| Feb 5, 2009 | Pine & Woods: The American Typologies | | | |
On Luminous-Lint we've been fortunate with collectors and dealers who handle vernacular photographs and this exhibition assembles typologies but I'll let the artists Pine & Woods speak for themselves:
We are photo-based artists currently living and working in the Southern California area. We have, for the last ten years collaborated on a series of works, The American Typologies, composed of found photographs. The size and content of each Typology varies and is largely based on Middle America at mid 20th century. Our work depends for its strength on the preferences of two minds and four eyes.
Putting order to chaos is an integral part of our working process. We have assembled an archive in the tens of thousands of images. It is from this cataloged archive that our art is achieved. Finished works can take several months and result from the painstaking process of picking and choosing, arranging and rearranging. Each work is unique and can range in size from 36" x 36" to 72" x 72"containing from 9 to 36 images.
Thanks to Pine & Woods for their patience during my recent move.
PhVTitle | Lightbox | Checklist
Exhibition: Pine & Woods: The American Typologies
More about this photographer
| 
| | Feb 4, 2009 | Portrait: Beggars | | | |
To get things rolling again on Luminous-Lint after my move to Canada here is an exhibition of photographs of beggars. The Italian author and satirical journalist Giovanni Guareschi (1908-1968) best known for his Don Camillo books wrote:
"When you share your last crust of bread with a beggar, you mustn't behave as if you were throwing a bone to a dog. You must give humbly, and thank him for allowing you to have a part in his hunger."
We are seeking further examples for this exhibition and would be particularly interested in Daguerreotypes, ambrotypes, albumen prints and tintypes depicting beggars.
PhVTitle | Lightbox | Checklist
Exhibition: Portrait: Beggars
| 
| | Feb 4, 2009 | George Eastman House Exhibition on pictorialism (Feb 7- May 31, 2009) | | | | Truth Beauty: Pictorialism and the Photograph as Art: 1845-1945
Exhibition opens Feb. 7 and continues until May 31, 2009 - George Eastman House
Take in the beauty of more than 100 treasures from the Eastman House collections. Featuring works by such well-known photographers as Alvin Langdon Coburn, Edward Steichen, Alfred Stieglitz, Robert Demachy, Frederick Evans, and F. Holland Day, this remarkable exhibition illustrates the Pictorialism movement's progression from its early influences to its lasting impact on photography and art. TruthBeauty curator and author Alison Nordström will provide a gallery tour of the exhibition on Thursday, Feb. 19, 6:30 p.m.
Exhibition details
Background information on Pictorialism
Thanks to the attentive support of collectors, particularly Photoseed, and galleries Luminous-Lint has been able to mount a number of online exhibitions that include many of the key publications on pictorialism along with exhibitions on significant photographers and schools. For those of you that see Camera Work as the most significant publication this will be a treat and a revelation as the less well known European publications started almost ten years earlier.
Publications
A Record of the Photographic Salon of 1895 (London)
Kodak Portfolio: Souvenir of the Eastman Photographic Exhibition 1897
Alfred Stieglitz: Picturesque Bits of New York and Other Studies (1897)
Die Kunst in der Photographie (1897)
Die Kunst in der Photographie (1898)
Die Kunst in der Photographie (1899)
Die Kunst in der Photographie (1900)
Die Kunst in der Photographie (1901)
Die Kunst in der Photographie (1897-1908)
G.L. Arlaud: Vingt Études de Nu en Plein Air
Gustave Marissiaux: Visions d’Artistes (1908)
Japanese pictorialism: Bunka Shashin-shu (1922)
Première Exposition d'Art Photographique - 1894 (The Photo-Club de Paris)
Deuxième Exposition d'Art Photographique - 1895 (The Photo-Club de Paris)
Troisième Exposition d'Art Photographique - 1896 (The Photo-Club de Paris)
Quatrième Année Salon de Photographie - 1897 (The Photo-Club de Paris)
Wiener Photographische Blätter: Herausgegeben Vom Camera-Club In Wien (1894)
Wiener Photographische Blätter: Herausgegeben Vom Camera-Club In Wien (1896)
American Pictorialism: Camera Work (1903-1917)
Photographers and schools
A. Aubrey Bodine: Baltimore Pictorialist
The Clarence H. White School of Photography
Themes
Erotica: A Pictorialist perspective
Flowers: A Pictorialist perspective
Trees: A Pictorialist perspective
Portraits: A Pictorialist perspective
Japanese Art Photography preserved on Postcards
|
| | Feb 1, 2009 | Andrew Garn: Magnitogorsk | | | |
Most of us have everyday lives far removed from that of heavy industry and at times in my life I've worked for large conglomerates such as Firestone Tyres and in the cable and wire rope works of Bridon in the UK. There is a magnificence in heavy industry despite the grime and often terrible working conditions - the scale is awesome and the ingenuity that can create immense plants stretches the mind. The recording of working conditions has a long tradition in documentary photography and it was common in the earliest Daguerreotypes to record workers with the tools of their trades - painters with their brushes, miners with shovels and picks and so on. Lewis Hine recorded aspects of child labor in the USA and the Bernd & Hilla Becher the typologies of industrial buildings. On this website there already exhibitions on the industrial remains of Eastern Europe recorded by Bruce Haley and the English industrial decay photographed by John Darwell.
In this online exhibition New York based photographer Andrew Garn takes us to Magnitogorsk in Russia.
The Magnitogorsk Metal Kombinat (MMK), built in the late 1920s during Stalin's Five Year Plan, is the largest steel plant in the world today. The sheer vastness and architectural complexity of this Siberian metal city, conceived with the ambition to become the "Pittsburgh of the East", is unparalleled throughout the world. An important record of political, social and manufacturing history, Magnitogorsk is also a feat of engineering and socialist ideals. The Russian steel plant, constructed on an uninhabited barren and hostile plain near the Ural River and a mountain rich in iron ore, stretches for over thirteen miles. By comparison, the great US Steel plant in Pittsburgh, PA, was a third of this size.
Thanks to Andrew Garn for his assistance with this exhibition.
PhVTitle | Lightbox | Checklist
Exhibition: Andrew Garn: Magnitogorsk
More about this photographer
| 
| | Jan 25, 2009 | Graphoscopes | | | |
As the photograph of the day is a graphoscope I thought that I would share a few other examples with you. Graphoscopes are magnifying viewers used largely in the 19th century. They consist of two parts - an easel to hold the image be it a photograph, engraving, object or piece of text and one large magnifying lens or two smaller ones. Charles John Rowsell of Stockwell Villas, South Lambeth Road, Surrey in England patented the first stereographoscope on February 1, 1864 in England for "Improvements in apparatus for viewing photographic and other pictures, coins, and medals, which is also applicable in the production of drawings and paintings." and versions of this magnifying viewer were made by notable optical instrument makers including Negretti and Zambra.
PhVTitle | Lightbox | Checklist
Exhibition: Stereo images: Storage and display
| 
| | Jan 25, 2009 | Giacomo Brunelli: Animals | | | |
Some time ago we put up an exhibition of the work of Giacomo Brunelli and I'm pleased to see that Dewi Lewis has published a book on his work. The Animals with a foreword by Alison Nordström of George Eastman House. (Hardback, clothbound 72 pages, 33 tritone photographs, 300mm x 247mm, ISBN: 978-1-904587-71-2). These photographs show a darker side of the ordinary - moments in the lifes of animals caught in their own fables. Giacomo has a website at http://www.giacomobrunelli.com/ for those that wish to explore.
PhVTitle | Lightbox | Checklist
Exhibition: Giacomo Brunelli: Creatures
More about this photographer
| 
| | Jan 21, 2009 | Change of address for Luminous-Lint | | | | Please note that Luminous-Lint has moved from the USA to Canada and I can be contacted at:
Alan Griffiths
Luminous-Lint
Box 33055
Quinpool RPO
Halifax NS
B3L 4T6
Canada
Email: alan@luminous-lint.com
As always I look forward to hearing from you as Luminous-Lint starts to return to activity. Best, Alan
|
| | Jan 19, 2009 | Upcoming Stereographica auction | | | |
There is an upcoming online auction (www.stereographica.com) that closes on Saturday, January 31, 2009. As always with the Stereographica auctions there are intriguing finds for the collector of early photography. The four examples I'm showing here include a CDV used as the first card in a photo album to encourage viewers to contribute their own image, a lithograph showing a photographer in a perilous position, a Graphoscope by Gustav Schneck, and a Daguerreotype showing twelve ladies with alarmingly similar hairstyles.
| 
| | Jan 14, 2009 | The Recession or: How I learned to Stop Worrying and Love Photographs! | | | |
LL takes a look at the Photographic Art Economy.
Since March 2008 the US S&P 500 fell 51%, the German DAX fell 41%, and the Japanese Nikkei 300 fell over 44%. With turmoil in the global financial markets seriously downgrading the value of traditional investment products, the need for more reliable alternative investment assets has never been more acute.
Investment in works of art, particularly important paintings, long a safe haven favorite in stressful economic times, has also fallen in aggregate value over the last six months. Sotheby’s stock fell 75% and its overall art sales revenues decreased 44%.
However, in recent months the price and sales volume of one particular alternative art collectible category, photographic art prints, have continued to rise–just as they have annually over the last few decades. Francis Hodgson, head of photography at Sotheby’s, said of the market in general: “If you look at prices over many years [photographic prints] have held their value spectacularly well.”
“Whatever the period or medium, the photography market enjoyed the strongest growth in the last decade. Between the last speculative bubble in the art market in 1990 and last summer, the Photography Price Index posted an increase of +131%.”
–Art Price, “Has photography proven crisis-proof?” (November 24, 2008)
Cognizant of the historic strength of the photographic market, several banks and public investment groups, including Deutsche Bank, Camera Work AG, and the Art Photography Fund, have acquired portfolios of photographic art that have shown steady growth even in the current economy.
This year to date Camera Work’s stock has gained 11.6%, the Fine Art Fund Group’s initial offering showed a 30% internal rate of return, and the Art Photography Fund showed a 8.4% cumulative return, supporting remarks made by New York photo-gallerist Lawrence Miller, who has said of art investment behavior in times of recession: “Interestingly, each time, as people scale back, they scale back into photography.”
The Photographic Art Market’s “Comparative Auction Index”, listing the sales price results from all major auction houses, shows a 14% yearly increase in photographic print sales since 1976.
According to a two year-old article in the Forbes, “Photography is one of the most steeply rising markets in the collecting world right now. In the New York spring photo auctions, the number of lots that sold for six figures rocketed from 25 last year to 85 this year. And auction records have been shattering at a neck-snapping pace.” The article shared advice from leading photographic art curators from across the US to identify their choice for undervalued artists. Examples range from nineteenth century topographic photographers such as Captain Linnaeus Tripe (1822-1902), 1940’s fashion photographer Louise Dahl-Wolfe (1895-1989), documentarian Esther Bubley (1921-1998), Midwest topographic photographer Wright Morris (1910-1998), American artist-curator Barbara Norfleet (b. 1926), photo-conceptualist Robert Heinecken (1931-2006), American humanist Dave Heath (b. 1931), to more recent contemporary photographers such as California artist John Divola (b. 1949), An-My Lê (b. 1960) from Vietnam, Koos Breukel (b. 1962) from the Netherlands, and Cao Fei (b. 1978) from China.
But the six-figure auction records mentioned in Forbes are primarily earned in the photographic art market by its “blue chip” stock, work by historically important photographers from its early Modernist era, 1910 to the 1930s, including Alfred Stieglitz, Edward Steichen, and Edward Weston. Most of the well-known photographic artists from this era have been actively traded, and over the last thirty years their print prices have consistently risen.
But the main question in investors’ minds is what is happening now? Alex Novak in his December 5, 2008 edition of the E-Photo Newsletter article titled: “Latest Market Observations: The View from Paris and Miami” states: “Big contemp art pieces are definitely being affected, which is very problematic for those dealers, although some are still certainly being sold at some pretty nose-bleed-high prices. I would not want to hold any of the high-priced pictures by Richard Prince, Cindy Sherman, Andreas Gursky, etc., unless I was prepared to do so for at least ten years or more.”
“Photographs that are readily available (later prints and work that have been made in fairly large editions) will be, and have already been, somewhat affected by the market, especially at auction. Also, those photographs/photographers that have experienced too sharp a rise over the last three years (think Penn, Avedon, Beard, Horst—late prints, Newton, Lindbergh, Stern, Frank, Weston, etc.) may have some difficulties selling for the more recent sky-high prices, especially at auction. On the other hand, most high quality and rare vintage photographs do not appear to be going down much, if anything at all (maybe sideways for a year or two).
Novak goes on to speculate that if market conditions worsen, “money's integral value will go down and the value of hard goods will all go up accordingly.” He states: “I think it now looks like a very good time to buy high quality vintage photographs if, 1. You can find anything worth buying (good stuff rarely comes out during a recession); 2. We don't have a further financial collapse and go into a full-fledged depression (unlikely at this juncture, but the Bush administration has made a royal hash out of the start of the financial bail-out); 3. You have money on hand and enough cash flow (big “ifs” for a lot of dealers, at least); 4. You have at least a five-or six-year time horizon. It actually appears to be the perfect time to buy for collectors, given these circumstances and a lot of care. There have even been a few recent buying/investment groups materializing on the market during this period already.”
This cautionary but positive news will not slow photographic art collectors and investors from seeking out winners in the art photography market. Historically the best and most consistent monetary appreciation has come from prints by important photographers whose estates once lost have been “rediscovered.” When such collections come on to the market prints first sell low and then rapidly build value until they are equalized at the monetary level equal to that of their artistic peers. A past example of undervalued/hidden estate collection is Paul Outerbridge (1896-1958). A key American photo-modernist in the 1920’s and a pioneer in color photography from the 1930s onwards, prints from Outerbridge’s rediscovered estate first sold in 1975 for $2,000 but now command up to $400,000.
A comparable bright spot in the market is the recently rediscovered photographic work by early Photo Modernist Emil Otto Hoppé (www.eohoppe.com). Long buried in a London picture library the Hoppé Estate Collection of vintage photographs from the 1920’s and 1930’s have recently been compared by photography curator Phillip Prodger of the Peabody Essex Museum to Steichen, Stieglitz, and Weston—artists whose prints sell for an average of $75,500, $72,200, and $74,900, respectively. Two recent exhibitions in 2006 and 2007 from the Hoppé Estate Collection saw the release of several of Hoppé’s prime vintage Modernist prints into the market for the first time since the 1940’s. In 2005 Hoppé prints sold at an average price of $3,770 but by 2006 they had risen to an average of $7,725. Since 2005 Hoppé prices have since risen almost four-fold to an average of $14,062 by October 2008—a 273% increase in the price of prime vintage prints in less than four years.
According to Bruce Silverstein, the New York gallerist representing Hoppé: “As the history of photography is still being written, it is becoming increasingly clear that E.O. Hoppé played a major role in the evolution of Modernist photography both in Europe, having influenced the industrial images of Albert Renger-Patsch and Werner Mantz, and as well in the United States, where his images predate equivalent but better known works by Charles Sheeler, Walker Evans and Berenice Abbott.”
Luminous Lint’s advice to collectors: do your homework, buy prudently, and you can not only enjoy great photographic treasures, but also hold investments that help you weather the current financial crisis and realize future gains that will far exceed those of the traditional investment market.
REFERENCES
Quotations
- “Has Photography proven crisis-proof?" Art Market Insight, 11/2008
- Francis Hodgson, head of photography at Sotheby’s; from “The art world is
no longer a safe haven” in London’s Sunday Times, 10/12/2008
- Laurence Miller, director, Lawrence Miller Gallery; from “Wall Street Sends Tremors to 57th Street Art Dealers” on Bloomberg.com, 10/17/2008
- “Top 12 undervalued photographers” in Forbes, 10/28/2006
- “Latest Market Observations: The View from Paris and Miami”: E-Photo Newsletter, 12/05/2008
- E.O. Hoppé Estate Collection Newsletter, "Hoppé Print Prices on the Rise" 1/2009
- Phillip Prodger, Curator of Photography, Peabody Essex Museum “E.O. Hoppé, Amerika”
- Bruce Silverstein: personal communication, 11/2008
Indices & Reports
Funds
| 
| | Jan 8, 2009 | Have you moved recently….? | | | | Well that was fun! Over the last few weeks I've packed up our house in Los Angeles, driven 4,000 miles to our new house in Halifax in north eastern Canada, had fun with customs, been caught in a couple of blizzards and started to unpack. As I'm now sorting out a new office and am surrounded by stacks of photographic books, odd cables, unanswered emails and a host of online exhibitions that need to be dealt with it can seem a little daunting but have no fear Luminous-Lint is about to come back on stream to explore the history of Photography.
Thanks to everybody who has sent kind notes via email, Facebook, Skype or the numerous other communications systems we need to function these days and to those who need my address drop me an email and I'll send it through. Welcome to a NEW YEAR, thanks for all your support and let's see what we can do together in 2009.
All the very best, Alan
|
|
Ongoing • Newest • Newer • Older • Oldest Mode: LL C_NEWS_CF
|
LuminousLint 
@LuminousLint
