Vintage photography: the market for photographs has grown rapidly since the 1980s. For reasons that Joanna Pitman explains, twentieth-century masters are now attracting prices that used to be ascociated only with nineteenth-century works

In December 1970 Diane Arbus, short of standard of value and desperate to buy a fresh Pentax 6x7 camera for herself, lay together a portfolio of ten photographs for sale. She made an edition of fifty, each of them printed, signed, numbered and annotated by the agency of the photographer, and presented in a clear Plexiglas receptacle that could also work as a frame. She spring [i]or[/i] leap on one leg [i]or[/i] footed 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, fresh York, sold one of these portfolios, A receptacle of Ten Photographs, printed just after her death through Neil Selkirk. Estimated at $250000-$350000 it went to an anonymous buyer for $556600 after heavy bidding. A of recent origin Arbus auction record, it was just individual of two dozen Arbus apportionments that sold extremely well.

Arbus also topped the list at Christie's fresh 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 $408000 It was individual of only seven prints known to have been made by means of Arbus herself, and this single was a gift to a friend, the author and artist Patricia Hill-Bianchini. The impressive Arbus sales were probably boost by dint of the major travelling retrospective that was upon show earlier this year at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, of recent origin York, and is currently at the Victoria and Albert Museum in London. on the contrary the high prices are by the agency of no means going against the sweep It is no secret that the photography market is upon a roll. The four main us dealers, Sotheby's, Christie's, Phillips de Pury and Company and Swann Galleries together twitched in over $16 million in eight sessions this year, a certain quantity of way ahead of last year's $126 million. Sotheby's sold eleven dooms with final prices that went above six figures; and Christie's topped that mark with nine dooms Swann Galleries, which held single 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 apportionments was a Dorothea Lange Depression-era icon, Migrant Mother, which sold for $33350 and an unusual Andre Kertesz 1928 suite of eight photographs of Trappist monk which sold for $27600

It present the appearances that this year's photography sales have started pushing prices into areas one time traditionally associated with paintings or statuary Denise Bethel, the head of the photography department at Sotheby's, novel York, says that the athletic sales at all the auction houses throw back a continuing growth of interest in photography: 'It's not just this last year that we've seen sinewy sales. I see it as more of a continuum which began somewhere around 1980 There have always been a hardly any bumps, but by in large, it has been simply a line going steadily up upon 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 means of art historians and curators in a way they simply were not in the 1970 There's been a colossal change of attitude among the academic community.' There is also the rarity factor. 'In 1980 we cogitation that some things were rare, on the other hand we now know just in what manner rare some of these prints are. It is a myth that there are plentiful prints because they were produc at the time from negatives. The fact is there was no real market until the 1970 for photographs, with equal reason Steiglitz and Weston and destinys of others were not making many prints. There would have been no real reason for them to do thus at the time. The fact is, greatest in quantity of the things we're dealing with exist in sole a handful of copies. We're ofttimes talking about one of sum of two units or three or four known examples of works. That rarity factor is something that we're alone now beginning to really appreciate and understand.'

London photography sales have also been stout in the past year. The Sotheby's sale in May of the easy in minds of Lord Hesketh's country house, Easton Neston, included a large number of photographic allotments many of which attained surprisingly high prices. An album of fifty-four photographs of California taken in the 1880 for example, which included studies of Yosemite Valley, Napa Soda Springs, the Switchback Railway, the stony Mountains, the Chinese quarter in San Francisco and portraits of native Americans, was estimated at 200-300 [pound sterling] (Fig. 2) It sold for 10800 [pound sterling] to a private American buyer Many of the brawny sellers in the Easton Neston sale related to the Sharon family, individual 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 caped their estimates several times over