Creating a Photo Market Afterlife

Originally published November 29, 2013 in the New York Times LENS blog
Photo Credit - Luigi Ghiri/Estate of Luigi Ghiri

Every artist needs a champion — someone who can turn raw aesthetics into gallery-ready art. Granted, the relationship between creator and curator can be fraught, as they tussle over competing interpretations, edits or even visions.

But when it comes to the blank slate of work by a dead or barely known photographer, the mechanics of the market work a little differently.

Photographers can amass extensive archives over the course of their careers, and these visual legacies can remain packed away, unsorted and unseen for decades after a photographer dies. But sometimes, a patron emerges to pluck an artist from obscurity and create a new narrative.

“Unknown, unprofessional photographers typically made no attempt to put their work out there,” said Steven Kasher, who runs one of New York City’s most respected and successful photo galleries. “So we have to make a case from scratch, and the work has to be valued on its own terms.”

Mr. Kasher represents the estate of Mike Disfarmer, a mildly psychotic Arkansas photographer who ditched his farmhand roots and amassed an utterly bizarre catalog of portraits that showed a detached yet intimate vision of Dust Bowl life. His work was uncovered in 1976, 14 years after his death, and after multiple rounds of rediscovery has fallen into a nostalgic corner of the art market.

According to Mr. Kasher, the psychology of Disfarmer’s work was a major factor in its success, though it was only after a cache of original vintage prints was discovered a decade ago that the true value of his work was established. The actual prints, coupled with the story of this deranged former farmboy shooting portraits in his homemade Main Street studio, captured the attention and imagination of buyers and collectors.

“Disfarmer definitely had an edge,” Mr. Kasher said. “People are always wondering where we’ll find the next Disfarmer, and there have been other cases, but the work hasn’t been as interesting. For most studio photographers of the time, it was just a job, but he was driven by some fairly extreme psychological factors, and that’s what people pay for.”

It is nearly impossible to pinpoint what kind of photography people actually want to buy, but if the relatively short history of the photographic market has shown anything, it is that color is key for collectors. So when Melissa Harris, books and special projects editor at the Aperture Foundation, discovered the work of Luigi Ghirri while compiling an issue dedicated to Italian photography, she was stunned to learn of his lack of recognition in the United States. In 1992, when she first saw Ghirri’s candy-colored Kodachromes from the early 1970s, she knew she had found something special.

She fell in love with his work and was determined to publish a book of it. Unfortunately, she was too late. Ghirri died in 1992, just months after being published in Aperture Magazine, and his widow, Paola Ghirri, was not ready for a book project.

So Ms. Harris waited.

It wasn’t until 2008 that her patience was rewarded with the publication of “It’s Beautiful Here, Isn’t It…” The book introduced Ghirri to an art world that had just rediscovered William Eggleston, who wrote the book’s foreword. She also enlisted the Artforum writer and critic Germano Celant to write the introduction, which provided an authoritative stamp of approval from the upper echelons of the contemporary art world.

Harris said that her goal as a publisher was to provide access to Ghirri’s work. She said Mrs. Ghirri was interested in seeing her husband represented by a reputable gallery that would be sensitive to his vision but could ensure his legacy in the modern market.

“We all thought Ghirri’s work had such crossover potential, which was why we asked Celant to write the foreword,” Harris said. “We knew he was respected among a different crowd and that he would help build a new audience.” That audience came out last March, when the Matthew Marks gallery hosted a sold-out show of 53 vintage prints from Ghirri’s 1978 book, “Kodachrome.”

Any conversation about post-mortem discoveries in photography would not be complete without mentioning the work of Vivian Maier — a Chicago nanny whose work was discovered in a storage facility by a young entrepreneur who has since turned Maier into a symbol for unknown genius. John Maloof and Jeff Goldstein now hold the majority of Maier’s negatives and maintain a rivalry that has undoubtedly helped her become one of the biggest afterlife success stories in recent photographic history.

Mr. Maloof, who found the negatives in a search for historic images of Chicago, personally printed more than 80 images for the first public display of Maier’s work at the Chicago Cultural Center in 2011. After an exhaustive series of cold calls, Mr. Maloof was finally able to persuade one of New York’s leading photo galleries to represent Maier and establish her stature.

“I knew Greenberg was the best place for Maier’s work to go, but they weren’t initially interested,” Mr. Maloof said of the Howard Greenberg Gallery, which specializes in vintage prints by many of photography’s biggest names. “The art world was not eager to accept the work at first. They weren’t convinced until they saw more. Plus, I was nobody to them, really. I wasn’t sure what I was doing or how to navigate the market at all.”

Absent a working Ouija board, the question of interpretation is always somewhat open-ended. So Mr. Maloof, with a stash of negatives and a vague idea of what Maier’s work might be worth, both aesthetically and financially, set out to build her back story via the arrangement and organization of an archive and the curation of multiple shows and exhibitions. That is a practice he says museums shun, but galleries are typically open to.

“They have the incentive to make money,” he said. “So they’re more receptive to different interpretations of the work by different people who want to see it shown.”

In an art world that is discouragingly predatory in courting new talent, it is refreshing to see nonliving artists reborn and recognized for their historic contribution to the medium, not their net worth on the market, though one can certainly lead to the other.

“The market for photography as we know it is very young,” Mr. Kasher said. “But it is far more developed now than it was in the 1970s. The market for modern prints is growing up around what already exists.”

But as Disfarmer, Ghirri and Maier have shown, existence itself is not necessarily a prerequisite for success.