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Photography - the new painting? By Gerry Badger, from Ag25 |
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Some six weeks previously, Charles Sheeler’s Ford Works (1927), selling for $607,500, had broken the auction record for a single photograph, which had stood for six years; but at the Jammes sale records tumbled faster than footballers in the penalty box. The sale total - at £7,430,693 - broke the previous record by a margin of nearly 50%. Many photographers fetched record prices, but Gustave le Gray was the star of the show, eclipsing the Sheeler record not once but twice. Le Gray’s La Grande Vague - Sète (The Great Wave) of 1856, a stunning print of one of his most famous seascapes, astonished the house when it was knocked down for an amazing £507,500, or around $720,000. To be sure, there were exceptional circumstances surrounding this auction. The provenance and condition of much of the material was impeccable. And the dramatic entry into the photo-collecting world of a major new player with immensely deep pockets, Sheikh Saud al-Thani of Qatar, combined to make this the photographic ‘sale of the century’. As the International Herald Tribune stated, it was ‘one of those historic days when an extraordinary sale brings home the fact that a major change in cultural perception has taken place’. It was, as the Tribune said, a matter of perception, not so much a quantum leap but the culmination of a process that had been more than two decades in the making. The Jammes sale confirmed that the best 19th century photographs were as desirable as vintage modernist photographs by the likes of Man Ray or Alfred Stieglitz. And, given the surrounding publicity, it finally announced to the world at large what the small coterie in the photographic art market knew all along. For the finest vintage images by the best-known photographers, sums in the hundreds of thousands are being paid regularly, and the £20,000 photograph is a commonplace. Next Page >> |
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