REVLLONE TALKS FINE ART PHOTOGRAPHY

Fine art photography

Love clicking pictures? Got an eye for beauty? Well then fine art photography is for you. J Fine art photography is photography created with the vision of the artist as photographer. Fine art photography stands in contrast to photojournalism, which provides a visual account for news events, and commercial photography, the primary focus of which is to advertise products or services. "Fine art photography": Also called "decor photography," "photo decor," or "wall decor," this "involves selling large photos... that can be used as wall art" "It is a picture that is produced for sale or display rather than one that is produced in response to a commercial commission". In 1961, Dr S.D.Jouhar founder and Chairman of the Photographic Fine Art Association, said that their definition of Fine Art was “Creating images that evoke emotion by a photographic process in which one's mind and imagination are freely but competently exercised.”  

Rhein II

There’s a relatively short list of really hot names in the photography market that consistently do well at auction, such as earlier twentieth century photographers like Richard Avedon and Irvin Penn, Helmut Newton, and living artists such as Cindy Sherman and Andreas Gursky. A 1999 Andreas Gursky work, Rhein II, holds the record for the most expensive photograph to be sold at auction after it fetched $4.3 million.

Historically, prices for fine art photography have tended to be much lower than those fetched by artists working in other medium, but that seems to be changing. Prices are definitely creeping up, but it’s not a steep curve, more of a gradual slop.

"A created image is like a painting," says Chennai-based photographer Varun Gupta, who has been showing his work since 2007. "You conceptualize it using space and light just like you would on canvas," he says. Photography as art is catching on in the city.

But can the gap between fine art photography and the rest of the fine art market ever be fully closed? Arthur Goldberg, a major US collector of contemporary photography for the last 40 years, said that it was up to history to decide if there should be equality between the two when he spoke at the Artelligence conference in New York . However, he thought that buying photography was a real opportunity to own great art at a lower price. “Great art is great art,” he said, “whatever the medium.”

Alfred Stieglitz's photograph The Steerage (1907) was one of the first works of artistic modernism. Stieglitz was notable for introducing fine art photography into museum collections