The concept of being editioned or un-editioned is not crucial; rather it’s about what’s behind it, the intention, the integrity, the artistry.
categorise these things as people just switch between categories. They can be in many categories at once. You have to evaluate everybody individually. Like photojournalism becoming recognized as a great work of art, taking on a status other than that for which it was originally intended – for editorial for example? Going back to FSA photography before the Second World War. Those people who took documentary took that next step into ‘art’. So which contemporary photographers would you put in that category now? Simon Norfolk, Luc Delahaye. Delahaye was a war photographer who ten or twelve years ago became an art photographer and makes a total output of only two or three pictures a year. I think Simon Norfolk is absolutely wonderful at what he does.
But there are examples that do work? Certainly Irving Penn, Richard Avedon and Helmut Newton are brilliant.
Do you think that it has something to do with the duration of an image? When it is taken for a newspaper it may be there one day and gone the next, unlike an art image that has a longer life because of the way in which it is displayed, in an exhibition say? That’s happened to some war correspondents from the Second World War. Dorethea Lange believed she was an artist beforehand. She was a portrait photographer who had been steeped in the San Francisco art scene and was working in that. When she worked for the FSA she brought that canon to it. She borrows the negatives back and makes exhibition prints, lavishly done with a very particular aesthetic.You can see and understand that she is an artist making a work of art. The marketers can make it into a work of art or the artists can do it. So who’s behind the work of art? Magnum makes some into a work of art rather than the artist. Some of these guys are artists, some of them aren’t. Koudelka for instance makes a print and spends an enormous amount of time to achieve the desired
What is your feeling about Guy Bourdin? I think when you get into Guy Bourdin it’s a little more problematic. But again I think those are fairly unsubtle. Herb Ritts for example - the Getty just did a big retrospective of him – I guess because in Los Angeles and advertising and the MET Ritts’ work has made a huge impact and is copied a lot. The question is whether to compare his male nudes to, say, Mapplethorpe or compare his other stuff to Helmut Newton. I find their work a lot more engaging in the long term, in the sense that you can look at it for a long time. That’s just my personal opinion. Do you think that these markets are driven by nostalgia as well? Certainly, in the Horst pictures of famous actresses, there’s a lot of that, although they are aesthetically very beautiful prints. He was a master printer. It’s hard to
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photographic dealers are very conservative most of the time, but the art dealers tend to be very un-conservative about marketing work. That’s not true of all art dealers, but I’m trying to make a point. Colour work has become popular now in the last ten years; there has been a movement into new areas. Fashion never used to be collectable for example. That’s fine, but they seem to ignore the traditional values we place on pictures. I’ve not leapt into those markets because the images tend to be in the world of illustration. The reason they don’t seem to work for me is that advertising and fashion images are meant to arrest your attention to sell a product. So, for example, when you are flipping through a magazine you would think ‘wow look at that’ when you come across it. As you live with the piece for a long time there’s nothing more than that in it. So I suppose that’s why I’m less enthused by that area of photography.