 's prices fall steeply for 1970s and 1980s reprints to between €4,000 and €7,000. For example, the same image, signed by the artist but printed in the eighties, was sold for only £3,200. (€4,756, Sotheby's London, Nov.14, 2006).
The Luxembourg-born American emigrant Edward Steichen was director of aerial photography for the allied forces during World War I. However, he spent most of his career working on portraits of well-known figures (actress Greta Garbo, British prime minister Winston Churchill, etc.) and genre scenes - anecdotic, intimate or popular scenes. His work is popular among Americans and most of his works was selling for between €1,000 and €10,000 even before his index began a spectacular rally with an increase of 240 percent in 2005 alone. On Feb. 14, 2006, his photo of Rodin's Balzac reached $550,000 (€462,330) setting a new record at Sotheby's New York. Steichen's photo engravings are less popular. Collectors can buy a "piece of history" for less than €1,000.
Today, the boundaries between photo-reportage and art photography are blurring, as visual artists such as Sophie Ristelhueber, Paul Seawright and Jean-Luc Moulène move onto what was previously considered journalistic territory.
Published on the Magnum Blog on February 21, 2007
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