The Photo as Art

There is an exception to the general gloom of the current art scene: photography. Not do-it-yourself photography, but photography as art. During the Christmas holidays, for instance, 25 photography exhibitions—theme shows, one-man offerings, group shows—could be seen in New York, mostly in museums but also in six commercial galleries catering to collectors. Most of these concerns are only a few years old but all, including the most avant-garde, report that they are doing fine, and though photographic prints still don’t command prices comparable to those for paintings or graphics, they are fetching sums that would have seemed preposterous two or three years ago. Thus an early shot of a Mississippi sidewheeler that sold for $20 in 1964 and $500 in 1973 is now priced at $2,000—and such jumps are the rule, not the exception. One respected investment advisory service told its clients that “the market trend is strongly upward today with every prospect of being unreasonably high within

the next decade.” Even young craftsmen whose work is known only to a relatively select public are doing well. A salesman at the Light Gallery, which specializes in the far-out and the experimental, told me that most of the customers were Students who bought only a single print. “But we also have collectors in their forties,” he added, “and some of them spend thousands of dollars in an afternoon.”

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Ruth Berenson

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There is an exception to the general gloom of the current art scene: photography. Not do-it-yourself photography, but photography as art. During the Christmas holidays, for instance, 25 photography exhibitions—theme shows, one-man offerings, group shows—could be seen in New York, mostly in museums but also in six commercial galleries catering to collectors. Most of these concerns are only a few years old but all, including the most avant-garde, report that they are doing fine, and though photographic prints still don’t command prices comparable to those for paintings or graphics, they are fetching sums that would have seemed preposterous two or three years ago. Thus an early shot of a Mississippi sidewheeler that sold for $20 in 1964 and $500 in 1973 is now priced at $2,000—and such jumps are the rule, not the exception. One respected investment advisory service told its clients that “the market trend is strongly upward today with every prospect of being unreasonably high within

the next decade.” Even young craftsmen whose work is known only to a relatively select public are doing well. A salesman at the Light Gallery, which specializes in the far-out and the experimental, told me that most of the customers were Students who bought only a single print. “But we also have collectors in their forties,” he added, “and some of them spend thousands of dollars in an afternoon.”