Collecting Fine Art Photography

Collecting Fine Art Photography

By John O’Hern

hat tourist hasn’t whipped out her camera to capture the grandeur of Niagara Falls, certain that the photo will capture Wevery drop of the experience? Cell phone or digital camera gets stowed in a pocket or bag and the photographer goes merrily on her way confident that a memory and an artful picture of the moment have been preserved forever. Fifty years ago the tourist took 35mm color slides to capture the beauty of sites on his trip and bored countless of his neighbors with after-dinner slide shows of “Here we are at….!” One hundred years ago, photographers loaded their equipment on horses or mules, coated their glass plates with light sensitive emulsions, developed the plates in a tent, and hoped that they’d make it back from their treks with themselves and their delicate cargo intact. Photography has changed since Nicéphore Niépce recorded the first images with light in the 1820s. Yet, nearly 200 years later, the controversy still rages over “But is it art?” Ansel Adams suggested a difference between taking snapshots and making art. “You don’t take a photograph, you make it.” William Henry Jackson began photographing in the American West in the 1860s with huge cameras and glass plates measuring up to 18 by 22 inches. His photographs of Yellowstone were influential in persuading Congress to establish the National Parks in 1872. Jackson’s enormous 10-by-50-inch image of Niagara Falls from 1902 comes close to capturing the experience of the Falls, even in black and white. The careful composition and exposure of the negatives and later the print create a document of the place as well as an artistic landscape image. At about the time that Jackson and others were making their straightforward documents, another group of photographers began to exploit the artistic qualities of the medium and created images that emulated paintings. The “Pictorialists” made soft-focus images of light and shadow. Both approaches to photography continue today with art entering into the documentation and documentation entering into the art. My own love of photography began when I was given an old Kodak box camera with roll film as a boy. Not satisfied with the quality of the developing and printing from the local drugstore, I soon graduated to developing my own film and making my own prints. Much later, I went to school in Denmark to study photography and, armed with a 4-by-5-inch view camera and holders for individual sheets of film, I traipsed around the country photographing churches, beaches, prehistoric monuments and, when I could get up the courage, people.

Werner Bischof, Japan, Tokyo, courtyard of the Meiji temple, 1951 © Steve McCurry/Magnum Photos/Courtesy Magnum Photos, New York, NY

72 73 We students bought chemicals at the local chemist shop and carefully mixed the various concoctions that would allow us to nearly collapse the wide range from light to dark that we saw with our eyes onto a sheet of film and eventually onto photographic paper. A little more of this chemical and a little less of that one, combined with filters to adjust for contrast, and I made my first photographs that went beyond being snapshots and became fine art images. We used Ansel Adams’ “Zone System” in which we learned how to visualize the effect we wanted in the final image before we even exposed the film. One of my favorite fine art photographers was, and is, Paul Caponigro. His photographs of Stonehenge and the stone ruins I knew so well, Arnold Newman, Igor Stravinsky, New York, 1946, gelatin silver print not only captured an image of the physical mass Courtesy Peter Fetterman Gallery, Santa Monica, CA of the sites but also their mystery. He brought all the technology of the medium together with his sensitive eye to make pictures of surpassing beauty. Many of us, when we start making serious photographs, seek out old barns and nostalgic subjects that will grasp our viewers’ attention even if our technique isn’t the best. I didn’t know then that Caponigro had photographed one of my favorite motifs, the Olsen house in Cushing, Maine, made famous by the paintings of Andrew Wyeth. Olsen House is a simple, straightforward composition of a window centered in an expanse of weathered clapboards, clouds and sky reflected in the imperfect glass. Wyeth might have painted a red geranium in the window for contrast and to suggest the presence of his friends who lived there. Caponigro’s image is an artistic document of the facts of the sturdily built house and its survival against years of being buffeted by ocean winds. Sometimes it is impossible to escape the subliminal influence of other art forms or to escape the aesthetic of a different society in which we make our art. Recently back from a trip to Japan, I had to chuckle, after the fact, at how my photographs incorporated artfully swooping branches and other elements I know so well from Japanese art. Werner Bischof’s photograph of two Japanese women walking past the gate of a temple in a snowstorm is so masterfully composed that it invites the viewer to pause and to move around the scene rather than look at it as a static image. Bischof observed, “Deep inside me I still am—and always will be—an artist.” David H. Gibson finds art in the environment and uses the qualities of the medium to record it. He saw the abstract quality of Lotus Stems and Light Reflectionsand created an “artful” composition that is a pleasing pattern and a reminder that artists see what many of us miss. They don’t simply say “Oh,

Steve McCurry, MALI Timbuktu, 1987 Courtesy Magnum Photos, New York, NY

74 Paul Caponigro, Window, Olsen House, Cushing, Maine, 1991, gelatin silver print Courtesy Peter Fetterman Gallery, Santa Monica, CA look!” They look, see, carefully compose and Documentary photographers are no longer creating a perfect image, but those images, in expose, and make images that our point-and- burdened with mountains of equipment as stark black and white, are arresting. Salgado shoot mentality can’t even imagine. William Henry Jackson was. With small format writes, “I hope that the person who visits my The photographer Elliott Erwitt observed, cameras they can go more easily into remote exhibitions, and the person who comes out, are “To me, photography is an art of observation. regions and capture fleeting moments. not quite the same.” It’s about finding something interesting in an Some of Steve McCurry’s photographs of Alessandra Sanguinetti documented the ordinary place...I’ve found it has little to do people in remote regions have become iconic. friendship of two young girls as they navigated with the things you see and everything to do His ability to gain the trust of his subjects and puberty in Buenos Aires. The Necklace is with the way you see them.” to get them to pose for him results in character part of the series, The Adventures of Guille Arnold Newman’s photographs of studies of both beauty and insight. “Most of and Belinda and the Enigmatic Meaning of famous artists from many fields are exemplars my photos are grounded in people,” he says, Their Dreams. of the photographic portrait. His image of “I look for the unguarded moment, the Sanguinetti’s camera records, but doesn’t Igor Stravinsky dwarfed by the abstract shape essential soul peeking out, experience etched intrude upon, their fantasies and their role of the open lid of a grand piano, suggests the on a person’s face.” playing and allows the viewer to experience, innovative and sometimes jarring nature of Sebastião Salgado’s photograph at a distance, the intimacy of their friendship. Stravinsky’s abstract musical compositions. Barrancos is from a series he made of the “I have attempted to interpret the ending of Alan Kupchick’s dramatic photograph of workers in a Brazilian open top gold mine who their childhood by entering their imaginary a shadow continuing the slope of a distant hill dig by hand because of the steepness of the pit. spaces,” she writes. “The time when their through the window of an abandoned building His humane images of inhumane scenes of dreams, fantasies, and fears would fuse in the Southwest captures the scene with the workers, displaced people, and war are some seamlessly with real day-to-day life are ending, newest technologies—digital cameras and of the most moving images of these subjects. and the photographs I have made intend digital printers. Salgado is moved more by moral concerns than to crystallize this rapidly disappearing very

75 personal and free space.” Julie Blackmon stages tableaux of life that elicit smiles of recognition of the near universal experience of American family life. Even Superman has a mom who can declare a Time Out after he has torn through the house just a few times too many. Blackmon casts light on the intimacies of the inhabitants of the house both figuratively as well as literally with a bright, nearly shadowless, light illuminating every detail. David Hilliard creates multiple-image tableaux. Noah Listening depicts a young man relaxing among the accumulations of generations of inhabitants of a summer house including a Shaker chair and a kerosene lamp. Noah, however, is firmly connected to the present among the stability of tradition. “I continually aspire to represent the spaces we inhabit, relationships we create, and the objects with which we surround ourselves,” Hilliard writes. “I hope the messages the photographs David H. Gibson, Lotus Stems and Sun Reflections, Texas Gulf Coast, 1998, deliver speak to the personal as well as the gelatin silver print, ed. of 48, 17 x 23" universal experience. I find the enduring power Courtesy Photo-Eye Gallery, Santa Fe, NM/www.photoeye.com and the sheer ability of a photograph to express a thought, a moment, or an idea, to be the focus, chaste nudes of the photorealists have desired effect. The model is seldom the subject. most powerful expression of myself, both as an given way to bold revelations of individual In photography there is a confrontation with a artist, and as an individual.” people who happen to be nude. Paintings are, real person. The tradition of the nude in art has been after all, paintings, with the painters adjusting, Chan Chao comments that in his series in photography from its beginnings. The soft- suggesting, and manipulating the image for the “Echo” he learned about “the importance of scale and establishing eye contact between the subject and the viewer. A large print makes the subject equal to, if not larger than, the viewer. When the subject looks back the nude becomes a portrait, giving the subject and the viewer equal importance.” He illumines his model Kristy Van Meter, with the same cool light that Julie Blackmon uses in her story- telling images. She stands before a backdrop that suggests an early Brice Marden painting as well as the neutral grey card we all used to calibrate the proper exposure in our black-and-white photographs. Many realist painters endure the comment, “It looks like a photograph!” as if a photograph were a lesser, easier art medium. Why paint realistically when you can take a “picture”? Perhaps one of the pioneers of fine art photography, Edward Steichen, had the best response to that: “The use of the term art medium is, to say the least, misleading, for it is the artist that creates a work of art not the medium. It is the artist in photography that gives form to content by a distillation of ideas, thought, experience, insight and understanding.”

Julie Blackmon, Time Out, 2005, pigment ink print, ed. of 25, 22 x 22" Courtesy Photo-Eye Gallery, Santa Fe, NM/ www.photoeye.com

76 California Kiss, 1955, platinum print, ed. of 12, 30 x 40" Elliott Erwitt

About the Photographer Born in Paris in 1928 to Russian parents, Elliott Erwitt spent his childhood in Milan, immigrating to the U.S. with his family in 1939. As a teenager in Hollywood, he developed an interest in photography beginning work in a commercial darkroom before experimenting further at LA City College. In 1948 he moved to New York where he met Edward Steichen, Robert Capa and Roy Stryker, launching his commercial career. Erwitt joined Magnum Photos in 1953. He continues to travel producing both personal and commercial work with over 20 books to his name. His exhibitions continue to tour to major international institutions. Price Range Starting at $20,000 (gelatin silver prints available from $4,000 - $8,500) Purchase Inquiries Magnum Photos (212) 929-6000 North Carolina, 1950, platinum print, ed. of 12, 30 x 40" www.artnet.com/magnumphotos.html

77 Henri Cartier-Bresson

About the Photographer Henri Cartier-Bresson, (France, 1908-2004), took up photography after being inspired by a 1930 photograph by Hungarian photojournalist Martin Munkacsi. He acquired a Leica camera, which he masked in black tape to increase its anonymity, and began to actively photograph. He met David Seymour in 1934 and through him he met Robert Capa. The three shared a studio in the early 1930s, and in 1947, along with George Rodger, founded Magnum Photos. Through the photo agency Cartier- Bresson was assigned to India and China where his photographs from Gandhi’s last days and the Communist victory over China gave him global recognition. In 1952 Cartier- Bresson published his most important publication, Images à la sauvette, (The Decisive Moment). Cartier-Bresson spent more than three decades on assignment for Life and other journals and his work has shown worldwide. Price Range Please contact the gallery Purchase Inquiries Peter Fetterman Gallery (310) 453-6463 www.peterfetterman.com

Top: Brussels, Belgium 1932, gelatin silver print, 16 x 20" Signed in ink on recto

Right: Bolshoi Ballet, Moscow 1954, gelatin silver print, 20 x 16" Signed in ink on recto

78 Sahara/Algeria, 2009, gelatin silver print, sizes vary. Sebastiao Salgado Signed, titled & dated in pencil on verso

About the Photographer Born in Brazil, the photographer began his career as an economist before shifting to photography in 1973. Salgado has covered major news events as well as pursuing more personal and in-depth documentary projects. More than any other living photographer his images of the world’s poor stand in tribute to the human condition. Salgado defines his work as “militant photography” that he dedicates to “the best comprehension of man,” and with his unique vision and empathy he gives us a picture of humanity that renders the human condition with honesty and respect. Price Range Please contact the gallery Purchase Inquiries Peter Fetterman Gallery (310) 453-6463 Iceberg Between the Paulet Island and the Shetland Islands, Antartica, 2005, gelatin www.peterfetterman.com silver print, sizes vary. Signed, titled & dated in pencil on verso

79 Scott Peck

About the Photographer Scott Peck has created a unique niche in the world of high-resolution floral photography. As an innovator in regard to his lighting and use of modern tools, he specializes in creating imagery with aspects that were technically impossible to achieve just a few years ago. His actual studio sets, however, are all quite real; there is no digital addition or subtraction to what you see. A three-time first place winner in international competition, he shows his stunning prints through fine art galleries around the country in sizes up to 6 feet. Price Range $350-$3,100 Purchase Inquiries The Camera Obscura Gallery (303) 623-4059 www.cameraobscuragallery.com

Double Stargazers, Fuji Light-jet print, 50 x 37½"

Allan Gill

About the Photographer Allan Gill’s images start as conventional black- and-white x-rays that are then meticulously refined to enhance and isolate the delicate structures found in flowers and plants. The resulting images, with overlapping lines and shapes, have a transparent somewhat ethereal glow, showing leaves, veins, and internal structures in a delicate balance that conventional photography is unable to achieve. Gill is a semi-retired veterinarian living in Kelowna, British Columbia. Price Range $500-$2,000 Bracken’s Brown Beauty Magnolia, floral x-ray, 24 x 36” Purchase Inquiries (250) 860-6226 [email protected] allangillphotography.com

80 Arthur Tress

About the Photographer Arthur Tress is one of the most eminent and consistently imaginative photographers of his generation. His style originated in the 1960s when surrealist staged photography ruled. But Tress evolved a style all his own that is both dreamlike and formally composed out of contemporary subject matter. In the reviews of his major Corcoran retrospective he was dubbed “a national treasure,” fitting for a photographer who captures symbolically so wide a range of modern life. Tress’ work is collected by major museums around the world, including The Whitney, George Eastman House, MOMA, New York, Los Angeles County Museum, L.A. Museum of Fine Art, Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris the Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam and the de Young Museum in San Francisco. Price Range $2,400-$10,000 Purchase Inquiries The Vault Gallery (805) 927-0300 www.vaultgallery.com

Top: Flood Dream, Ocean City, New Jersey, 1971, 29 x 29"

Right: Owl on Road, Big Thicket, Texas, 1975

81 Paul Mindell

About the Photographer Sedona is from a series of 12 limited- edition landscape photo-collages. It pictures Cathedral Rock, a well- known Arizona landmark, and hangs in Connecticut's Stamford Hospital and several private collections. “While the sun set behind me, lighting the mountain to a glowing orange luminescence, I shot 350 photos for later studio work on the final piece. Collage and painting have long been my passion. Notably, a Smithsonian jury selected my photo collage Align Through Time... as one of 49 works, from a field of 3,300, for exhibition in the National Portrait Gallery this past year.” Visit www.paulmindell.com for ongoing updates on Mindell’s art. Price Range $200 to $20,000 Note: price depends on several factors including, but not limited to: size of print, medium (archival pigment print, c-print, cibachrome), number of prints in the limited edition. Sedona, archival pigment print, limited edition, 34" (h) x 42" (w) (other sizes available from 12" wide to 60" wide) Purchase Inquiries (203) 247-3688 www.paulmindell.com

George Tice

About the Photographer George Tice is one of the most known fine art photographers in the nation and has authored 15 books. His prints are in many museums including the Museum of Modern Art, the Art Institute of Chicago, and the Metropolitan Museum, where he had a one-man show in 1972. Tice was born in 1938 in New Jersey where he still lives. His first museum sale was to the Museum of Modern Art in 1959. He has received fellowships from both the Guggenheim Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts. Price Range $1,500 to $40,000 Purchase Inquiries Afterimage Gallery (214) 871-9140 www.afterimage.com

From the Chrysler Building, New York, 1978, platinum/palladium photographic print, edition of 30, 24 x 20"

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