here is nytimes take on photography as art via simonwide

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March 25, 2001

Racing for Dollars, Photography Pulls Abreast
of Painting

By RICHARD B. WOODWARD

   OR better or worse, photography is the New New Thing in the art
market.
   Over the last two years, with fortunes being won and lost on bets
about our
digital future, the most searching visual invention of the 19th century
has been
charting upward like a 1999 Internet stock.

Record prices have become the norm for every period. A few contemporary
photographers, at auction last year for the first time, outsold their
peers in other
mediums. No booth at New York's recent Armory Show, a showcase for
international art trends, seemed up-to-date without a photographer or
two;
while the exposure photography received in the city's museums amid the
millennial hoo-hah last year was unprecedented. Even if the new
financial
respect and visibility for photographs in 2000 is seen in decades to
come as a
blip, one of many tech bubbles that popped, a dizzying sense that
milestones had
been passed and barriers leaped was hard to ignore.

ARTnewsletter reported in September that a print of Man Ray's "Glass
Tears"
from 1932-33 had sold privately in 1999 to the collector John Pritzker
for
"substantially more than a million dollars." (Only three years earlier
another
"Glass Tears" set the record for a photograph at Sotheby's at a mere
$266,500.)
If nothing else, the sale indicated to many people, as the dealer Howard

Greenberg said, that the "price gap between great photos and great works
in
other media is closing."

Nowhere was this phenomenon on more egregious display than at New York's

contemporary art auctions last year. Enormous, digitized, color prints
by young
Germans ruled the block. "Pantheon, Rome" by Thomas Struth, hammered
down for $270,000 at Christie's in May, measures 8 by 6 feet; while
Andreas
Gursky's "Prada II," which fetched the same price in Christie's November
sale, is
nearly 10 feet across — wider than most of Pollock's canvases. Even
photographs that aren't king-size, at least if by Cindy Sherman, were
bid up to
unheard of heights. "Untitled No. 209," a color self-portrait from 1989,
went
for $269,000 at Sotheby's in the spring while "Untitled No. 92" from
1982
fetched $259,000 in the fall at Christie's, making her among the most
prized
American artists of her generation in any medium. No photographer in
history
has achieved the monetary parity with painters and sculptors that Ms.
Sherman,
Mr. Struth and Mr. Gursky now enjoy.

That none of the photographs mentioned above are unique works — all the
images have existing variants or were printed in editions — may mean
that the
upper end of the contemporary-art market has at last accepted the
replicant
nature of photography (previously a deterrent to high prices); or that
buyers are
willing to overlook this uncomfortable fact in exceptional cases.

The tide of money has rolled into the calmer bays of 19th-century
photography
as well. Sotheby's London sale in October 1999 of the André and
Marie-Thérèse
Jammes collection was billed as an event. The Parisian couple pioneered
an
appreciation for French calotypists like Gustave Le Gray, Henri Le Secq,

Edouard Baldus and others. Still, few collectors predicted the bidding
frenzy
that ensued. An 1855 albumen print by Le Gray went to an anonymous phone

bidder for $840,370 — a world record for a photograph at auction.
Another Le
Gray went for $694,650.

The total of $12.3 million for 265 lots prompted The International
Herald
Tribune to call it "one of those historic days when an extraordinary
sale brings
home the fact that a major change in cultural perception has taken
place."

The centrality of photographs for the millennial celebrations reinforced
this
impression of a cultural earthquake. Many surveys of American art, even
one as
recent as Robert Hughes's "American Visions," have played down the
contributions of photographers to the country's artistic heritage.

But last year there was no getting away from them. The Whitney Museum's
two-part extravaganza, "The American Century," highlighted photographers

from beginning to end.

At the Museum of Modern Art, the space given to photography was still
more
striking. In a year devoted to re-examining its mission and its
collections, 30 of
the 50 shows had photographs on the walls with paintings, drawings,
posters,
sculptures and videos. In this new, provisional, uncompartmentalized
MOMA,
photography stood for the first time on equal footing with every other
art. Its
prominence within the museum was further emphasized by the announcement
in
December that MOMA would buy 1,000 photographs by Lee Friedlander —
868 prints from the 1950's to the present, and another 132 prints
"representing
current and future work." Not only is this the largest purchase of works
by a
living artist in the history of the museum, it is the first time the
Modern has
committed itself to buying art not yet made.

Some of the pressure to change photography's status has come from
contemporary practice. Young artists everywhere have accepted the camera
as
simply one among many picture-making tools and photographs as just
another
kind of image. The awarding of the 2000 Turner Prize in England to
Wolfgang
Tillmans, the first time a full-fledged photographer has won this
glamorous
award, completes a dramatic shift that began in the 80's when
photographers
first appeared routinely in painting and sculpture galleries. It is no
longer
unusual to find, say, prints by Robert Mapplethorpe or Sherrie Levine
hanging
in the collection of someone who also owns a David Salle painting or a
Damien
Hirst vitrine.

But a noticeable change in the Chelsea scene over the last year or so
has been
the appearance of photographers who were never stars during the 80's art
boom.
Robert Adams, associated with the New Topographics movement of the 70's
and among the most unassuming artists alive, had two large shows last
year at
Matthew Marks, a premier space for contemporary work. The color
landscape
photographer Stephen Shore, another relative old-timer, turned up at
303, a
gallery better known for showing young painters and installation
artists.

Perhaps the older New Topographic focus of Mr. Adams and Mr. Shore will
help to establish an American lineage for the newer New Topographics of
Mr.
Struth and Mr. Gursky; or maybe photography of any style, even
small-scale
documentary, is now welcome in art's marketplace. The Andrea Rosen
Gallery,
which represents artists in many mediums but mostly with a conceptual
bent,
will have a show by Mr. Friedlander this spring.

Some of the older antagonistic critical rubrics — between modern and
postmodern, "straight" and "staged" — seem increasingly empty or
pointless as
money begins to change everything.

Whether this is altogether good for photographers is another matter.

Will people start to view exhibitions, like Mr. Gursky's current show at
the
Modern, with dollar signs in their eyes? What will happen to the
photography
market and to people's expectations when, as some conservators and
dealers
predict, the color in some of these high-priced prints starts to fade?
The layer of
serious photography collectors in the world remains dangerously thin.

The market may be surging ahead of what photography can truly deliver as
an
owned thing with an aura that offers solace or proves one's financial
savviness
and self-worth.

Throughout its history photography struggled to be respected as an art
on equal
grounds with painting and sculpture. It existed on the margins, with
scant
attention from the art magazines or general news media. Those days are
probably over. But what seemed to be a disadvantage may in fact have
been a
relative blessing. Commenting from the sidelines on the follies of human
vanity
has been one of its most constructive roles. Then again, it may turn out
that
2000 was the year that photographers finally joined — or led — the
passing
parade.

Richard B. Woodward is an editor-at-large for DoubleTake magazine.

          Copyright 2001 The New York Times Company