 Matthew Murray's large luminous prints are limited to an edition of just five "For me, this country has always turned its nose up at photography and treated photography as the poor relation of art... I want people in England to [...]discover photography as art. The very fact that I am having to say this is a bit ridiculous, but we’re stuck somehow." Elton John, 2017 If you’re one of the sceptics and haven’t discovered photography as art, have a look at our previous blog post on that subject. The reality is that lots of art collectors concentrate on photographs. Some of the smarter ones have been doing so for decades and have enviable photography collections worth multiples of their cost. Some are famous, such as Elton John or Jamie Lee Curtis. But there are lots of lower-profile people who have amassed very valuable photography collections such as Michael Wilson (the British producer of the James Bond films), Randi and Bob Fisher (of the Gap clothing dynasty) and Peter Cohen (an investment banker).  Daniel Meadows' many institutional exhibitions include the Photographers’ Gallery, the Institute of Contemporary Arts and the National Media Museum. Sir Elton is right in much of the world is way ahead of Britain in appreciating photography as an art form. Big art fairs devoted to photography such as New York’s AIPAD and Paris Photo have been established for decades. Hundreds of galleries from around the world come together at such fairs and sell many thousands of photographs, with prices generally from the low thousands of pounds to the high hundreds of thousands. But Britain is starting to catch up: Photo London, an art fair of comparable stature and scale, has been running annually since 2015. The many thousands of people buying photographs at art fairs and from galleries and dealers around the world are mostly not big collectors. While some of them are just starting modest collections, many are just looking for something special to put on their wall.  Chris Harrison's 'Under the Hood' is in the Victoria & Albert Museum's collection The art photography market only really got going in the 1970s, so while it’s long-established compared with, say, crypto-currency, it’s still less mature than longer-established art forms such as painting. One consequence of this is that prices for photographs are still much lower than for other art forms. These days acquiring a minor Old Master painting or a piece by a middleweight modern or contemporary artist is strictly for the very rich. But you can still buy work by even very famous photographers for a tiny fraction of these prices. For example, whilst a painting by David Hockney may sell for millions of pounds, his photography-based works are generally priced in the low thousands. You can still pick up photographs by acknowledged greats of the medium such as Henri Cartier Bresson or Ansel Adams for just few thousand pounds, and prices for works by other famous photographers start lower than that. So where do you start? Of course there’s nothing wrong with just following your heart and buying what you like. But if you’re interested in photographs which can retain their value or even have investment potential, a good place to start is with validation: is the artist’s work supported by museums, galleries, dealers, prizes, critics, or publishers?  Phoebe Kiely's 'They Were My Landscape' is validated by a leading art publishing house For museums, there is a long history of such validation. New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art has been collecting photography since 1928. MoMA is a comparative newcomer next to London’s Victoria & Albert Museum, which has been collecting photographs and putting on photography exhibitions since the 1850s. But aren’t photographs infinitely reproducible? What’s to stop an artist making thousands of prints? These days many artists stake their reputation on producing photographs in editions strictly limited to low numbers, such as Chris Harrison and Matthew Murray. Other photographers have open editions, but supply is often naturally limited by the nature of the art object itself: for example Phoebe Kiely painstakingly hand prints her photographs individually using traditional methods and materials in a darkroom. Only one print exists of many of her images, and these early ‘vintage’ prints may well become the most coveted and valuable examples of her work in the future. If you want to buy validated art which could retain its value, or even appreciate as an investment, and you don’t have a millionaire’s budget, then buying a photograph could be for you. It’s popular around the world, and it seems to be growing in Britain too. And it’s also the most fascinating and important visual art.
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 Part of Tessa Bunney's installation at the Hit the North exhibition The Hit the North exhibition celebrates northern photography across the past five decades, from incisive studio portraiture to grand rural vistas to quiet urban details. In constant flux but obdurately unchanging, the North is revealed as a paradox, as contradictory and subjective as photography itself.  Part of Chris Harrison's installation at the 'Hit the North' exhibition  Part of Liza Dracup's installation at the Hit the North exhibition While Daniel Meadows’ magical Moss Side portraits from the early Seventies are filled with a community spirit, Chris Harrison’s mid-Nineties Salford lads portray a harder-edged, less innocent time. But the timelessness of Liza Dracup’s recent natures mortes – the stillest of still lives drawn from the nature of the North – contend that little ever really changes here.  Part of Daniel Meadows' installation at the Hit the North exhibition  Part of Matthew Murray's installation at the Hit the North exhibition. Northern nature also fills Matthew Murray’s vast dark views of the Manchester-Yorkshire borderlands, but these are inner visions of a subtly managed landscape. Human intervention is more conspicuous in Ian Macdonald’s warm scenes of Teeside, made at the tail end of a now bygone industrial era. But Tessa Bunney’s micro views of the North Yorkshire managed landscape are a surprising reminder that dead industries from the distant past are sometimes reborn.  Part of Ian Macdonald's installation at the Hit the North exhibition. Paul Floyd Blake’s wry observations capture the abiding northern characteristics of resolute humour and eternal positivity. And while Salford-based Phoebe Kiely’s urban details show the North of today, her traditional analogue photographs could have been made at any time in the past half century.  Part of Paul Floyd Blake's installation at the Hit the North exhibition  Part of Phoebe Kiely's installation at the Hit the North exhibition Hit the North is curated by Manchester-based Hobo Photo, which aims to develop the appreciation of photography as art. As well as promoting new talent, we are particularly interested in recognising older work which has been overlooked.
All the photographs in the exhibition are for sale. Hit the North Until 30th June 2018 First Floor Exhibition Hall, Central Library, St Peter's Square, Manchester M2 5PD  Matthew Murray, Quarries, Wessenden Moor 2017 Is photography art? The question is as old as photography itself. It all started as a Victorian argument between photography pioneers and art-establishment traditionalists. Eventually, the traditionalists lost. Over the past century, photographs have become increasingly significant in the world’s major art institutions, such as New York’s Museum of Modern Art and London’s Tate. And despite their inherent lack of uniqueness, works by modern and contemporary photographers such as Edward Weston and Cindy Sherman are regularly auctioned at Christie’s and Sotheby’s, occasionally for millions of pounds. Photography is even an important aspect of the practice of many major artists not usually thought of as photographers, such as David Hockney and Tracey Emin. It seems odd, then, that many people argue that photographs cannot be art. Why do they still cling to this view? Perhaps it is because photographs are taken by an apparatus directly ‘from life’, the image made not by an artist, but by the light of the world. This leads many to see photographs as straightforward mechanical reproductions of people and things.  Ian MacDonald, Cobles, 1973 But often, photographs are by no means artless, unmediated records of the world, and have instead been subjected to a vast range of artistic meddling: scenic, technical, presentational, contextual, editorial, and so on. Sometimes we can see this artistic interference at first glance, as with Matthew Murray’s photograph above. But often the hand of the artist is not obvious, especially with more straightforward-looking pictures such as Ian Macdonald's beautifully shot, hand-printed silver gelatin photograph above. And if you can’t - or won’t - see the art in the work, it’s easy to presume that no art is involved. But that would be wrong. Photographs are both a direct record created from the world AND an interpretation created by the photographer’s choices, whether conscious or unconscious. In other words, photographs are both document and art. This documentary aspect means a photograph can, in a sense, never be entirely art. But ‘part art’ does not equal ‘not art’. Yet many – art critics even – still look at photographs and see all document and no art.  Chris Harrison, Sean, 1994 This duality of art and document – the ‘rendered’ and the ‘real’ - is actually a great strength of photography. It helps explain why photographs can fascinate more than, say, sculpture or painting. It also helps explain how photographs can unexpectedly seem different from the world as we saw it. ‘The photograph isn’t what was photographed, it’s something else. It’s about transformation,’ said the American photographer Garry Winogrand, who took photographs of a thing ‘to see what that thing looks like photographed.’ Another reason photographs fascinate us is their dogged superficiality, which can create great mystery: photographs might pretend to tell us much, but in reality they are all inscrutable surface, all show and no tell, like Phoebe Kiely's photograph below. Moving pictures, especially with sound, contain much more contextual information, so they just don’t have this enigmatic quality. ‘A photograph is a secret about a secret. The more it tells you the less you know,’ said the photographer Diane Arbus, a contemporary of Winogrand.  Phoebe Kiely, Untitled, Undated Purely artistic media just do not have these complexities. Even in a photorealist painting, the marks are made by the hand of the artist alone, in no way drawn by ‘the pencil of nature’: it is all art and no document. And while they can still be potent and have much to say, painting and sculpture today are - comparatively speaking - marginal, arcane activities, practised and consumed by hardly anyone. By contrast, how many people look at photographs every day? Probably billions. How many people practise photography? Easily more than a billion (many, many more than shoot video). If only the tiniest proportion of these people are among the most interesting artists of the present and of the future, then photography is set to be by far the most significant and exciting visual art medium in history. Photography’s art/ document duality, its unpredictable and inscrutable character, and humankind’s ever-increasing mass engagement with it leave other visual media such as painting, sculpture, and video light years behind. Since photography is less than two centuries old, and its popularity is only just exploding, we may only be beginning to explore its artistic possibilities. Photography isn’t just valid as a visual art. It's the most important one. Simon Bowcock |