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The sharpest eyes in the world descend on Paris for a stream of events celebrating international image-making, bringing photography to light as a major market force.
As the photography fine art market booms and digital cameras are an everyday accessory, creativity's Zeitgeist finds its focal point in photography.
Photography has always touched on the philosophical, teasing out questions about creation, reality and representation. Images, Aristotle wrote long ago, are like sensuous contents except they contain no matter.
Contain no matter? Ever more true, as the digital image, just a numeric series of zeros and ones, overshadows the tangible silver negative.
Like sensuous contents? From powerfully alluring marketing images to horrifying war photography, images are evocative.
This November, Paris brings photography into focus. For its eleventh consecutive year, Paris Photo (http://www.parisphoto.fr/) presents a superb sampling of still photography at the Carrousel du Louvre, with over 100 international galleries and publishers, and Italy as the country of honor. While it may be an off-year for the Mois de la Photo (http://www.mep-fr.org/moisdelaphoto2006/fr/10-home/default.htm), when galleries around Paris honor photography within their walls, Paris Photo is a fine show of the effervescent Western photographic art market. An equally charismatic force, however, is coming from the East. The Musée du Quai Branly's curating initiative, Photoquai (http://www.photoquai.fr/fr/), collaborates with venues around the city to showcase photographers who pose an intimate view of their home countries, from South Africa to the Middle East.
This is just one example of the dynamic confrontations surrounding the medium.
An artistic practice in its own right, photography is merging within creative professions, offering an extension and a complement to a creator's vision in the fields of design, sculpture and painting. Karl Lagerfeld photographs his own designs for Chanel's advertising campaigns, maintaining total aesthetic control from sketchpad conception to public domain; Lagerfeld is also developing a rich editorial career, recently shooting for Playboy France. Former Dior Homme prodigy Hedi Slimane's (http://www.hedislimane.com/) photographs are hot on the international art gallery circuit. Even fashion models like Eva Herzigova and Astrid Muñoz are switching sides to take control of the lens.
But this is nothing new. The elegant 1920s Vogue model Lee Miller, in addition to being Man Ray's intimate, went on to produce some of the greatest war reportage of the second World War, currently on view at London's Victoria and Albert Museum (http://www.vam.ac.uk/exhibitions/future_exhibs/lee_miller/index.html). Perhaps politics and fashion have always been secret bedfellows, as U.S. portrait photographer Annie Leibovitz photographed Mikhail Gorbachev, among other unlikely models, for a worldwide Louis Vuitton campaign - producing one of the most original commercial image collaborations to date.
Constantin Brâncusi, a key figure in the canon of modern sculpture, produced 1200 photographs in his lifetime in order, he claimed, to maintain representative control and reflect upon his sculptures through a different perspective. These photographs are fetching more than certain Diane Arbus or Irving Penn photographs at the moment. Even Edgar Degas and Pablo Picasso put their eye to photography for a time. However, on the contrary, Magnum Photo Agency legend and founder Henri Cartier-Bresson evolved in the opposite direction, away from the camera, renouncing photography in his later years to produce only pencil sketches and paintings.
Constantin Brâncusi was notably close friends with Edward Steichen, whose career embodies the very notion of photography as a dilettante genre and a commercial wonder child. Steichen, originally trained in painting, went on to work as an art, fashion and government photographer, in addition to later career incarnations as a curator and publisher. Four hundred examples of his work are showing at the Jeu de Paume (http://www.jeudepaume.org/?page=article&idArt=419&lieu=7) through December, for the first time in Paris since 1961, offering a comprehensive view of his career which, above all, sought to give photography a more elevated role in modern art.
Photography is causing little market revolutions everywhere, inciting every investment-minded aesthete to chase and define image value. This year, Charles Saatchi (http://www.saatchi-gallery.co.uk/) opened an online space for artists to sell their work commission-free. With a section dedicated exclusively to photography, now unknown photographers in China can reach the eyes of the moneyed London art market, as the site attracts 40 million-plus hits a day. Digital photography is democratizing image-making; now Saatchi hopes to do the same for image-buying.
Auction house Phillips de Pury & Company (http://www.phillipsdepury.com), which partnered this year with the Saatchi Gallery's physical London location to allow free entrance to all visitors, keeps an astute perspective on the market. Charles Scheips, Worldwide Director of Photographs for Phillips de Pury & Company, takes into consideration the more recent practice of creating print editions - a necessity with modern print and reproduction capabilities, but inconceivable a hundred years ago when prints were singular creations. A November 20th London auction with an alternative look at photography in British culture (http://www.phillipsdepury.com/auctions.aspx?sn=UK040207), as well as an early November exhibition of unseen images by Guy Bourdin at the Victoria House (http://www.phillipsdepury.com/exhibitions.aspx?sn=UK020507), bring a bit of the photography spotlight across the Channel.
Corporations such as BMW are sponsoring photography prizes (http://www.parisphoto.fr/29/prix_bmw_paris_photo.htm?lang=uk). Powerful banks, such as HSBC, are not only sponsoring photography prizes but are building formidable collections and foundations around photography initiatives (http://relationsmedia.photographie.com/?pubid=103951&pag=4&secid=12&rubid=9&PHPSESSID=656aaf6ff9b78a8e4f65c619676234ab). Christie's and Sotheby's are pushing unprecedented prices in their May auctions, with a record sale in 2006 that sold a moody Steichen image for a fresh $2.9 million.
Perhaps the market saturation, commercial speculation and fervent dialogue about photography mark an important historical right of passage for the medium. Photography's value to the history of art and to society at large has not even begun to settle into scalable intelligence, but in the process, photography is claiming a firmer stake - at least the market tells us so - as a veritable fine art medium.
French poet, critic and translator Charles Baudelaire was notoriously hesitant about photography. In a critique a hundred and fifty years ago, wary of its realism, he claimed its only real value was to free the novelists from lengthy descriptions of place. If the painter of modern life were to exist today, however, he would no doubt have a digital camera with him at all times.
Pictures are becoming worth more than just a thousand words and, while market indicators are not to be taken as truth, it is reasonably safe to say that the future of modern aesthetics may well just be refracted in glass.