Michael Wilson laughs at the memory: “They’d hate to be reminded of that now, they’re all so grand.” For the past 30 years, Wilson has avidly collected photographic prints, since becoming interested in them while living in New York in the 1970s. Then, photographs were considered to hold relatively little value; the art market looked askance at a medium that was ubiquitous and for which there was no agreed canon, little scholarly history and precious few institutional collections. “Weston Naef was a friend from university. He was working at the Metropolitan museum [he is now curator of photographs at the Getty museum]. I’d go to his apartment and there’d be these pictures on the wall and photographers hanging out. I became intrigued.”
Philippe Garner, a photography specialist and a director of Christie’s, describes Wilson as “a rare bird”. “He’s the opposite of the obsessive hoarder, operating without a project or purpose,” says Garner. “Photography has taken him on a journey and now he wants to bring a lot of people into the subject and share that enthusiasm.” But Wilson reveals his motives are not entirely altruistic. “What we started to do from the mid-1990s was put together exhibitions from the collection that were themed and focused. We worked with museums who hired in independent curators. Their choices forced us to add where we had a deficit, focus on that area and fill the gaps.”
Tactile, tangible photographs – with their textures, tones, colours and markings – call out to be held as well as seen. They are emotionally charged, the cherished family snap having the same bewitching allure as the lovingly rendered fine-art print. Faced with a flood or a house fire, many people would grab the photographs before the flight to safety.
As the market has grown, the price of the most sought-after images has escalated. The record price at auction for a single photograph stands at $922,488 (£511,155 in today’s money), paid in 2003 at Christie’s in London for a daguerreotype of the Temple of Jupiter, Athens, made in 1842 by Joseph-Philibert Girault de Prangey. It is not a print: the French daguerreotype process produced unique images exposed directly onto polished copper plates in the camera and developed over a potentially lethal mercury vapour. So this is a one-off, and it has all the qualities to attract the serious money: image quality, condition, rarity, and provenance: that arcane term favoured by auctioneers which refers to the biographical history of the object.
The buyer was Sheikh Saud al-Thani of Qatar, whose task was to assemble collections including outstanding photographs for museums planned for Doha, capital of the oil-rich Gulf state. Al-Thani has fallen foul of his cousin, the Qatari Emir, and in April was placed under house arrest while investigators tried to unravel what had been bought on behalf of the state and what the sheikh claimed was for his private collection. Mutterings about inflated invoices have begun to surface in the respected American trade paper The Art Newspaper.
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The Temple of Jupiter is one of those prized, iconic, “first ever” images of exotic places beloved by collectors of the earliest work made in the 19th century. This period has its own following, but represents just one of the three distinct strands of the market. The largest is modernist photography, made between 1900 and 1970 and populated by the most familiar names and recognisable images: prints by Cartier-Bresson, Robert Frank, Rodchenko, Diane Arbus and, of course, the much-trumpeted, occasionally forged Man Ray.
More recently, a third strand of collecting has emerged around contemporary photography, attracting those who want to buy into the more brittle world of Tate Modern and New York’s Whitney museum. They are often young collectors from the City or Wall Street, interested in what they calculate to be a relentless curve of escalating value. Supersized prints produced in ever-smaller editions by the German artists Andreas Gursky, Thomas Struth and Thomas Ruth are some of the top attractions.
While prices are climbing, these are still relatively illiquid assets. If your finances fall apart you can sell the car and the house, but try offloading a large-scale Gursky in a hurry. With this in mind, the grandest galleries attempt to vet their clients, adopting the language of offering “to place the piece with you”, ensuring you are “worthy enough to own it”.
“It’s bullshit,” says Wilson, adding that galleries are “hyping an artificial market. They don’t let the price float properly. It’s the same with the business of editions. They print an edition of 10. The first two prints cost $1,000, the next two cost $1,500 and they keep hiking it up, trying to panic you into buying. Collectors should refuse to get involved”.
While contemporary photography pitches itself directly into the gallery space, the great swathe of 20th-century photography was preoccupied with the newspaper and magazine industry. Many of the most iconic photographs were originally commissioned for the likes of Vogue, Life, Fortune, Vu, Picture Post and, indeed, The Sunday Times Magazine. Few vintage prints, defined as those made around the time the photograph was taken, were made. Two of the top prices achieved for modernist photography were for prints that first appeared to illustrate articles in Vogue and Vanity Fair – Man Ray’s Noire et Blanche and Charles Sheeler’s Criss-Cross Conveyors. Both prints carry traces on the reverse of picture stamps and Chinagraph markings inflicted as they journeyed through the art directors’ hands.
Assembling a collection of photographs becomes a vicarious form of self-expression; the best carry the indelible marks of the collector’s sensibility. Sam Wagstaff stands out among collectors of recent times. Working on the dictum “Photography is silent talk,” and that “You’ve got to crash through the sight barrier and tell the mind to shut up,” Wagstaff honed his eye for the medium through buying, constantly making discoveries along the way. Garner recalls: “There was a subversive side to Sam, putting a V-sign to the establishment as if to say, ‘You guys in your ivory towers, let me show what can be done when you’re out on a limb.’” Wagstaff and his lover, Robert Mapplethorpe, fed their mutual passion: Wagstaff the collector, Mapplethorpe the artist. The 19th-century material Wagstaff loved – death and dying, sensuality and the inscribed identities created by the best portraitists, principally Julia Margaret Cameron and Nadar – profoundly influenced Mapplethorpe’s work.
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Wagssaff sold his collection to the J Paul Getty museum in Los Angeles in 1984, three years before his death. The trend for the wholesale acquisition of private collections by public institutions is a growing one, and many collectors, Michael Wilson included, see themselves as temporary custodians for the museums of the future.
While the passion for collecting photography has enjoyed a revival, it’s not entirely new. Queen Victoria assembled one of Britain’s earliest collections, and many pioneers of the medium here and in France swapped and exchanged their work within the growing community of practitioners. Photographers are still at it, trading among themselves and assembling ad hoc pension plans for their uncertain futures. Britain’s own Martin Parr has a collecting impulse that mirrors his hunter-gatherer instincts as a photographer. “I’ve always collected photographic books, of course, and postcards, but I also collect British photography from after the war. Many of the photographers don’t have dealers, so I buy direct from them or sometimes swap my own prints.” His tireless shopping extends into the more eccentric areas; tea trays, wallpaper, Saddam Hussein wristwatches, even crisp packets. “eBay has been a boon. They send alerts for things you’re looking for and I often find sellers have quite big collections they’re prepared to sell wholesale.” Once Parr’s interest in an area of collecting is known, others follow and the price moves up. What he has assembled is a collection of collections, some aspects being worth a fortune, others relatively worthless. The approach is one that Garner recognises as the mark of a true collector: “It’s all about the thrill of the chase and the emotions that come from finding something that fits the project. True collectors get as much excitement from finding the right photograph for £5 as they do for a photograph worth half a million.”
Henri Cartier-Bresson once remarked that everyone is capable of making at least one great photograph in their life. Given that millions of us have tried, thousands have made a half decent living at it and a handful have been touched by genius, there must be a world out there of undiscovered treasures waiting to be lovingly winkled from obscurity.
SNAP JUDGMENT
The dos and don’ts of photograph collecting
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Putting together a collection, large or small, is about building a narrative, making connections and honing your eye. Start slowly and be guided by your heart. And learn the principles that should rule your head: