Buying history
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.
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