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L’effervescence photographique [juil. 06]

Le marché de la photographie est au beau fixe ! Les prix grimpent encore de 30% sur les douze derniers mois (+207% en dix ans) et les records se multiplient, à la fois pour les clichés modernes et actuels.

Le marché de la photographie moderne est essentiellement anglo-saxon, les œuvres majeures étant dispersées chez Sotheby’s et Christie’s à Londres et à New-York. Les Etats-Unis concentrent 79% du produit des ventes de photo modernes et les plus belles enchères sont atteintes par des artistes américains de naissance ou ayant émigrés aux Etats-Unis….

Lors des dernières vacations de Sotheby’s New-york le 14 février 2006, le secteur de la photo moderne a atteint des sommets.

L’artiste le mieux coté de cette période est Edward Steichen (1879-1973), dont les œuvres dispersées en 2005 avaient généré un chiffre d’affaire de plus de 900 000 €. En 2006, sa cote explose, établissant un record hors norme le 14 février chez Sotheby’s NY, lors d’une importante vente de photos provenant du Metropolitan Museum of art de NY. Son cliché The Pond, Moonlight de 1904, estimé entre 700 000 et 1 000 000 $ a atteint 2 600 000 $ (2 185 560 €). En une décennie, la valeur d’investissement de Steichen a largement quintuplé : 100 € investis en 1997 dans l’une des ses œuvres valent aujourd’hui 540 € en moyenne !

Illustrant le formidable dynamisme du marché anglo-saxon, cette même vente signa deux autres records pour deux épreuves d’Alfred Stieglitz. Datées de 1919, elles explosèrent leur estimation : annoncées chacune entre 300 000 et 500 000 $, Georgia O’Keeffe (hands) et Georgia O’Keffe (nude) furent respectivement adjugées 1,3 million de $ (1 092 780 €) et 1,2 million de $ (1 008 720 €). Les experts de l’artiste estiment que la série d’épreuves de Georgia, qui sera l’épouse de Stieglitz, est la plus aboutie de sa carrière, à l’instar de la série intitulée Equivalents (prises de vue de ciels nuageux).

Le troisième photographe moderne a avoir signé un récent record est l’américain Edward Weston (1886-1958). L’adjudication à 720 000 $ (594 504 €) remonte a octobre 2005, toujours chez Sotheby’s New-York (la maison de vente a enregistré 8 des 10 meilleures adjudications 2005-2006 pour des photographies). Le cliché, titré The Breast et daté de 1923, représente des jeux ondulants de lumière sur un buste de femme.

Le marché français n’a pas bénéficié ces derniers mois du prestige d’une provenance telle que celle du Metropolitan Museum of Art ! Les prix français, chez Piasa, Cornette de Saint-Cyr ou Le Mouel, ne sont pas aussi haut qu’outre-Atlantique. Les acheteurs français sont très sélectifs et de nombreux clichés vintages portant de belles signatures telle que celle de Brassaï sont fréquemment ravalées. Le 24 mai dernier, Le Mouel dispersait à Paris une demi-douzaine de clichés de Brassaï dont Paris, les Ponts et les Quais, les bouquinistes sur les quais, un tirage argentique d’époque (1931-1932) enlevé pour 4 000 €.

L’engouement pour la création actuelle.

Là encore, les enchères les plus enthousiastes ont lieu sur le sol américain ou les auctionneers collectionnent les records tels que celui d’Andreas Gursky, artiste contemporain le mieux coté, dont le format monumental (207 x 336 cm) titré 99 Cent doublait son estimation basse et trouvait preneur pour 2 millions de $ en mai 2006 chez Sotheby’s New-York! Jusqu’alors le record était détenu par Richard Prince qui, en bon jongleur de clichés américains, signait Cow-Boy, un immense ektachrome de 1989 (127 x 177,9cm). Le marteau tomba à 1,1 million de $ (931 590 €) le 5 novembre 2005 chez Christie’s New-York.

En France, les clichés majeures sont rares, les investisseurs sont plus frileux et aucune enchère millionnaire n’a été signé lors des dernières vacations contre 4 sur le sol américain. Les maisons de ventes françaises proposent cependant des artistes qui sont d’ors et déjà des valeurs sures, tels que Nan Goldin, Cindy Sherman, Robert Mapplethorpe, Vanessa Beecroft ou Vik Muniz.

Rappelons que le volume financier des anglo-saxons représente 87% du marché de la photo en 2005 contre un peu plus de 6% réalisé sur le sol français. A titre comparatif, le 9 juin dernier, Joana Nude on my Futon in morning Light, NYC de Nan Goldin était ravalée à Paris chez Artcurial pour une estimation basse à 6 000 € tandis qu’une œuvre similaire titrée Joana in the Doorway looking at Aurele, Chateau du Neuf, Avignon trouvait acquéreur pour 6 500 $ (5 434 €) chez Sotheby’s Londres en octobre 2005. En 2006, le plus beau résultat est détenu, pour l’instant, par la maison de vente Piasa à Paris pour un Nu dans les algues de Saint-Tropez, cliché pris par Helmut Newton en 1981, pour lequel le marteau tomba à 60 000 €.

http://web.artprice.com/AMI/AMI.aspx?id=MTYzOTc2OTE2NTU0OTk=

Photography is booming [Jul 06]

The photography market is booming ! Prices are up with 30% again for the last 12 months (+207% in ten years) and it is not finished, prices fly high for contemporary photography.

The bulk of the market for modern photography is in the English-speaking world. Major works are put up for auction at Sotheby’s and Christie’s in London or New York. The USA alone hosts 79% of the market for modern photographs by turnover and the top hammer prices are commanded by American-born or immigrant artists. 
The auctions at Sotheby’s New York, held on 14 February 2006, set another high water mark in the modern photography boom.

Edward Steichen (1879-1973) is the best-selling photographer for this period with sales at auction grossing more than EUR 900,000 in 2005. In 2006, his price index has taken off, helped by an eye-catching record sale at Sotheby’s New York in its Valentine’s Day sale of photos from the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York.
The Pond, Moonlight, dating from 1904 and estimated at between USD 700,000 and USD 1,000,000 in fact went for USD 2,600,000 (EUR 2,185,560). Steichen’s investment value has more than quintupled in the last decade: EUR 100 invested in a Steichen image in 1997 is worth an average EUR 540 today.

Underlining the strength of the Anglo-Saxon market, the same session also knocked up record sales for two Alfred Stieglitz prints: Georgia O’Keeffe (hands) and Georgia O’Keeffe (nude). Dating from 1919, both swept past their estimates, – USD 300,000-500,000 each – and finally went for USD 1.3 million (EUR 1,092,780) and USD 1.2 million (EUR 1,008,720), respectively. Stieglitz experts consider the series of prints of Georgia, his wife, the most accomplished of his career along with the cloudscape series Equivalents.

The third modern photographer to have set a recent record is the American Edward Weston (1886-1958). His work entitled The Breast sold for USD 720,000 (EUR 594,504) in October 2005, once again at Sotheby’s New York, the auction house that hosted 8 of the top 10 photograph sales in 2005-2006. The Breast dates from 1923 and shows the play of light rippling across a woman’s torso.

The French market has had nothing in the last few months to rival the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s sales. French prices at Piasa, Cornette de Saint-Cyr and Le Mouel are not as high as across the Atlantic. French buyers tend to be highly selective and even vintage images by major names, such as Brassaï, are often bought in.
On 24 May, Le Mouel, Paris, sold half a dozen Brassaï prints, including Paris, les Ponts et les Quais, les bouquinistes sur les quais, a silver print from the 1931-32 period, which went for EUR 4,000.

Enthusiasm for current work.

Here again, the keenest bidding has been in the USA where auctioneers have knocked down record hammer prices for artists such as Andreas Gursky. Gursky’s price index is the highest of any contemporary photographer at the moment and his 99 Cent, a monumental format (207 x 336 cm), doubled its low estimate and went for USD 2 million in May 2006 at Sotheby’s New York. The previous record had belonged to Richard Prince, maker of archetypal American images, whose massive (127 x 177.9 cm) ektachrome Cow-Boy, from 1989, went under the hammer on 5 November 2005 for USD 1.1 million (EUR 931,590) at Christie’s New York.

In France, major pieces are rare, investors are cautious and there have been no million-plus hammer prices at recent auctions while the USA has had four. French auction houses, however, do tend to have work by artists who are now established as safe investments, such as Nan Goldin, Cindy Sherman, Robert Mapplethorpe, Vanessa Beecroft and Vik Muniz.

Remember that by turnover the Anglo-Saxon houses had 87% of the market for photography at auction in 2005 compared to just 6% in France. By way of comparison, on 9 June, Joana Nude on my Futon in morning Light, NYC, by Nan Goldin was bought in off a low estimate of EUR 6,000 at Arcturial Paris while, in October 2005, a similar work calledJoana in the Doorway looking at Aurele, Chateau du Neuf, Avignon found a buyer at USD 6,500 (EUR 5,434) at Sotheby’s London.
Thus far in 2006 the highest price for a photograph achieved by any French house has been the sale at Piasa, Paris, of Nu dans les algues de Saint-Tropez, taken by Helmut Newton in 1981, which fetched EUR 60,000.

http://web.artprice.com/AMI/AMI.aspx?id=MTYzOTc2OTE2NTU0OTk=

Published: August 25, 2006
New York Times

A PHOTOGRAPHER snaps a picture. If it’s a camera with film, a negative is made; if it’s a digital camera, a file is produced. A printer, in a dark room using chemicals, or at a computer screen, can tinker with the image, crop it, enlarge it, make it lighter or darker, highlight one part or obscure another.

In other words, the image produced by the camera, whether it’s a negative or a digital file, is only the matrix for the work of art. It is not the work itself, although if the photographer is a journalist, any hanky-panky in the printing process comes at the potential cost of the picture’s integrity. Digital technology has not introduced manipulation into this universe; it has only multiplied the opportunities for mischief.

I dawdle over this familiar ground because the digitally produced prints of classic Walker Evans photographs, now at the UBS Art Gallery, are so seductive and luxurious — velvety, full of rich detail, poster-size in a few cases and generally cinematic — that they raise some basic issues about the nature of photography.

For starters they suggest a simple question, whether luxury and richness are apt qualities for pictures of Depression-era tenant farmers in the American South. These are, I must say, almost uncomfortably beautiful. In “Let Us Now Praise Famous Men,” where Evans first published many of these photographs in 1941, James Agee, his collaborator, wrote that the book might best have been issued on newsprint to suit the simple and honest character of its subjects. Photography compromises its own value, Agee thought, when it becomes pretentious.For his part Evans notoriously disdained darkrooms and only haphazardly supervised the making of his own prints. But he adopted the new Polaroid SX-70 camera when it came along in 1973, indicating that he wasn’t averse to new technologies; and with his negatives, like most photographers, he occasionally burned in or dodged out passages to make the pictures look more the way he wanted them to, which they couldn’t otherwise. To a negative of the famous portrait of Allie Mae Burroughs, the sharp-faced Alabama tenant farmer’s wife, he attached instructions for exposing furrows in her brow. Adjusting the exposure was the technique he had at hand, a crude one compared to digital technology.

The new Evans prints are made by John Hill, a friend and colleague of Evans’s at the Yale School of Art, in collaboration with Sven Martson, who printed photographs for Evans during the 1970’s. They use carbon pigments. Evans shot these works on assignment for the Farm Security Administration, so they ended up in the Library of Congress as public property, where anybody now has permission to reproduce them.

The digital process allows Mr. Hill and Mr. Martson to uncover details embedded in the negatives, outside the tonal range of the old silver gelatin prints: a shadowy girl in the doorway of a roadside stand near Birmingham, Ala.; numbers painted on a telephone pole beside a gas station in Reedsville, W.Va.; penny-picture faces in a window of a photographer’s studio in Savannah, Ga. The new prints modulate and unify the midranges of grays in these pictures to soften contrasts and give a warmer ambience to photographs that were often sharp and austere in Evans’s gelatin silver prints. Mr. Hill, who put together the show, includes various books, magazines and prints that Evans supervised, so you can make the comparison yourself.

But does this improve the pictures? No. For one thing, it is not possible to improve on the quality of Evans’s originals, only to emulate it. For another, size shifts how we see, both for better and worse. There is a level of concentration required by staring into a small gelatin silver print, a way the image focuses the mind and stays contained within a narrow field of vision, which is among the pleasures of photography. Bigger pictures are read differently more piecemeal, in the way that film in a theater is viewed differently from an image on television or on a computer screen. Evans lugged his large-format camera around the rural South during the heat of summer so that he could make pictures containing lots of detail. And for his Museum of Modern Art retrospective in 1971 he approved the installation of a few blownup photographs as props.

But a new detail revealed by an enlarged digital print becomes a visual fact that, however subtly, affects the balance of the entire picture. Photography is a seamless medium: a whole, continuous image put together at once, which the eye unconsciously distinguishes from a drawn image that is made inch by inch, or pixel by pixel, in the case of a digital image.

http://www.nytimes.com/2006/08/25/arts/design/25evan.html?ex=1159934400&en=84f7d83d5d92be7b&ei=5070

Art and apartheid: The prime real estate is still a men's club
by Jerry Saltz for VillageVoice http://villagevoice.com/art/0639,saltz,74535,13.html
September 21st, 2006 4:16 PM

When it comes to being artists, women can be as bad as men. The problem is that even now, decades after the onset of women's liberation, women aren't being allowed to demonstrate this. I doubt that there's a conscious effort to keep women from showing, yet the percentage of women exhibiting in New York galleries and museums is grievously low. According to the fall exhibition schedules for 125 well-known New York galleries—42 percent of which are owned or co-owned by women—of 297 one-person shows by living artists taking place between now and December 31, just 23 percent are solos by women.

Some may argue that 23 percent isn't that bad. True, it's not as bad as last fall's even worse 19 percent. And it's certainly not as sorry as the situation at some of our museums. On the fourth and fifth floors of the Museum of Modern Art, in the galleries devoted to the permanent collection of art from 1879 to 1969, there are currently 399 objects. Only 19, or 5 percent, of those objects are by women. This is up from last fall's 3 percent, but it's partly due to the display of a silver teapot, a brass fruit bowl, and an ashtray by the excellent Marianne Brandt, who technically isn't even in the painting and sculpture collection. Yesterday's institutions can't be judged by today's standards. MOMA's shortcomings are built-in: Of all the artists in its P&S collection with work completed before 1970, fewer than 1 percent are women. Even so, MOMA's narrative wouldn't be disrupted by having work on view by Alice Neel, Florine Stettheimer, Sonia Delaunay, Louise Nevelson, Emma Kunz, Hilma af Klint, Adrian Piper, Marisol, Maya Deren, Dorthea Rockburne, Niki de Saint Phalle, Jo Baer, Jay DeFeo, Joan Brown, Grace Hartigan, Leonora Carrington, Leonor Fini, Natalia Goncharova, Gego, Dorothea Tanning, Romaine Brooks, Ree Morton, Howardena Pindell, Lee Lozano, Hanna Hoch, and Claude Cahun. If MOMA doesn't own work by all these artists it needs to rectify this.

Meanwhile, since 2000 only 14 percent of the Guggenheim's solo shows of living artists have been devoted to women. After cringing at that, consider "Full House," the Whitney's recent installation of its permanent collection. The show was challenging but familiar in one troubling area: Only 19 percent of its participants were women. Figures, however, aren't always cut-and-dried. Only 23 percent of all the artists in the Whitney's collection are women, so "Full House" reflected its collection. There were 48 artists in "Uncertain States of America," Bard's summer show organized by three European male curators: Only 10 were women. Several of these were only in the rotating video program. The prime real estate is still a men's club.

The programmatic exclusion of women is partly attributable to the art world's being a self-replicating organism: It sees that the art that is shown and sold is made mainly by men, and therefore more art made by men is shown and sold. This is how the misidentification, what Adorno called a "negative system," is perpetuated.

What to do? As Bob Marley said, "You can observe a lot from watching." Consider the savant of watching, Andy Warhol. As art writer Jack Bankowsky observed, "He noticed things." Noticing can be insurrectionary. All of us can notice, then mention that we noticed. I did this last year when I had a hissy fit on this page about how women were only around 15 percent of the artists included in

Artforum's annual Top 10 lists and the "power lists" of Art + Auction and ArtReview. That seemed to ruffle a lot of feathers. Regardless, if those percentages are repeated, at least we'll know it's intentional. (A discouraging sign is that only 13 percent of the solo shows previewed in Artforum this month are women's.)

If this summer's Documenta and Venice Biennale were 50-50 men/women, neither would be better or worse than usual. That said, no one is more self-righteous, dogmatic, and moralistic than a quota queen. Art isn't democratic. Shows shouldn't be regulated.

It's a pernicious double bind: If only 24 percent of the shows are by women, how can 50 percent of the shows you preview, review, buy, or sell be by women? Art historian Griselda Pollock has written about "women's struggle for meaning"; whatever we call this struggle, it needs to be seen as a failure of the imagination that amounts to apartheid. We all have to feel threatened by the bias. We must see it as a moral emergency. Having mainly men show means that more than half the story is going untold. Whatever story women tell will be told in ways it never has before. If we don't remove the taboo against women, the story could eventually die.

Lonely Hunter

The subjects of Catherine Opie's academic black-and-white photographs are, as the show's title informs us, "American Cities." We see St. Louis, Chicago, Minneapolis, Los Angeles, and New York. Opie is trying to tap in to the deadpan lucidity of Atget, Abbott, and Evans. She's drawn to the indexical vision of Edward Ruscha and the lonely 1970s cityscapes of Thomas Struth. Although many of these works are momentarily engaging, Opie's city pictures flirt with the canned grandeur and romanticism of Ansel Adams.

Nevertheless, some of Opie's city pictures are laced with a degree of latent psychological content. We know from her past work that Opie is, or was, part of the lesbian BDSM community. She's known for images of herself and others pierced with needles etc. This ritualized pleasure and pain is here but cloaked in a fascinating blandness and Opie's rage for normalcy. She likes families and communities. In "American Cities" the streets may always be barren, but it's as if she's staking a claim for those, like her, who want to walk these streets alone without feeling afraid.

Far better are pictures of Los Angeles mini-malls, in which Opie gets out of her own way. We see storefronts of a Taiwanese dentist next to an Arab hairdresser next to a Chinese dry cleaner next to an Italian pizzeria run by Vietnamese. Admirers say these pictures are about "urban sprawl." This is totally wrong. These pictures echo Opie's urge for normalcy and are images of hope. The mini-malls are portraits of those who have hung placards outside shops in hopes of making their fortune. I love these pictures.

par Judith Benhamou-Huet paru le 10/11/06. © Les Echos.

Que cherchent les collectionneurs de photographies ? Si on en croit le record de prix réalisé en février dernier à New York, ils aiment les tirages qui ressemblent à des tableaux et qui sont signés d'un grand nom américain. La somme colossale de 2,4 millions d'euros a en effet été investie par un inconnu dans un petit cliché, " Le Pont à la lumière de la lune ", réalisé par le photographe Edward Steichen en 1904. Il a retravaillé l'oeuvre comme une peinture symboliste toute en ombres et en mystères, à l'aide de pigments. Jusque-là, jamais un tel montant n'avait été déboursé pour une photographie. A Paris aussi, on peut admirer - faute d'acquérir - une image célèbre de Steichen. Pendant le Salon Paris Photo, qui se tient du 16 au 19 novembre, la galerie parisienne 1900-2000 montre certainement un des tirages les plus chers de la manifestation : autour de 500.000 euros. Là encore daté de 1904, il représente une femme nue, plantureuse à la Rubens, posant de face sensuellement, dans un savant clair-obscur. " In memoriam ", c'est son nom, est une des icônes de la photographie du XXe siècle. D'ailleurs, en 1999, le Musée d'Orsay n'a pas hésité à payer à Londres 343.500 euros pour obtenir un autre tirage de la même image. Celui de Paris Photo appartenait au peintre futuriste italien Gino Severini qui l'avait conservé dans son atelier.

Mais, bien heureusement, le Salon entièrement consacré à la photographie n'abrite pas seulement des chefs-d'oeuvre signés de stars de la discipline. Cette année, on y trouve par exemple, pour la première fois, un exposant, Philippe Jacquier, qui se consacre entièrement à la photo anonyme. Sa galerie, située à Montreuil et qui attire nombre d'initiés pour chaque exposition, porte le nom poétique de " La Lumière des Roses ". La démarche originale de Philippe Jacquier s'inscrit bien dans l'air du temps : sélectionner des images relativement anciennes pour ce qu'elles incarnent, alors qu'elles ont souvent été réalisées par des amateurs. Lui parle d'" aura " de ces images. Il en expose une quarantaine sur un petit stand de Paris Photo qui représentent, dit-il, un an de recherche. On y voit, par exemple, la grâce de jeunes femmes des années 1920 ou 1930 posant, euphoriques, sur une plage ou encore une demoiselle en habits du dimanche face à un miroir déformant, dans une fête foraine. Les clichés sont à vendre entre 500 et plusieurs milliers d'euros. Des cotes difficiles à fixer puisque, d'une certaine manière, c'est son " oeil " que vend le marchand. Il réalise un travail de " chine ", de sélection dans les vide-greniers et autres marchés aux puces à travers le monde.

Au même moment, un des grands spécialistes français de la photographie, Michel Frizot, directeur de recherche au CNRS, publie chez Phaidon " Photo trouvée ", un recueil d'images anonymes, sélectionnées dans l'esprit qui anime aussi Philippe Jacquier (1). Il introduit sa sélection en écrivant : " Il se prend plus de 1 milliard de nouvelles photos chaque semaine. Et, depuis plus d'un siècle, les clichés d'amateurs s'entassent dans des tiroirs, échouent dans des poubelles ou s'accumulent dans les cartons des marchés aux puces. En mettant les mains dans ces cartons, nous avons recueilli ce trop-plein d'images que l'humanité déverse avec indifférence. "

En fait, si l'on se pose la question de la demande en matière de photographies, on comprend rapidement qu'il n'existe pas un, mais des marchés de la photographie, tous arrivés aujourd'hui à l'âge adulte, après une période d'effervescence et d'excès.

Paris Photo est globalement le reflet du large éventail de l'offre. C'est aussi la seule manifestation réellement internationale à prendre place en France. En effet, sur les 106 exposants du Carrousel du Louvre, 73 % sont étrangers et Paris Photo abrite plus de marchands américains que français. On y trouve donc des images du début de la photographie mais aussi des images classiques du XXe siècle, des tirages de l'après-guerre et encore des travaux contemporains récents, moins représentatifs cependant.

Bernard Utudjian de la galerie parisienne Polaris a sélectionné une production de photos contemporaines pour le Salon. " Depuis quelque temps, les collectionneurs comme les professionnels ont arrêté de dire qu'il y avait un boom sur la photographie. C'est bien. Maintenant, les prix existent dans le contexte de ceux pratiqués dans l'art contemporain en général. "

Rétrospective Lee Friedlander
Il montre, entre autres, le travail d'Yto Barrada, jeune photographe née en 1971, qui vit entre Tanger, Paris et New York. Elle fait partie des noms demandés sur la scène photographique internationale alors qu'elle était encore quasi inconnue il y a cinq ans. Elle a participé en quelques mois à une masse d'expositions de Paris, à l'hôtel de Sully, jusqu'à Rotterdam ou Tokyo. Le Kunstmuseum de Vienne vient aussi d'acheter 14 tirages de l'artiste. Elle pose son objectif sur des attitudes humaines ou des paysages qui expriment solitude, abandon et exil. En 2003, ses images se vendaient pour 2.600 euros. Aujourd'hui, ses grands tirages couleurs (à partir de 60 × 60 cm) en 5 exemplaires sont présentés par Polaris entre 4.300 et 7.000 euros, selon le format.

Paris Photo prend cette année place dans le cadre de la manifestation biennale du Mois de la photo (cf. la sélection dans " Les Echos week-end " du 3 novembre) qui transforme la capitale française en épicentre de la discipline et attire ainsi spécialistes et collectionneurs du monde entier. Parmi l'offre pléthorique de la programmation, il y a l'exposition rétrospective consacrée au Jeu de Paume à un talent américain devenu une référence depuis les années 1960, Lee Friedlander (2). Dans la grande tradition américaine, le photographe capte, principalement en noir et blanc, des images de l'ordinaire de la ville et de ses petites facéties involontaires. Des photos animées d'un certain esprit, défendues depuis plus de quinze ans à New York par Janet Borden. Elle fait le voyage à Paris Photo avec un stand entièrement consacré à Friedlander avec 35 tirages des cinquante dernières années. Comme elle l'explique, " Friedlander est un peu " old school " ". Autrement dit, aucun de ses tirages n'est numéroté et, si une image plaît, il peut la retirer à la demande. De ce fait, les clichés les plus fameux sont souvent aussi les moins rares. La différence en termes de prix se fait justement selon la date du tirage. Plus il est ancien plus il est élevé. C'est le qualificatif de " vintage " - une image contemporaine de la prise de vue - qui fait monter la cote. Sur le stand de Janet Borden, " New York City ", image chaotique de la ville effervescente, un tirage vintage de 1974 est à vendre pour 30.000 dollars mais un nu sensuel à la prise de vue frontale daté de 1979, tiré postérieurement, peut être acquis pour 4.200 dollars.

C'est là toute la différence entre la photographie conçue comme un véritable objet et la photo simplement ressentie comme une image forte.

par Judith Benhamou-Huet. Le Point 16/11/06

http://www.lepoint.fr/tendances/document.html?did=186003

On ne peut plus dire aujourd'hui « Je n'aime pas la photographie », car la discipline a pris des aspects extrêmements divers. Photo ancienne au parfum de nostalgie, photo documentaire pour amateurs d'illustrations, photo moderne pour l'ambiance de la ville ou des bas-fonds et encore photo plasticienne conçue comme une composition picturale, photo érotique... A Paris cette semaine, justement, avis de déferlante de photos. Le Salon Paris-Photo ouvre aujourd'hui pour quatre jours avec une participation qui n'a jamais été aussi internationale. Elle fait la part belle aux images classiques. Les maisons de vente en profitent pour multiplier les enchères à la même période dans la capitale tandis que le Mois de la photo, manifestation biennale, donne aussi l'occasion aux galeries parisiennes d'exposer leur offre dans la spécialité.

La chute en suspens
« Jusqu'ici tout va bien... » pourrait être le titre de ce cliché signé Denis Darzacq. Il est connu pour son travail de photographe de presse mais réalise aussi des recherches plus plastiques, comme en 2005 et 2006 avec des jeunes gens des cités aux prouesses physiques sublimées par l'arrêt sur image. Pas de truquage. Ils volent un court instant avant... « La chute », c'est justement le nom de cette série.

2 000 euros sont demandés pour ses tirages de 85 x 105 cm présentés par la galerie Vu à Paris-Photo.

Flaubert : to be or not to be
Lorsque Flaubert disait « Madame Bovary, c'est moi », il mentait. On en a désormais quasiment la preuve. Plus sérieusement, cette image, un daguerréotype, l'ancêtre de la photo, daté de 1846, pourrait être une des rares photos qu'on connaisse de l'écrivain, et même l'unique représentation du temps de sa jeunesse. Un musée américain a, semble-t-il, fait une étude anthropométrique à l'aide du masque mortuaire du père de « L'éducation sentimentale », histoire de se rassurer sur l'identité du personnage. Si c'est lui, l'image vaut assurément plus que les 40 000 euros d'estimation. Si cela n'est pas lui, 200 euros suffiraient.

Le 18, Hôtel Dassault, Paris, Artcurial. 01.42.99.20.20. www.artcurial.auction.fr

La beauté de l'inconnue
Une des vogues qui sévissent actuellement parmi les spécialistes de la photographie est celle de l'image anonyme. Certains grands musées américains en font collection. Le charme premier de ces clichés vient du miracle dont est l'objet un amateur magiquement inspiré pendant quelques instants. L'autre charme de ces images en est le prix, modeste. A Paris-Photo, pour la première fois, une galerie au nom étrange de Lumière des roses se consacre aux photos anonymes anciennes. Ce tout petit tirage des années 30, issu d'un album de famille, montre une jeune fille à la fête foraine prise par son reflet dans un miroir déformant. Son prix : 800 euros

Lee Friedlander
A Paris-Photo, ce sont les galeries américaines qui sont le plus représentées. Parmi elles, Janet Borden, qui vient de New York pour exposer son « gisement » de tirages de Lee Friedlander. Ce photographe américain de 72 ans, passé à la postérité avec ses vues urbaines en noir et blanc, fait l'objet d'une rétrospective au Jeu de paume jusqu'au 31 décembre (www.jeudepaume.org). Les tirages anciens - on dit « vintage » - sont les plus onéreux, mais Friedlander fait retirer à la demande n'importe quelle image, sans apposer de numérotation. C'est le cas de cette vue d'intérieur américain typique, prise en 1962 en Virginie, retirée ultérieurement, à vendre pour 5 300 euros.

For reasons that Joanna Pitman explains, twentieth-century masters are now attracting prices that used to be ascociated only with nineteenth-century works

Apollo, Nov, 2005 by Joanna Pitman

In December 1970, Diane Arbus, short of money and desperate to buy a new Pentax 6x7 camera for herself, put together a portfolio of ten photographs for sale. She made an edition of fifty, each of them printed, signed, numbered and annotated by the photographer, and presented in a clear Plexiglas box that could also work as a frame. She hoped to sell them for a thousand dollars each. A year later, Arbus committed suicide, at the age of forty-seven. Had she lived, she would have been astonished at the popularity of her work today and the prices it is fetching. In April this year, Sotheby's, New York, sold one of these portfolios, A Box of Ten Photographs, printed just after her death by Neil Selkirk. Estimated at $250,000-$350,000, it went to an anonymous buyer for $556,600 after heavy bidding. A new Arbus auction record, it was just one of two dozen Arbus lots that sold extremely well.

Arbus also topped the list at Christie's New York in its April sale this year. A rare vintage print of Child with a Toy Hand Grenade, Central Park, NYC (Fig. 4), made in 1962, was sold in a phone bid to a private European collector for $408,000. It was one of only seven prints known to have been made by Arbus herself, and this one was a gift to a friend, the author and artist Patricia Hill-Bianchini. The impressive Arbus sales were probably boosted by the major travelling retrospective that was on show earlier this year at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, and is currently at the Victoria and Albert Museum in London. But the high prices are by no means going against the trend. It is no secret that the photography market is on a roll. The four main us dealers, Sotheby's, Christie's, Phillips de Pury and Company and Swann Galleries together pulled in over $16 million in eight sessions this year, some way ahead of last year's $12.6 million. Sotheby's sold eleven lots with final prices that went over six figures; and Christie's topped that mark with nine lots. Swann Galleries, which held one of its major auctions in May, reported global interest, with heavy phone and order bids as well as live internet bidding. Among its top selling lots was a Dorothea Lange Depression-era icon, Migrant Mother, which sold for $33,350 and an unusual Andre Kertesz 1928 suite of eight photographs of Trappist monks, which sold for $27,600.

It seems that this year's photography sales have started pushing prices into areas once traditionally associated with paintings or sculpture. Denise Bethel, the head of the photography department at Sotheby's, New York, says that the strong sales at all the auction houses reflect a continuing growth of interest in photography: 'It's not just this last year that we've seen strong sales. I see it as more of a continuum which began somewhere around 1980. There have always been a few bumps, but by in large, it has been simply a line going steadily up on the graph.' In explanation she cites the growing number of serious art-historical exhibitions of photography, which would not have taken place twenty-five years ago. 'Within the traditional disciplines of art history, photographs are now being taken seriously by art historians and curators in a way they simply were not in the 1970s. There's been a huge change of attitude among the academic community.' There is also the rarity factor. 'In 1980, we thought that some things were rare, but we now know just how rare some of these prints are. It is a myth that there are plentiful prints because they were produced at the time from negatives. The fact is there was no real market until the 1970s for photographs, so Steiglitz and Weston and lots of others were not making many prints. There would have been no real reason for them to do so at the time. The fact is, most of the things we're dealing with exist in only a handful of copies. We're often talking about one of two or three or four known examples of works. That rarity factor is something that we're only now beginning to really appreciate and understand.'

London photography sales have also been strong in the past year. The Sotheby's sale in May of the contents of Lord Hesketh's country house, Easton Neston, included a large number of photographic lots, many of which attained surprisingly high prices. An album of fifty-four photographs of California taken in the 1880s, for example, which included studies of Yosemite Valley, Napa Soda Springs, the Switchback Railway, the Rocky Mountains, the Chinese quarter in San Francisco and portraits of native Americans, was estimated at 200-300 [pounds sterling] (Fig. 2). It sold for 10,800 [pounds sterling] to a private American buyer. Many of the strong sellers in the Easton Neston sale related to the Sharon family, one of the wealthiest families in California (Florence Sharon became Lady Fermor-Hesketh in the 1860s). Also in May, Sotheby's, London, sold the Ehrenfeld collection, a collection of nineteenth-century photographs of India, many of which exceeded their estimates several times over.

Curtesy Yancey Richardson Gallery
At Yancey Richardson Gallery, this installation of Esko Minnikko's photographs have a nonphotographic look.

By PHILIP GEFTER
Published: December 3, 2006
The New York Times

IN New York City, a vast number of commercial galleries show photographs. Many of them represent photography exclusively; some show photo-based art that incorporates other mediums; others are galleries that represent painters and sculptors primarily but also include a handful of photographers. But in the last few years, some of the most famous and long-standing photography galleries have begun mixing nonphotographic work in with their primary offerings.

It may not be a revolution, but it is a significant change in the gallery landscape. These are the places that helped to establish photography’s viability as an art form as well as to create a business model. Having proven their point, they are now at liberty to experiment.

There is an unofficial hierarchy among photo galleries, and the oldest tend to be at the top of the heap. Many of those have featured photographers who over the years have earned a place in the medium’s canon — sometimes because of their dealers’ efforts.

Peter MacGill, who opened the Pace/MacGill Gallery on East 57th Street in 1983, said he has always tried to show work that advances photography as a whole. “The work must closely interface with the history of art and advance it along with the other mediums,” he explained. “I believe there is one history.” His artists could constitute a foundation course in photography since the 1950s: Robert Frank, Harry Callahan, Duane Michals, Irving Penn, Philip-Lorca diCorcia, among others.

But his last show didn’t contribute to that history at all. It was a collection of drawings and sculpture by David Byrne. While Mr. MacGill has shared exhibits of work in other mediums with PaceWildenstein, his partner gallery, at Pace/MacGill he has mounted only three in the last 20 years. “Until recently, everyone seemed to think of photography as an entity separate from the rest of the art world,” Mr. McGill said. “Currently there is more freedom to show other works of art on paper along with photographs to what is now a very receptive audience.”

Janet Borden Inc. opened in SoHo in 1988, and among the photographers she has represented are famous names like Lee Friedlander, Jan Groover, Tina Barney, Larry Sultan and Martin Parr. When Lee Friedlander came to Ms. Borden, he had already won the approval of the Museum of Modern Art, but many of her other artists owe at least some of their prominence to her imprimatur.

Asked if her gallery has an aesthetic mission, Ms. Borden waved the question away. “That’s a little too religious for me,” she said. “We try to identify the best artists working in photography and work with them to promote and sell their photographs. I tend to be more interested in artists’ ideas, so that their work is consistently interesting over the years.”

What about showing work that is not photographic? “We never call ourselves a photography gallery, in case we want to show something else,” she said. “When one of the artists whom we represent is making other art, that’s what we show. Robert Cummings is a good example. He often works in intricate cut-paper silhouettes as well as drawings. We think his vision is totally photographic, so we’re thrilled to show whatever he makes.”

One of the most prominent dealers, Jeffrey Fraenkel, plays a central role in the photography world even though his gallery isn’t in New York. He opened in San Francisco in 1979 and over the years has assembled a stable that approximates the Modernist canon: Robert Adams, Diane Arbus, Richard Avedon, Lee Friedlander (shared with Janet Borden in New York) and Richard Misrach (with Pace/MacGill), among others.

Mr. Fraenkel neatly defines his gallery’s aesthetic profile: “Modern art, specializing in photographs. A place where one can depend on seeing serious photographs regularly considered in relation to other arts.”

His current show, “Nothing and Everything,” includes drawing, painting, photography and sculpture, in work not only by his gallery photographers but also by Carl Andre, Jean Dubuffet, Donald Judd, Ellsworth Kelly, Robert Rauschenberg and Robert Ryman.

Explaining why he is showing work in other mediums, Mr. Fraenkel said that when he first opened his gallery people consistently asked him if photography was art. “That battle has been won, and photography is no longer an island,” he said. “Now it’s more fruitful to investigate the areas where photography intersects the other arts.”

Photography does so to a greater and greater degree, in part because of galleries like Marian Goodman on West 57th Street, a top contemporary art gallery with a branch in Paris. Among Ms. Goodman’s stars are Rineke Dijkstra, Thomas Struth and Jeff Wall. In Chelsea, Matthew Marks represents Nan Goldin and Andreas Gursky. Sonnabend Gallery has Hiroshi Sugimoto; Cheim & Read shows William Eggleston; 303 Gallery shows Stephen Shore; and Luhring Augustine represents Gregory Crewdson and Joel Sternfeld.

All of these artists use photographic equipment, but like the pioneering work of Cindy Sherman, some of their work crosses genres, styles and mediums to become a conceptual form all its own. Their association with high-profile galleries that show a variety of mediums has afforded them international visibility, record sales and a certain cachet.

Laurence Miller Gallery, which opened in 1984, has given many international photographers their first solo shows, including Daido Moriyama, Toshio Shibata and Erwin Olaf. Mr. Miller considers his West 57th Street gallery a place to educate his audience about “the qualities and possibilities that are unique to photography.” But, he added, “what constitutes ‘photographic’ keeps changing. The history of photography is one big technological evolution. New technologies keep challenging us, and I’m excited about the future.”

When Julie Saul opened her gallery in the 1980s, she and her contemporaries took a considerable professional risk by committing themselves to photography. But today she speaks of “works on paper” more broadly, so as to include drawings by Maira Kalman and Roz Chast. In the same West 22nd Street building, Yancey Richardson also shows a wide range of photographic imagery, from Julius Shulman’s straightforward documentation of midcentury modernist architecture to Mitch Epstein’s large-format color photographs of the contemporary social landscape. She also shows films and videos, as well as site-specific installations, a show of original artist books by Ed Ruscha and two shows of drawings and works on paper by emerging artists.

Bonni Benrubi, who opened her 57th Street gallery in 1986, is one dealer who is holding firm to her photographic roots. “The aesthetic core of our gallery has to do with what the camera can make,” she said. “Abelardo Morell’s camera obscura pictures, Matthew Pillsbury’s time-lapsed pictures, Simon Norfolk’s political views, Massimo Vitali’s beach scenes. All of them use the camera and do not manipulate. They show the magic of what the lens can do and show a view that we do not see or notice with our normal eyes.”

A number of younger photography galleries have commanded a new kind of respect — built not on longevity but on sale prices. Yossi Milo opened a small Chelsea gallery in a second-floor walkup in 2000. Three years later his show of eerie portraits of children by the German photographer Loretta Lux put him on the map. He set prices no one had seen before for a new gallery, offering images under 15 inches square by an unknown artist. And the show sold out, causing a sensation.

Mr. Milo next showed work by another unknown photographer, Alec Soth. Mr. Soth had studied with a pre-eminent photographer, Joel Sternfeld, which helped assure a collective nod of approval from the old-guard photography community. That show also did extremely well, and Mr. Soth has since been swooped up by the much more famous dealer Larry Gagosian. Mr. Milo, meanwhile, has moved his gallery to a sleeker storefront space.

“The characteristics that our artists share are psychological intensity, technical innovation, imagery that does more than record reality — pushing the boundaries of the medium of photography,” Mr. Milo wrote in an e-mail message.

But even he isn’t ruling out some variety. “With the opening of our North Gallery at 531 West 25th Street this month, we may expand our program to include nonphotographic work.”

Some of the newest galleries came on the scene so recently that the old divisions between photography and other art forms don’t seem relevant to them at all. They may have forged their identity through the sale of photographic work, but they do not see themselves as particularly beholden to that medium or to any other. ClampArt, on West 25th Street, has featured a great deal of photography since opening in 2003 . But Brian Clamp, the gallery’s owner, said, “With the notion of medium specificity having less and less relevance, we will begin mounting occasional solo exhibitions by artists producing nonphotographically related paintings and works on paper.”

And Daniel Cooney Fine Art, also on West 25th Street, which opened in 2004, represents 11 photographers, one artist who makes sculpture and drawings and others who use video in their work. “I am looking to increase the number of nonphoto people that I represent,” Mr. Cooney said.

With the variety of photographic work being made and the increased cross-pollination of mediums, specifying a photography gallery from an art gallery may soon seem like a retrograde distinction. Asked how she maintains her gallery’s identity within the shifting landscape, Ms. Borden offered a blithe observation about artmaking in general: “Of course, you know the adage, if you can’t make it good, make it big. If you can’t make it big, make it red. So we do like big red photographs.”

LE MONDE| 10.05.07 |

The great photographer Henri Cartier-Bresson, dead in 2004, had warned: "I always signed and dedicated the circulations of my photographs to those to that I heard to give them, did it write October 30 2000. All the others not consisting of circulations only that of the plugs or seals " Magnum Photos" or my name," Henri cartier-bresson"are alone my property." Matter heard? Not really.

Many realized circulations to the era of the taken one of view, swabbed and signed nos, meet again in sales to the bids. Following the example of this realized photo in Spain and that has for title Aragon, Spain, 1953 , obtained 12 000 dollars February 14, to the occasion of a sale organized by Christie's to New York.

Worse again, on two tests (a Spain view, the Italy other, in 1933) that will be put to the bids by the house Swann, to New York May 22, the signature of the photographer crudely was imitated and the false signature figures in the recto and to the back of the paper, this than Cartier-Bresson never did. To the great displeasure of Foundation Henri Cartier-Bresson, to Paris, that manages the funds of the artist. "These photographs were diverted of their owner ", explains Kristen Van Riel, the vice president of Foundation.

To understand this misappropriation, it is necessary to evoke the role of the press agency Magnum, that the photographer had created in 1947. A multitude of Cartier-Bresson circulations then were borrowed by newspapers and magazines of the entire world in order to reproduce them. But the rule wants that these circulations, only intended for the press, returned, after usage, to Magnum, of which addresses it is swabbed to the back of the circulation.

It happened that certain persons have "forgotten" to return these fine circulations or the preserved by love of the cartier-bresson work. In the years 1950 to 1970, Magnum not about it was concerned really, for it did not exist any true market of the photograph. To the day where the prices took off, from the years 1980. Certain then understood that they held treasures, that they proposed to gallery owner or to houses of sales to the bids, indeed on Internet.

The circulations presented by the house Swann originate Manchete, a press group Brazilian that broadcasted the photos of Magnum in South America, before of go bankrupt there is some years. "People then robbed these photos to be going to sell them in markets to the fleas or in room of the sales ", explains Agnès Sire, the director of Foundation HCB. This that they anonymously facts. And the sale houses to the bids are been anxious the secret. "This is not because Cartier-Bresson had confided these photos to the press that it had renounced its rights ", adds Kristen Van Riel. Also, Foundation does she decide today to act. "Our goal is to reform the market. We wish that the houses of sales to the bids warn their buyers that they are about to to obtain a work that does not belong to the salesman."

OF HANDS IN HANDS

Foundation Cartier-Bresson invites these salesmen to him to return the photographs swabbed realized tests mostly between 1945 and 1973. The one of them, spotted on the site e-bay, recently accepted doing it. "As recognized us public usefulness, we can establish a fiscal certificate of the value to which these circulations were paid ", follows Mr. Van Riel.

The houses of sales to the bids - informed position of the Foundation at the time of a recent meeting - are afraid of to see to fly away itself a juicy market. Christie's had refused to withdraw the fine circulation d'Aragon, Spain, 1953 of the February sale as the asked him Foundation, to the motive that " his owner had obtained it honest".

This that is possible, since these photographs are passed hand in hand with the years, without that their new buyers are not warned of their origin origin. " THIS IS for that that we communicate in this moment. Once informed, theeventual buyers more willnot be able to deduce of their good faith, underlines Agnès Sire. With regards to the tests of which the signature was imitated, we hope that Swann will withdraw them sale. If this is not the case, we will envision legal procedures."

The House Artcurial, to Paris, for its part attained the request of Foundation and removed two photographs swabbed and signed nos of an organized sale February 20. This that does not prevent it to propose in his catalog, for the sale of the 15 and May 16, two tests realized by cartier-bresson in China, in 1949 and 1958 (batches 267-268), that Foundation HCB estimates doubtful. "I am not absolutely agreed with the position of Foundation. It is strange to awaken forty-five after to come to claim these circulations ", explains Grégory Leroy, the specialist of the photograph with Artcurial, furious to see certain salesmen that estimate themselves honest to be going to propose these circulations to the installed houses abroad.

Grégory Leroy fears especially that the case cartier-bresson set a precedent. Most of the photos of the school humanists proposed in room of the sales of the circulations carried out for the press - this that the houses of sales, most of the time, do not write clearly in their catalogs.

" To withdraw them for this motive would mark the end of the market of the photograph in France ", packs itself Grégory Leroy. And to quote as an example the sale Brassaï organized in October 2006. "All the proposed circulations were swabbed and signed nos", assures Mr. Leroy. Of course. But there was a size difference: these tests were sold by the having straight of the Hungarian photographer and no by special.

Hélène Simon translated by FreeTranslation

LE MONDE| 10.05.07 |

Le grand photographe Henri Cartier-Bresson, mort en 2004, avait prévenu : "J'ai toujours signé et dédicacé les tirages de mes photographies à ceux à qui j'entendais les donner, écrivait-il le 30 octobre 2000. Tous les autres tirages ne comportant seulement que des tampons ou cachets "Magnum Photos" ou mon nom, "Henri Cartier-Bresson" sont seuls ma propriété." Affaire entendue ? Pas vraiment.

De nombreux tirages réalisés à l'époque de la prise de vue, tamponnés et non signés, se retrouvent dans des ventes aux enchères. A l'instar de cette photo réalisée en Espagne et qui a pour titre Aragon, Spain, 1953, acquise 12 000 dollars le 14 février, à l'occasion d'une vente organisée par Christie's à New York.

Pire encore, sur deux épreuves (une vue d'Espagne, l'autre d'Italie, en 1933) qui seront mises aux enchères par la maison Swann, à New York le 22 mai, la signature du photographe a été grossièrement imitée et la fausse signature figure au recto et au verso du papier, ce que Cartier-Bresson ne faisait jamais. Au grand dam de la Foundation Henri Cartier-Bresson, à Paris, qui gère le fonds de l'artiste. "Ces photographies ont été détournées de leur propriétaire", explique Kristen Van Riel, le vice-président de la Fondation.

Pour comprendre ce détournement, il faut évoquer le rôle de l'agence de presse Magnum, que le photographe avait créée en 1947. Une multitude de tirages de Cartier-Bresson étaient alors empruntés par des journaux et des magazines du monde entier afin de les reproduire. Mais la règle veut que ces tirages, uniquement destinés à la presse, soient retournés, après utilisation, à Magnum, dont l'adresse est tamponnée au dos du tirage.

Il est arrivé que certaines personnes aient "oublié" de rendre ces fameux tirages ou les aient conservés par amour du travail de Cartier-Bresson. Dans les années 1950 à 1970, Magnum ne s'en souciait pas vraiment, car il n'existait pas de véritable marché de la photographie. Jusqu'au jour où les prix ont décollé, à partir des années 1980. Certains ont alors compris qu'ils détenaient des trésors, qu'ils ont proposés à des galeristes ou à des maisons de ventes aux enchères, voire sur Internet.

Les tirages présentés par la maison Swann proviennent de Manchete, un groupe de presse brésilien qui diffusait les photos de Magnum en Amérique du Sud, avant de faire faillite il y a quelques années. "Des gens ont alors dérobé ces photos pour aller les vendre dans des marchés aux puces ou en salle des ventes", explique Agnès Sire, la directrice de la Fondation HCB. Ce qu'ils font anonymement. Et les maisons de vente aux enchères sont tenues au secret. "Ce n'est pas parce que Cartier-Bresson avait confié ces photos à la presse qu'il avait renoncé à ses droits", ajoute Kristen Van Riel. Aussi, la Fondation décide-t-elle aujourd'hui d'agir. "Notre but est de moraliser le marché. Nous souhaitons que les maisons de ventes aux enchères préviennent leurs acheteurs qu'ils sont sur le point d'acquérir une oeuvre qui n'appartient pas au vendeur."

DE MAINS EN MAINS

La Fondation Cartier-Bresson invite ces vendeurs à lui restituer les photographies tamponnées d'épreuves réalisées pour la plupart entre 1945 et 1973. L'un d'entre eux, repéré sur le site e-Bay, a récemment accepté de le faire. "Comme nous sommes reconnus d'utilité publique, nous pouvons établir un certificat fiscal de la valeur à laquelle ces tirages ont été payés", poursuit M. Van Riel.

Les maisons de ventes aux enchères - informées de la position de la Fondation lors d'une récente réunion - craignent de voir s'envoler un marché juteux. Christie's avait refusé de retirer le fameux tirage d'Aragon, Spain, 1953 de la vente de février comme le lui demandait la Fondation, au motif que "son propriétaire l'avait acquis de bonne foi".

Ce qui est possible, puisque ces photographies sont passées de main en main avec les années, sans que leurs nouveaux acquéreurs ne soient prévenus de leur provenance d'origine. " C'est pour cela que nous communiquons en ce moment. Une fois informés, les acheteurs éventuels ne pourront plus arguer de leur bonne foi, souligne Agnès Sire. Pour ce qui est des épreuves dont la signature a été imitée, nous espérons que Swann les retirera de la vente. Si ce n'est pas le cas, nous envisagerons des procédures légales."

La Maison Artcurial, à Paris, a pour sa part accédé à la demande de la Fondation et enlevé deux photographies tamponnées et non signées d'une vente organisée le 20 février. Ce qui ne l'empêche pas de proposer dans son catalogue, pour la vente des 15 et 16 mai, deux épreuves réalisées par Cartier-Bresson en Chine, en 1949 et 1958 (lots 267-268), que la Fondation HCB estime douteux. "Je ne suis absolument pas d'accord avec la position de la Fondation. C'est bizarre de se réveiller quarante-cinq après pour venir réclamer ces tirages", explique Grégory Leroy, le spécialiste de la photographie chez Artcurial, furieux de voir certains vendeurs qui s'estiment de bonne foi aller proposer ces tirages aux maisons installées à l'étranger.

Grégory Leroy craint surtout que le cas Cartier-Bresson fasse jurisprudence. La plupart des photos de l'école humaniste proposées en salle des ventes sont des tirages effectués pour la presse - ce que les maisons de ventes, la plupart du temps, n'écrivent pas clairement dans leurs catalogues.

"Les retirer pour ce motif marquerait la fin du marché de la photographie en France", s'emballe Grégory Leroy. Et de citer en exemple la vente Brassaï organisée en octobre 2006. "Tous les tirages proposés étaient tamponnés et non signés", assure M. Leroy. Certes. Mais il y avait une différence de taille : ces épreuves étaient vendues par les ayants droit du photographe hongrois et non par des particuliers.

Hélène Simon

Du 15 au 18 novembre se tient au Carrousel du Louvre la 11ème édition de Paris Photo, un rendez-vous incontournable pour les collectionneurs de clichés anciens, modernes et contemporains. Pour l’occasion, 83 galeries seront réunis pour présenter leur sélection. En parallèle des maisons de ventes parisiennes, telles Piasa, Artcurial et Ader, en profitent pour orchestrer quelques vacations thématiques. De l’autre côté de la Manche, à Londres, les 12 et 13 novembre Sotheby’s et Christie’s présentent aussi quelques centaines de clichés. A cette occasion, Artprice dresse un bilan de l’un des secteurs les plus en vogue du marché.

Le marché de la photographie poursuit son exceptionnelle croissance. Sur tout juste 9 mois ce secteur affiche un produit de ventes de 75 millions d’euros en 2007 contre 65 millions d’euros un an auparavant. Néanmoins, avec dix mille clichés présentés sur ce laps de temps, la photographie ne représente encore aujourd’hui que 4,5% des transactions de Fine Art. Le marché reste concentré aux Etats-Unis. A New York s’est négocié 65% du produit des ventes du secteur réalisé sur 10 ans, avec 40% des lots. Suivent ensuite Londres (19% du produit des ventes) et Paris (9%).
Si l’offre reste encore limitée, c’est par ses performances en terme de valorisation que ce secteur brille. Ainsi, la photographie est bien le plus porteur des médiums, même à long terme. Entre 1990 et octobre 2007, la photographie affiche une hausse de +70%, contre +43% pour la sculpture, ou +15% pour la peinture. Pour autant, ce marché offre encore de nombreuses opportunités : 86% des lots sont adjugés moins de 10 000 €.

© Andreas Gursky - 99 cent

A la suite des récentes hausses des prix, les records se sont accumulés. En février dernier, Andreas Gursky a encore planté une enchère à 1,5 millions £ (2,27 millions d’€) chez Sortheby’s London pour «99 cent II», (2001), un record absolu pour un cliché, ou plutôt deux car l’œuvre se présente sous la forme d’un dyptique. Il est suivi par Edward Steichen (1879-1973), dont «The Pond, Moonlight» est la photographie moderne la plus chère du marché, avec une enchère de 2,6 millions de dollars, décrochée un an plus tôt ! En mai dernier, lors des ventes d’art contemporain, d’autres enchères millionnaires sont venues se greffer. Parmi les plus notables soulignons les 2,5 millions de dollars pour un «Cowboy» de Richard prince de 2001, les 1,85 millions de dollars pour Cindy Sherman avec «Untitled No.92», (1981) et les 1,65 millions de dollars pour un triptyque de Hiroshi Sugimoto intitulé «Black Sea, Ozuluce/Yellow Sea, Cheju/Red Sea, Safaga», (1991-1992). Si la photographie primitive fut fort médiatique jusqu’en 2003 avec le record de 700 000 € décroché par Joseph Philibert Girault de Prangey (1804-1892), aucun cliché du 19ème siècle n’a encore flirté avec le million de dollars. Seul de rarissimes portfolios y sont parvenus.

©The Pond—Moonlight (1904) is a pictorialist photograph by Edward Steichen.

© Hiroshi Sugimoto. Black Sea, Ozuluce/Yellow Sea, Cheju/Red Sea, Safaga. 1991-1992

©Cindy Sherman. Untitled no. 92

©Richard Prince. untitled (Cowboy), 1989

©Joseph Philibert GIRAULT DE PRANGEY (1804-1892). 113. Athènes, T(emple) de J(upiter) Olympien pris de l'Est». 1842

ArtPrice

From November 15-18, the Carousel du Louvre will be hosting the 11th Paris Photo, an essential event for collectors of vintage, modern and contemporary photos. On this occasion, 83 galleries will be presenting their selection. At the same time, Parisian auction houses like Piasa, Artcurial and Ader are organising various thematic sales. On the other side of the Channel in London, Sotheby’s and Christie’s are presenting a few hundred photos. This is the opportunity for Artprice to examine one of the most fashionable sectors on the market.

The photography market is still enjoying extraordinary growth. In only 9 months, this sector has racked up sales of EUR 75m in 2007 compared to 65m the year before. Nevertheless, with ten thousand images presented over this period, photography still only accounts for 4.5% of Fine Art transactions today. The market is still concentrated in the United States. Over the last 10 years, 65% of proceeds (40% of lots) were generated in New York. London was second (19% of proceeds) and Paris third (9%).
Supply is still limited but the sector stands out for high valuations. Photography is easily the highest growth medium, even over the long term. For example, between 1990 and October 2007, prices for photography rose 70%, compared to +43% for sculpture and +15% for painting. Even so, the market still offers many opportunities: 86% of lots went for less than €10,000.

© Andreas Gursky - 99 cent

Recent price rises have resulted in an increasing number of records being set. Last February, Andreas Gursky was honoured with a £1.5m bid (€2.27m) at Sotheby’s London for 99 cent II, (2001) an absolute record for a photo, or rather two as the work is a diptych. Then comes Edward Steichen (1879-1973) whose The Pond, Moonlight is the most expensive modern photo on the market, with a $2.6m bid a year earlier. Last May, during the contemporary art sales, other million dollar bids arrived. The most remarkable were $2.5m for a Cowboy by Richard Prince (2001), $1.85m for Cindy Sherman with Untitled No.92, (1981) and $1.65m for a Hiroshi Sugimoto triptych entitled Black Sea, Ozuluce/Yellow Sea, Cheju/Red Sea, Safaga, (1991-1992). Primitive photography was a media favourite up till 2003 with a record €700,000 paid for a photo by Joseph Philibert Girault de Prangey (1804-1892), but no 19th century image has come near the million dollar mark. Only very rare portfolios have managed that.

©The Pond—Moonlight (1904) is a pictorialist photograph by Edward Steichen.

© Hiroshi Sugimoto. Black Sea, Ozuluce/Yellow Sea, Cheju/Red Sea, Safaga. 1991-1992

©Cindy Sherman. Untitled no. 92

©Richard Prince. untitled (Cowboy), 1989

©Joseph Philibert GIRAULT DE PRANGEY (1804-1892). 113. Athènes, T(emple) de J(upiter) Olympien pris de l'Est». 1842

ArtPrice

Newsweek
By Peter Plagens | NEWSWEEK Dec 10, 2007 Issue

© Photo by Cindy Sherman

How is that even remotely possible? The medium certainly looks alive, well and, if anything, overpopulated. There are hordes of photographers out there, working with back-to-basics pinhole cameras and pixeled images measured in gigabytes, with street photography taken by cell phones and massive photo "shoots" whose crews, complexity and expense resemble those of movie sets. Step into almost any serious art gallery in Chelsea, Santa Monica or Mayfair and you're likely to be greeted with breathtaking large-format color photographs, such as Andreas Gefeller's overhead views of parking lots digitally montaged from thousands of individual shots or Didier Massard's completely "fabricated photographs" of phantasmagoric landscapes. And the establishment's seal of approval for photography has been renewed in two current museum exhibitions.
In Depth of Field— the first installation in the new contemporary-photography galleries at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, on display through March 23—the fare includes Thomas Struth's hyperdetailed chromogenic print of the interior of San Zaccaria in Venice and Adam Fuss's exposure of a piece of photo paper floating in water to a simultaneous splash and strobe.

At the National Gallery of Art in Washington, The Art of the American Snapshot, 1888–1978" (up through Dec. 31) celebrates average Americans who wielded their Brownies and Instamatics to stunning effect.

Yet wandering the galleries of these two shows, you can't help but wonder if the entire medium hasn't fractured itself beyond all recognition. Sculpture did the same thing a while back, so that now "sculpture" can indicate a hole in the ground as readily as a bronze statue. Digitalization has made much of art photography's vast variety possible. But it's also a major reason that, 25 years after the technology exploded what photography could do and be, the medium seems to have lost its soul. Film photography's artistic cachet was always that no matter how much darkroom fiddling someone added to a photograph, the picture was, at its core, a record of something real that occurred in front of the camera. A digital photograph, on the other hand, can be a Photoshop fairy tale, containing only a tiny trace of a small fragment of reality. By now, we've witnessed all the magical morphing and seen all the clever tricks that have turned so many photographers—formerly bearers of truth—into conjurers of fiction. It's hard to say "gee whiz" anymore.

Art and truth used to be fast friends. Until the beginning of modernism, the most admired quality in Western art was mimesis—objects in painting and sculpture closely resembling things in real life. William Henry Fox Talbot, who produced the first photographic prints from a negative in 1839, immediately saw the mimetic new medium as an art form. Talbot wanted only to be able to "draw" more accurately than by hand. In fact, he called his first book of reproduced photographs The Pencil of Nature

For at least a century thereafter, any photograph with a claim to being art had in its DNA at least a few chromosomes from Talbot's The The Open Door a picture of a tree-branch broom leaning just-so-esthetically against a dark doorway. Of course, great photographers have never merely recorded visual facts indiscriminately, like a court stenographer taking down testimony. They've selected their subjects carefully and framed their views of them precisely, in order to give their pictures the look of "art." Later in the 19th century, "pictorialist" photographers used soft focus, toothy paper, sepia tones, multiple negatives and even scratching back into the image as ways of getting photographs to look more like paintings.

Soon, photography escaped the exclusive grasp of the professionals and moneyed hobbyists who could afford its cumbersome equipment, and the public began to take its own pictures. In the 1920s, small, inexpensive fast-shutter cameras like the Kodak Brownie appeared. By 1950, according to Kodak, nearly three quarters of American families owned cameras and took 2 billion photographs with them. By the 1970s, they were taking 9 billion pictures a year, most of them quick, informal snapshots. To be sure, some masterpieces did emerge—mostly accidentally—from this Everest-size heap of images. The person who pointed his Brownie at the woman in "Unknown [photographer], 1950s" in The Art of the American Snapshot probably didn't anticipate that she'd cover her face with her hands just as he clicked the shutter. And he (or she) couldn't predict that the result would be a great composition—long fingers and angular elbows set against the gentle downhill sweep of a field—and a wonderful metaphor for photography's tango with the truth. What the inadvertently great snapshot shared with the work of realist artist-photographers like Dorothea Lange and Walker Evans in the 1930s and '40s, and Diane Arbus and Robert Frank in the 1950s and '60s, was that the people in them were who they looked like they were—raw-boned farmers, gritty miners, harried housewives, burly bikers—really doing what they looked like they were doing.

In the late 1970s, however, the concept of fiction in photography reared its little postmodern head. "The big change in attitude from realist photography," says Lawrence Miller, who owns a prominent photography gallery in New York, "was when Metro Pictures [one of the hippest galleries in SoHo] showed Cindy Sherman in 1980." Sherman's fictional self-portraits—fake "film stills" with the artist posed as a negligeed blonde on a bed, or a dark-haired femme fatale in a chic apartment—weren't photography's first turn away from the straight, nonfiction reportage most people think of as great photography. But her pictures represented something new in the way that photography was considered as art. It wasn't just for reportage anymore. The Talbotian esthetic door was now fully opened for photographers to make photographs just as well as to take them. The advent of digital technology only exacerbated photography's flight into fable.

We live in a culture dominated by pixels, increasingly unmoored from corpor-eal reality. Movies are stuffed with CGI and, in such "performance animation" films as "Beowulf," overwhelmed by them. Some big pop-music hits are so cyberized the singer might as well be telling you to press 1 if you know your party's exten-sion. Even sculpture has adopted digital "rapid prototyping" technology that allows whatever a programmer can imagine to be translated into 3-D objects in plastic. Why should photography be any different? Why shouldn't it give in to the digital temptation to make every landscape shot look like the most absolutely beautiful scenery in the whole history of the universe, or turn every urban view into a high-rise fantasy?

Photography is finally escaping any dependence on what is in front of a lens, but it comes at the price of its special claim on a viewer's attention as "evidence" rooted in reality. As gallery material, photographs are now essentially no different from paintings concocted entirely from an artist's imagination, except that they lack painting's manual touch and surface variation. As the great modern photographer Lisette Model once said, "Photography is the easiest art, which perhaps makes it the hardest." She had no idea how easy exotic effects would get, and just how hard that would make it to capture beauty and truth in the same photograph. The next great photographers—if there are to be any—will have to find a way to reclaim photography's special link to reality. And they'll have to do it in a brand-new way.

par Nathalie Heinich | LE MONDE | 05.01.09

Il ne se passe pas de semaine sans que nous lisions des articles indignés, des courriels, des manifestes, des protestations contre l'état présent de l'art contemporain : l'art actuel ne fait pas - et de moins en moins - consensus. De ce fait, les artistes se trouvent coupés d'un large public, tandis que maints amateurs d'art se privent du contact avec les créations majeures de l'art contemporain. Il est temps de réfléchir à de possibles remèdes.

La sociologie a mis en évidence l'émergence d'un "système marchands-critiques" dans la France de la seconde moitié du XIXe siècle, caractéristique de l'art moderne tel qu'il s'était constitué alors contre l'art classique et son système néo-académique. C'étaient là les prémices de ce qui est devenu une tendance lourde de l'art contemporain dans la seconde moitié du XXe siècle : l'importance des intermédiaires de l'art (en particulier issus du secteur public), qui croît avec son autonomisation.

En effet, plus l'art obéit à des logiques intéressant prioritairement les artistes et les spécialistes, plus il tend à se couper des amateurs et du grand public : d'où la nécessité d'une chaîne de médiations entre la production de l'oeuvre et sa réception. Contre l'illusion d'une relation immédiate entre oeuvres et spectateurs, la sociologie de l'art a commencé à étudier cet entre-deux, en même temps que l'art contemporain en explorait les possibilités, à la suite de Duchamp et de ses ready-mades.

Toutefois les institutions de l'art ont pris du retard dans ce processus : elles continuent à fonctionner sur le mode de l'immédiateté, restant en grande partie invisibles quant à leurs modalités d'action et manquant de reconnaissance quant à leur rôle.

Conservateurs de musée, directeurs de centre d'art, commissaires d'exposition (pour le secteur public), ainsi que critiques d'art, galeristes et experts en salles des ventes (pour le secteur privé) sont certes bien connus à l'intérieur du milieu. Mais leur travail est presque ignoré par les simples amateurs. Et cette ignorance même demeure invisible à ces intermédiaires, trop exposés aux regards de leurs pairs - notamment par la transformation progressive des "curateurs" en véritables "auteurs" d'expositions - pour s'apercevoir qu'ils ne sont visibles que par eux.

Ce manque de visibilité des rouages contribue au discrédit dont pâtit l'art contemporain au-delà de son propre monde. Il est fauteur à la fois d'incompréhension sur le plan artistique et de déficit démocratique sur le plan politique, dès lors du moins que ces médiations relèvent d'institutions publiques - quant aux acteurs privés, leurs goûts peuvent être critiqués mais non remis en question, puisqu'ils n'engagent qu'eux-mêmes.

La conclusion s'impose : il faut pallier ce manque de visibilité des médiations en exposant l'action des intermédiaires de l'art, au-delà des limites de ce monde. C'est la seule façon, premièrement, de leur rendre justice et, deuxièmement, de les inciter à rendre des comptes au public. Comme le savent bien les artistes, toute "exposition" permet à la fois d'exister publiquement, et d'autoriser les critiques. L'un ne va pas sans l'autre.

Voici donc quelques idées d'"expositions" permettant au public d'avoir prise sur le travail des intermédiaires, en les incitant à rendre des comptes. Tout d'abord, il faudrait donner aux décisions plus de publicité : pourquoi les grands musées, les FRAC, le Fonds national d'art contemporain (FNAC), la Délégation aux arts plastiques (DAP) n'organisent-ils pas des conférences de presse annuelles présentant leurs acquisitions ou commandes publiques et explicitant les raisons de leurs choix ?

Pourquoi les commissions habilitées à faire ces choix au nom de la puissance publique ne diffuseraient-elles pas sur Internet les procès-verbaux de leurs séances ? Pourquoi enfin n'organiserait-on pas, comme cela se fait aux Etats-Unis, des débats publics en cas de controverses sur des commandes, des achats, des subventions, des expositions ?

Par ailleurs, il serait bon d'encourager nos institutions culturelles au pluralisme : élaborer un guide des bonnes pratiques en matière de recrutement des commissions d'achat et de subventions, de façon à assurer le maximum de pluralité des sensibilités et des genres ; ouvrir les achats et subventions à tous les courants de l'art actuel, et pas seulement aux installations, performances, vidéos et photographies plasticienne ; et inviter systématiquement un expert étranger à participer aux principales commissions. Mais il serait bon aussi de rendre justice au travail des intermédiaires de l'art, en le montrant, en l'aidant, en le récompensant. L'on pourrait par exemple instaurer des prix annuels pour la galerie la plus dynamique, la meilleure exposition, le meilleur catalogue, le meilleur livre, le meilleur éditeur, avec cérémonie publique aussi largement médiatisée que possible.

Les centres d'art pourraient organiser des opérations annuelles du type portes ouvertes, proposant des discussions avec les équipes et l'exposé par chacun de qui fait quoi (sélection, transport, accrochage, rédaction, médiation...). L'association CulturesFrance (ex-AFAA) pourrait créer une chaire annuelle sabbatique pour voyages de formation des spécialistes d'art à l'étranger, du type "Villa Médicis hors les murs", avec conférence publique à l'issue de la mission où l'intéressé en exposerait les acquis. Enfin, il ne serait sans doute pas inutile que le ministère de la culture commande des enquêtes sociologiques sur les problèmes de formation, de recrutement, de statut économique et social, de reconnaissance des intermédiaires, qui sont encore très mal connus.

Ce ne sont là que quelques pistes, limitées certes mais concrètes, immédiatement praticables, et conformes à l'esprit de transparence des décisions publiques propre à une vraie démocratie.