Juliet Hacking - Photography and the Art Market

HANDBOOKS IN INTERNATIONAL ART BUSINESS

Series Editor: Iain Robertson

Advisory Editors: Jeffrey Boloten and Jos Hackforth-Jones

The art market is now a multi-billion-dollar industry employing hundreds of thousands of professionals worldwide. Working within the art market brings a specific set of challenges, which are distinct from those of the conventional business world. Aimed at art world professionals and those working within the many sectors of art business, as well as those preparing for careers in the commercial art world, the Handbooks in International Art Business provide a series of authoritative reference guides to the structure and working of the international art market, incorporating core topics such as Art Law and Ethics as well as guides to different market sectors.

The Handbooks are written by experts in their field, many of whom teach at, or are graduates of, the ma in Art Business at Sothebys Institute of Art. Sothebys Institute of Art has pioneered the field of art business as both a professional and an academic discipline. Its ma in Art Business was established in 1998.

First published in 2018 by Lund Humphries in association with Sothebys Institute of Art

Lund Humphries

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Juliet Hacking, 2018

British Library Cataloging in Publication Data. A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

ISBN: 9781848221482 (hardback)

ISBN: 9781848223400 (ebk PDF)

ISBN: 9781848223417 (ebk ePub)

ISBN: 9781848223424 (ebk mobi)

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means, electrical, mechanical or otherwise, without first seeking the permission of the copyright owners and the publishers.

Juliet Hacking has asserted her right under the Copyright, Design and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as the Author of this work.

Front cover: Lutz Dille, Three in a Window, Gelatin silver print, 27.2 31.7 cm, Museum of Modern Art, New York. MoMA, NYC, 1959 Estate of Lutz Dille/Courtesy Stephen Bulger Gallery

Set in Avenir and Garamond Premier

Printed in the United Kingdom

Image credits: Ansel Adams Trust .

I would like to offer my profound thanks to Jos Hackforth-Jones, the CEO and director of Sothebys Institute of Art and Advisory Editor of this series, for supporting my teaching and research on the subject of art photography and the market. I am also enormously grateful to Lucy Myers, Managing Director at Lund Humphries; to her colleagues Tom Furness and Sarah Thorowgood, for their professionalism and their enthusiasm; and to Ian McDonald for the excellent copy-editing. Thanks also to my colleagues Marcus, Pierre, Lauren and Holly, who received a new member of the team, and her book project, with grace and warmth. I dedicate this book to my parents, Iain and Heather.

I am indebted to those who read and gave feedback on one or more chapters: Jeffrey Boloten, A.D. Coleman, Giles Huxley-Parlour, Dr Sara Knelman, Professor Joanne Lukitsh, Stephen Perloff and Dr Noni Stacey. Many thanks also to those who shared their knowledge and offered guidance, including Dr David Bellingham, Denise Bethel, James Blake, Anne Bracegirdle, Zelda Cheatle, Tom Christopherson, Naomi Cooperman, Dr Hope Kingsley, Professor Anne McCauley, Christopher Mahoney, the Robert Mapplethorpe Foundation, Alexander Montague-Sparey, Elizabeth Smith, Dr Sara Stevenson, Dr Emilia Terracciano, Hannah Watson (of T.J. Boulting) and Valrie Whitacre. I owe a special debt of thanks to Dr Simon Constantine for the picture research, and to A.D. Coleman, whose writings on photography are a constant source of inspiration. His generous engagement with this project has added to its virtues; any faults are entirely mine.

I would like to pay tribute to my students at Sothebys Institute of Art, London, on the ma programme in Photography (Contemporary and Historical) (200616) and on the ma elective Photography and its Markets (2016/17 and 2017/18), whose research into art photography and the art-world system has resulted in new insights, some of which I have drawn upon here. Those students whose research has directly informed what follows include Georgia Donkin, Blint Ferenczy, Deniz Gzel, Kelly Jones, Aris Kourkoumelis, Erika Lederman, Analissa Moreno and Iga Niewiadomska.

I had often heard it said that a key factor in photographys wide acceptance as an art form rarely makes it into the historical record: graduate and postgraduate education in photography. This strand of my research evolved into a substantial appendix, which in time proved too extensive to include here. Some of this research will now appear elsewhere. Similarly, an appendix of photographic collectors from 1839 to the present proved too large a project to complete. This, I eventually concluded, is as much a cause for celebration as for regret. Collecting photography, a growth area in Western Europe and the US since the early 1970s, is now a global phenomenon.

I have tried wherever possible to convert historical figures into their equivalents today. For UK and US conversions, I have used measuringworth.com/calculators/ukcompare and /uscompare, adopting the relative price worth calculations available via this site (choosing the Retail Price Index figure for sterling conversions and the Consumer Price Index figure for dollar conversions). See the site for the many difficulties in converting past to present values. The contemporary values given here (all 2016) are intended therefore only as a guide.

Please note that all figures achieved at auction given in this book include the Buyers Premium.

Photography has consistently experienced a dual struggle to attain validation as a respected art form and to create a viable and strong market within the historically entrenched parameters of the fine-art market. The journeys accompanying these twin challenges are inextricably linked, and are both equally necessary to explore when telling the story of photographys path to global recognition and market success.

In this essential new text, Dr Juliet Hacking has broken new ground in bringing together, and incisively guiding the reader along, these parallel journeys. What emerges in Photography and the Art Market is a unique combination of both academic and art-market perspectives, via both Dr Hackings key academic roles as Programme Director of the ma in Photography and then as Subject Leader: Photographic Studies at Sothebys Institute of Art, London, and her leadership of Sothebys auction houses Photographs Department. This book most effectively manages to merge both of these essential perspectives in order to deliver a single, coherent picture of the photography market.

Though continuing to confront many of its ongoing challenges, todays photography sector is experiencing a very well-earned boost in its art-world profile. In the auction world, major photographic works are being increasingly offered via both dedicated photography auctions and lucrative contemporary-art auctions. A cluster of vibrant new photography-focused art fairs has also been inaugurated, on a global level, over the past three to five years. Major commercial galleries and dealers are also increasingly seen to be representing artists working with photography expanding the essential collector interest in the medium in a major way.