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).

And in January the International Center of Photography (ICP), in New York, launched its "Year of Fashion," a series of six exhibitions organized by the ICP’s Carol Squiers and guest curator Aletti. Among the four shows currently on view through May 3 are a solo exhibition of Edward Steichen’s commercial work produced during his reign as chief photographer for Vogue and Vanity Fair, from 1923 to 1937, and "Weird Beauty: Fashion Photography Now," which includes tear sheets and enlarged, framed photographs by contemporary big-shots like Klein; Nick Knight, who began as a favorite of i-D in the ’80s; Meisel; Roversi; the Norwegian Sølve Sundsbø; Teller; and Bruce Weber, who, in recent years, is responsible for Abercrombie & Fitch’s steamy billboards and catalogue imagery. On May 15, "Avedon Fashion: Photographs, 1944-2000" takes center stage at the museum.

Meanwhile, in Milan, "Extreme Beauty in Vogue," an exhibition commissioned by the fashion designers Domenico Dolce and Stefano Gabbana and art-directed by the architect Jean Nouvel, opens on March 4 in the Palazzo della Ragione. The show, which runs through May 10, is a look back at 75 years of fashion photography in Vogue by Avedon, Annie Leibovitz (of Vanity Fair portrait fame), Klein and Penn, to name a few.

Contemporary fashion pictures have been surfacing at photography fairs as well. In December, Art Photo Expo, held during Art Basel Miami Beach, presented the second edition of its sale exposition In Fashion Photo, with 250 works by 35 fashion photographers, including the British lensman Miles Aldridge, known for his highly stylized and decadently glamorous pictures; the French photographer Bettina Rheims, who is celebrated for her portraiture — both fine-art and commercial, for clients like Chanel; and Sundsbø. Prices, according to François Trabelsi, who organized the show, ranged from $4,000 to $100,000.

Not many dealers, however, have a history of selling contemporary fashion work. The few notable exceptions include New York’s Staley-Wise Gallery and Hamiltons Gallery, in London, which shows primarily vintage pictures. Such sparse representation is partly because fashion images tend to acquire value in collectors’ eyes only with historical distance; freshly published pictures don’t yet have the patina of a classic Avedon or Penn.

Also holding the market back is the fact that commercial photographers often earn much more from a single day’s shoot than from the sale of one of their prints through a dealer. Some of them, moreover, are exclusively focused on creating images that reproduce well in publication. Meisel, for instance, "really works for the page," says Aletti, who notes that Meisel is in nearly every issue of Italian Vogue (which is edited by Franca Sozzani and art-directed by Luca Stoppini), where he is often given as many as 30 pages, providing him with creative leeway not seen in many American publications.

Commercial photographers, of course, work with stylists, editors and designers, a collaboration that perhaps complicates the creative ownership of an image. The issue of legal ownership was simplified in the 1970s, when, according to Staley-Wise’s Taki Wise, contracts were changed so that the copyright belongs to the photographer. Challenges remain for fashion photographers when it comes to creating a market for their work, including the job of figuring out how to define their editions. Fine-art photographers, says Wise, sometimes limit their prints to as few as three or five in number. But many are prepared to take on these tasks. "They want to be perceived as artists; they want to have that attention in the gallery world and to be collected," says Aletti. There’s evidence that today’s fashion photographers are starting to earn this respect.

Last fall, for the first time, New York’s Cook Fine Arts exhibited contemporary work, including prints by Aldrige and fellow Englishman Simon Emmett, priced at $5,000 and $4,500 respectively, alongside classic photographs by Avedon and the like. "There are so many extraordinary images that just happen to be fashion images," says gallery director Scott Cook. "If we keep showing them regularly, people will start buying them."

Connecticut-born David LaChapelle has shown at Staley-Wise and at New York’s Tony Shafrazi Gallery, exhibiting his slick, sexually charged fashion work and noncommercial photographs. The 2006 "Pictures for Italian Vogue," at Staley-Wise, was firmly in the former category. But "Auguries of Innocence," at Shafrazi last fall, included three-dimensional installations evoking politics and warfare, such as Holy War, 2008, a digital C-print on recycled cardboard with audio and visual electronics — clearly not something that would translate to print.

Klein has exhibited his commercial celebrity portraiture, including images from his shoot of Pitt and Jolie for W, at Gagosian Gallery in Los Angeles and at Deitch Projects, in New York. A 2006 show at Wessel + O’Connor Fine Art, in Brooklyn, contained photographs from his series for W featuring the fashion designer Tom Ford cavorting with a crew of male and female models.

Teller’s work has been regularly exhibited. He was commissioned to "interpret" the Ukraine for the 2007 Venice Biennial and decided to use the country as a setting for a W fashion shoot, mixing portraits and fashion images with documentary-style photographs. His February 2008 show at Lehmann Maupin displayed the printed pages of W together with the large-scale framed photos from the shoot. For "Nürnberg," his 2006 exhibition at Lehmann Maupin, he drew entirely from personal history. The series captures changes to the city where Teller spent time as a child — one image depicts decaying parade grounds used for rallies by the Nazis — as well as the growth of his own family over a four-year period. "He’s been so important to contemporary visual culture," says Maupin. "He’s an artist with a strong eye and a particular way of looking at things."

Two of the more obvious aesthetic references for today’s generation of fashion photographers are the images of Newton and the playfully kinky pictures of the Frenchman Guy Bourdin, who died in 1991. Bourdin was uninterested in selling his work, so his market consists of posthumous prints. His record was set at Phillips de Pury & Company, in London, in May 2008 when a 1978 image — of a woman in high heels, shown from the waist down spread across the back of a sofa — from his series of campaigns for the shoemaker Charles Jourdan sold for £8,750 ($17,254).

Although the polite elegance of classic material by Avedon and Penn is less of a stylistic influence today, the two deserve credit for being the market’s primary pioneers. Avedon was a staff photographer from 1945 to 1965 at Harper’s Bazaar, where he was championed by the legendary art director Alexey Brodovitch. He changed the way fashion was shot, showing his models in action — jumping off curbs or twirling on steps. The top price at auction for Avedon’s fashion work was set at Christie’s in April 2007, when Fashion, a portfolio of 11 prints, sold for $240,000, far above its $50,000 high estimate; his overall auction record is $464,000, paid in 2005, also at Christie’s New York, for a 1990 printing of a four-set 1967 portrait of the Beatles. This past October, Sotheby’s New York fetched $180,000 for Dovima with Elephants, Evening Dress by Dior, Cirque d’Hiver, Paris, 1955, which was originally published in the September 1955 issue of Harper’s Bazaar. The photograph is so iconic, says Wise, "that it has become the ultimate Avedon."

If there is an "ultimate" Penn fashion photograph, it might be his Black and White Vogue Cover (Jean Patchett), 1950. In its geometry and graphic punch, the image takes full advantage of the medium’s ability to create abstract patterns. It surely helped Vogue sell its magazine, and these days prints of it bring six figures: A 1976 platinum-palladium impression sold at Christie’s New York in April 2008 for $481,000, marking the artist’s second highest price at auction behind the $529,000 paid, in the same sale, for the noncommercial portrait Cuzco Children, taken in 1948.

Penn went to work for Vogue in the early 1940s, under the art director Alexander Liberman, and continues to photograph for the magazine today. He coined a new look, placing models against plain backdrops to draw attention to the fashion itself rather than the surroundings. According to Peter MacGill, of New York’s Pace/MacGill Gallery, which represents the 92-year-old artist, Penn’s work sells for between $30,000 and $1 million. Especially desirable are several of his fashion images, such as Harlequin Dress, 1950, of his wife and muse, Lisa Fonssagrives-Penn, a 1983 print of which sold for £204,000 ($406,455) at Phillips in London in 2007. "It’s a wonderful situation that this guy had a job, and he saw it as a job, but it was also his joy to make these pictures," says MacGill.

Perhaps it’s that formula that has allowed Penn to completely collapse the distinction between fine art and fashion in his oeuvre. "There’s really no differentiation between any of his work," says MacGill. "It’s all sought after, it just depends on who’s doing the seeking." That’s a phenomenon countless contemporary fashion photographers would surely love to emulate.

"Next Season's Collection?" originally appeared in the March 2009 issue of Art+Auction. For a complete list of articles from this issue available on ARTINFO, see Art+Auction's March 2009 Table of Contents.