Next Season's Collection?

SEE ALSO

Digging for Golden-Era Deals

Buyers need deep pockets to afford work by the acknowledged masters of the golden age of fashion photography.

Juergen Teller Edward Steichen Richard Avedon Guy Bourdin Steven Klein Annie Leibovitz Steven Meisel Helmut Newton

Send a letter to the Editor

Save to Del.icio.us Digg this

Pictures produced on assignment by photographers who established themselves during the golden age of fashion photography, from the 1930s through the ’50s, are routinely treated as valuable collectibles. In fact commissioned images by the leading figures from this era — Richard Avedon, Helmut Newton and the still-thriving Irving Penn — have catapulted into the six figures at auction. Take Newton’s Sie Kommen, Paris (Naked and Dressed), Vogue Studios, which captures a pack of models strutting in designer attire next to an identical portrait of them in the nude. The photograph made its way from a 1981 issue of French Vogue to Christie’s New York in December 2008, where an editioned print fetched $662,500. That sum is the record price for a commercial fashion photograph at auction. In contrast, the work of today’s most sought-after practitioners in the field is struggling to find a widespread market despite its profound cultural impact.

Juergen Teller, for example, helped usher in the ’90s "grunge" aesthetic and today produces gritty, snapshot-style images that, unlike most fashion photographers, he never retouches. He is represented by New York’s Lehmann Maupin gallery, where his photographs sell for $10,000 up to $50,000 for a commissioned portrait. And although his work is collected, it is not pursued as extensively as one might expect for someone of such influence. "His work really doesn’t come up at auction," says gallery director David Maupin. Teller’s auction history to date is composed of five lots — each with a sale price of less than $1,000 and all of the same image, Erin, Paris, 2004, a special project Teller shot for the German art magazine Texte zur Kunst and printed in an uncharacteristically large edition of 100.

Not that contemporary fashion photography doesn’t have a following. Consider the buzz surrounding American photographer Steven Klein’s 60-page 2005 shoot for W — which photography critic Vince Aletti calls America’s most exciting fashion magazine — of Brad Pitt (then recently separated from Jennifer Aniston) and Angelina Jolie as a disaffected suburban couple. The series created the sort of media exposure that made Klein himself a bold-faced name. One print, Angelina and Brad, Case Study #13, Image 10, of Jolie looking bored in a cocktail dress and Pitt in a 1950s-style suit, even ended up at auction, fetching £19,200 ($37,882) at Christie’s London in May 2007.

If the market has been slow to appreciate contemporary fashion photography, some of the world’s leading fine-art institutions have been far quicker to extend recognition. In 2004 the Museum of Modern Art in New York presented "Fashioning Fiction in Photography since 1990," the institution’s first exhibition devoted to fashion photography. Among the talents spotlighted were the British photographer Craig McDean, who got his start on the pages of the U.K. publications i-D and The Face; New York-based Steven Meisel, a regular in Vogue; Teller; and Ellen von Unwerth, the German photographer made famous by her popular ’90s campaign for Guess? Jeans featuring the model Claudia Schiffer.

Then, in 2007, the National Portrait Gallery in London organized the show "Face of Fashion," which highlighted the work of six photographers with a particular knack for portraiture: the London-based duo Mert Alas and Marcus Piggott; Paolo Roversi, the Paris-based photographer who kicked off his career in fashion at Marie Claire in the ’70s; Mario Sorrenti, the Naples-born New Yorker whose 1993 campaign for Calvin Klein’s Obsession fragrance brought Kate Moss, whom it featured, instant celebrity; and Corinne Day, who shot Moss in her debut editorial for a 1990 issue of The Face. In a twist, the gallery commissioned Day to create a portrait of Moss for its permanent collection timed to coincide with the show. The resulting tableau of nine snapshots capture the model making a variety of unposed expressions while mid-conversation with Day (see our cover).