​It’s there on the cover, and in many of the pictures inside. On the horizon, in the background. Grey, brutal and ugly, it’s coming. And it’s not going to stop.

​
​It’s coming, the smoke and the steel and concrete, but it’s not quite here yet. Here, we still have the makeshift, the ramshackle: make-do-and-mend constructions, ingeniously put together at low cost, created from what’s available. Some look like they have been built entirely from pre-used materials, the architectural equivalent of arte povera. All weathered wood, they fit with the environment, complement it, and look like a natural part of it. These improvised structures have a dilapidated beauty, compounded by a look of triumph over adversity. And each one is idiosyncratic, unique. 

​
​The noble, stoic and sombre men in this beautiful but harsh place are weatherbeaten. But they also look beaten, like they know the game is up. Only the boys raise a naïve smile. A community of fishermen still active, but now only just about scraping by. 

​
​This is the last outpost. Large-scale industry can be seen creeping into the background. It’s in our field of vision, and it’s advancing relentlessly. Big business will swallow small enterprise, and it will shatter the natural beauty of this place.

​They don't peddle any nostalgia, harking back to any mythical golden past. And they may look calm and quiet, neutral and detached. But these are passionate pictures. Ian Macdonald’s lovingly-crafted photographs of almost fifty years ago might be of Greatham Creek – a small marshy area near where the Tees meets the North Sea – but they could stand for the country, the West, even the world.

​Perhaps what they show is the end, when the last of the traditional makes way for the industrial, when sustainability is finally eaten by mass-scale production, consumption and environmental destruction. That pivotal moment of transition when globalised business engulfs the the small scale. When the unique is replaced by the homogenous, and the reused is supplanted by the replicated.

​The very moment the individual is squeezed out by The Man.

Phoebe Kiely’s book They Were My Landscape might be the result of intense stopping and staring, but not at some poetic rural idyll. This landscape is generally the more prosaic urban environment which most of us inhabit (she is, after all, based in Salford).

If the concept of ‘mindfulness’ applies to photography, then it applies here par excellence. Some people focus their attention on nature, such as the leaves on the trees as they walk through the park. But Kiely looks longer and harder at her everyday surroundings. She looks at what’s there now.

No snapshots these. This is is the long look. And Kiely’s contemplative metaphysical approach to picture taking is matched by her physical approach to print making: she uses medium-format film and painstakingly hand prints the photographs in a darkroom on fibre-based paper. The images in the book were made from these actual prints, not some JPEGs from a digital camera reproduction, and not even from scanned negatives. So the pictures in They Were My Landscape are the result of a thoughtful and slow process.

They may be slightly smaller and neither quite as exquisite nor as tactile, but the pages in the book are a reasonable facsimile of the prints. True, the richness and the depth of blacks and the texture of the hand-crafted art objects are not quite matched, but the same feelings and thoughts occur to the viewer.

Subtle visual correspondences occur throughout the book: the form of a branch in one picture is redrawn in another by spume on water; the small angular shape in some whitewash is subsequently retraced in a tiny functional graffito; the tattered Union flag is later mirrored by a pert tree stump. There is such delicate subtlety in the photographs that there is something new each time you look.

You hear a lot about slow food, even slow journalism. Perhaps this is slow photography. The time and care invested in making these pictures needs to be matched by time and care spent looking at them.

So stop and look. Really look.

Simon Bowcock

They Were My Landscape by Phoebe Kiely is published by Mack.

Lots of people collect photographs, and many have been doing so for decades. Some great collectors have themes, or concentrate on particular periods or groups of artists. I don’t have the budget to be a great collector, but I do have a penchant for photographs which have been used on album covers. 

I was at the Photo London art fair in 2015, where thousands of people come annually to buy photographs. One of the exhibitors, a leading American gallery, was offering a picture of a red ceiling. This piqued my interest, because the image had been used for the cover of an early Seventies album I like. So I asked the price. Unfortunately, at $225,000, it was way beyond my budget.

What’s going on here then? How can a simple photograph of a ceiling be worth that sort of money? 
​
Overall, the thing to remember is what is being offered for sale. A ‘photograph’ is probably too generic and unhelpful a term. Its not just an image. It is an art object, imbued with the aura of (and validated by) the artist, often hand made to exacting standards using a particular process (in this case, something called ‘dye transfer’).

Once we’ve accepted this premise, there are then a large number of factors driving the price.

The first is the artist. The red ceiling was by New Orleans photographer William Eggleston, who is lauded as a pioneer of colour art photography and as an early postmodern artist. A big name, and a big name can translate into a big price tag.

A second reason is the image itself. It’s a renowned one, one of Eggleston’s best known pictures, a celebrated artwork in its own right. Generally, the famous photographs by established artists will command higher prices than their lesser-known works.

A third factor is the age of the print. As a rule of thumb, the smaller the interval between the photograph being taken and the print being made, the more valuable the print. This particular example was made by Eggleston in 1980, seven years after he’d taken the photograph. As such, it doesn’t qualify as a ‘vintage’ print, which generally means made no more than 3-5 years after the picture was taken (to photography collectors, a vintage print is a bit like a first edition to a rare book aficionado). So a similar ‘vintage’ Eggleston print might cost even more than this one. 

Nonetheless, as an early print, this one will still command a higher price tag than, say, a 21st-century version. But even a photograph ‘printed later’ isn’t valueless. Even posthumous prints made many years after the fact by estates after the death of the artist end up in museum collections. And museums generally know what they’re doing.

A fourth consideration is the condition of the print. This one was in good order. If it’s dog-eared, torn or faded, then the price goes down.

A fifth factor is rarity. Many photographers  now ‘edition’ their prints and guarantee a limited number. But note editioning is comparatively new. So while, say, Matthew Murray editions his prints, Ian Macdonald is a little more traditional, and doesn’t. Eggleston didn’t edition his ceiling picture, and in the 70s and 80s the practice of ‘editioning’ wasn’t particularly widespread. That said, there aren’t too many red ceilings of this age around. 

But note the number made is all a bit less important than you might think. The laws of supply and demand apply to some extent, but just think for a minute about the art market in general and Andy Warhol in particular. There are plenty of Warhols to go around, many tens of thousands at least. They’re fairly easy to get hold of. But they’re all expensive - primarily because they’re Warhols, not because they’re particularly rare.

A sixth consideration is provenance: is our red ceiling really an Eggleston? Was it really printed by whom – and when – it purports to have been? Is there evidence to support that? In this case, there was plenty.

There are further factors which will impact the price of a photograph, such as the size of the print. If you want to look in more detail at what can drive the price of a photograph, or would like to look at some collecting options at a much more modest, entry-level price, click one of the buttons below.

Simon Bowcock

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.

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? ​

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