I’ve only ever had a passing interest in the fiscal woes of Annie Leibovitz, partly because I’ve mostly grown out of whatever interest I had in her work and partly because anything I’ve seen of hers in recent years makes me feel like she’s been subsumed by the machine she helped create. To me I find this makes her work less interesting (though there’s no denying her past status as a doyenne of the editorial portrait) but the Financial Times has an interesting article that uses her financial story as a springboard to delve into the intersection of photography and the fine art world.

(In my view, not only has she become just another cog inside the celeb machine there has also seemed to be a heightened sense of desperation in some of her work that feels like it’s run parallel with recent economic overextension and insecurity. Things such as questionable photoshop retouching and cannibalizing her own image – getting all meta on us by appearing in ads with Baryshnikov while her own photo book oh-so-subtly pokes out of an LV bag. No doubt she received her usual shoot fee plus a modelling fee; I wonder if she also expensed the books as props… ; )

Apparently the highest grossing sale of one of her prints at auction is a mere £31 200 which is dwarfed by an order of magnitude at print auctions of her now-dead photographer peers like Penn and Avedon. And if we’re talking about artists that happen to use photography that difference becomes several orders of magnitude.

The story describes how Leibovitz, renowned as being headstrong and prolific, has been buckling down recently in order to woo the art world. Much of that effort seems to be aimed at creating a strategic scarcity to her work. But from a collecting perspective photography has always suffered from the curse of its very nature as a medium perfectly aligned with an era of mass reproduction. Certainly the fact that making a basic photograph takes very little training and, more and more, its shear ubiquity as humanity’s preferred method of documenting itself means the supply side far outweighs demand. (The endgame of this can be seen perhaps most acutely in the crash of the stock photography market.)

But photography has paid some dues, as it were…

“Her change of heart says something about the photography market itself – its sense of having had to struggle to be taken seriously, to be categorised as art in the same way as painting or sculpture. “That has been a concerted effort on everyone’s part, a dedicated campaign to transcend the photography market and enter the bigger one where more money is available,” says Boloten.

I must admit to being sceptical of the pursuit of money as the final objective, especially when one needs to increase their print value from $30k to $300k or $3M or more, clearly numbers that are not connected with reality (albeit nice to have).

The unspoken fear is that, unless everyone pulls together, this three-decade effort could falter, an effort that has done more for the value of photography than any individual – even Annie Leibovitz.”

and later…

Not only did the total value of the contemporary photography market rise by 285 per cent between 1993 and 2008, according to Art Market Research, but it has been more resilient than contemporary art in the post-2008 downturn. “There has been a surprisingly strong comeback this year,” says Novak. “Photography has always been undervalued but it is less undervalued now.”

(A statement like this 285% needs to be qualified: clearly photography prices had less distance to fall. And a rise of several hundred percent isn’t difficult if you’re coming from so low on the ladder.)

Canadian Art magazine’s current issue is subtitled “Photography, the revival of realism” and features Ed Burtynsky and Donald Weber so clearly those dues are paying some reward in this country.

But I wonder about all of this. The art market likes rarefied and rare things. However what photography is particularly good at is reflecting us back to ourselves, who and where we are, showing our commonality and – chicken or egg? – being common itself. We live in an age of ever increasing more-ness but there is a horizon. Somewhere.

For an alternative view on aspects of the art market check out Ben Lewis’s documentary The Great Contemporary Art Bubble.

EDIT:
My mistake, was remembering a book of her dance work but it’s actually a William Ewing book.