Next week, for four days, Burlington Gardens, the stately exhibition space behind the Royal Academy, will again be overflowing with thousands of photographs, both contemporary and vintage, and all for sale at the third annual London photography fair, Photo-London. As in previous years, the event will be an exuberant celebration of the medium, a giddily broiling mixture of tastes, with 50 dealers from Britain, continental Europe and North America competing to sell their wares.
This is not surprising — the market for photography is booming. “Good photographs are fetching very high prices at auction at the moment,” says Michael Hoppen, who runs the Michael Hoppen Gallery dedicated to photography. “An Edward Steichen photograph, The Pond — Moonlight, sold for just under $3 million (£1.6 million) in New York earlier this year. That’s a new record price for a photograph, but at a fair like this you can find a good range of prices, right down to a few hundred pounds.”
The fair is always very crowded and very eclectic, and as you fight your way round you are as likely to rub shoulders with Bryan Ferry, Gwyneth Paltrow or Kate Moss as with the photography curators of the V&A. Anything goes at this fair. There will be huge contemporary works and videos, photographs by well-known artists such as Sam Taylor-Wood and works by lesser-known young photographers such as Jan Wenzel, a German artist based in Leipzig, who creates his pictures in an old passport photo-booth.
In between there will be everything from the greasy-haired aesthetic of Nan Goldin to the studious monomania of the Bechers, to Man Ray and the velvety riches of Paul Strand and, no doubt, a few faces from Julia Margaret Cameron’s album of geniuses.
As in any uncurated display, there will be good and bad works on show. But unlike a museum exhibition, you can wander around at will, free from any prescribed route, letting your own eye be your guide. Most of the works will be hanging on the walls, but some are in racks to be leafed through, and some will be shown as installations. This year for the first time there is a dedicated video room. With all kinds of oddball tastes being catered for, the point is that you have to choose what you like, because in the world of photography, a medium still only 170 years old, taste and perception are happily not yet cemented in the public mind.
“My advice is not to pay any attention to names,” says Daniel Newburg, the organiser of the fair. “Finding work that moves you is what is important. There are really still only a few people who are influential tastemakers. So if your own taste differs from that of the crowd, you should still pursue it. There is always quite a bit of work to be found that is undervalued.”
Last year 18,000 people visited the fair and, according to the organisers, spent £3.2 million on photographs ranging in price from a few hundred pounds to £250,000, paid for a vintage Diane Arbus photograph. Some buyers had never bought a photograph before. Others were serious collectors, such as Elton John, who spent a six-figure sum on a contemporary print.
If you have a few thousand pounds to spare, you can still buy a good quality vintage photograph by Bill Brandt, for example. Or you could invest in an undervalued portrait by Angus McBean, who is to be the subject of a major retrospective opening in July at the National Portrait Gallery.
Alternatively, for only a few hundred pounds, you could pick up a photogravure by the 19th-century photographer Peter Henry Emerson, whose work will be shown at the National Museum of Photography, Film and Television in Bradford in the autumn. Emerson’s works, using an etching process modified to reproduce photographs, are objects of a quality and significance that would justify a place in the photography collection of the Victoria and Albert Museum.
At the contemporary end of the spectrum you can buy, through the gallery Museum 52, large-scale photographs by Nick Waplington, who has made his name with interesting images informed by Turner’s paintings. There will be a plethora of contemporary works by young Chinese photographers, stimulated by the wave of interest following the V&A’s big show last year of young Chinese artists. And among the more established contemporary names you will find, for example, the mysterious and marvellous pinhole camera photographs of Abelardo Morrell at the Michael Hoppen Gallery.
As well as the photographs and books on sale, there will be a special exhibition curated by Christopher Bailey, the creative director of Burberry. Bailey has selected his favourite photographs of London, from John Deakin’s iconic images of 1950s Soho bohemia at the Colony Club to Hedi Slimane’s contemporary view of London hedonism. And there will be a new feature to the fair this year, “PhotoSwap”. This will work on the principle that anyone at the fair can swap up to three photographs with those taken by Timothy Prus, the founder of PhotoSwap. Among the highly eccentric collection of 300 photographs available for swapping are pictures of garden gnomes, Kenneth Clark in a pub and a dead dog.
To coincide with Photo-London is a big auction of works by Man Ray at Christie’s as well as a rare photobooks auction, also at Christie’s, and a number of other auctions and special exhibitions around the capital. Colnaghi, for example, is putting on a show of photographs by Julia Margaret Cameron, Roger Fenton and other Victorian photographers.
International interest in photography will be focused on London for the duration of the fair, which has now become part of the collateral that secures photography’s place in this country.
Photo-London is at Burlington Gardens, W1, from May 18-21. www.photo-london.com (020-7839 9300). The auction of Man Ray photographs is on May 17 at 2.30 pm at Christie’s, King Street, SW1 (020-7839 9060). Fenton, Cameron and others is at Colnaghi, Old Bond Street (020-7491 7408), www.colnaghi.co.uk
Fair enough - a pocket guide
£2,200
45 Beckham by Robert Davies
Davies has been given access to Fifa’s archive of film footage from 17 World Cup tournaments. Having spent six years scrutinising the film, he has selected a number of key moments, and frozen the resulting images. Blue Gallery, www.bluegallery.co.uk
£1,000
Marathon in University Street, Vilnius, 1959, by Antanas Sutkus
Born in 1939, Sutkus is Lithuania’s best known photographer. His lucid images of everyday life in his country have been compared to the work of André Kertész and Henri Cartier-Bresson. White Space Gallery, www.whitespacegallery.co.uk
£900
William Burroughs,
the author of The Naked Lunch, photographed by Gerard Malanga, Andy Warhol’s long-serving assistant and dancer at The Factory in New York City. Burroughs’s grandfather had invented the adding-machine, an early form of calculator, and the picture was taken outside the Burroughs shop. Riflemaker Gallery, www.riflemaker.org
£200
Burmese Chief, c 1887, unknown photographer
This portrait, made during the Anglo-Burmese War, shows a leader of a native tribe. It is typical of the distinguished portraits made by professionals and amateurs in the late 19th century. Many of them reinforced ideas of the “exotic” East with its dramatic landscapes, noble monuments and ethnographic variety. Available from The Photo-Exchange, Oxford. www.photo-exchange.com
