This February, Tate Britain closed its hottest present since Covid, and most profitable ever of a feminine artist. For three weeks till its ending, the galleries had been open till 10pm on Friday, Saturday and Sunday, as customer numbers lastly reached almost 270,000. The exhibition was of Lee Miller, the photographer whose extraordinary profession took in modelling, Man Ray, the destruction of the second world struggle and Vogue.
But it wasn’t simply the biographical content material that was pulling folks in. “It is amazing work, full of audacity and intelligence, humanity, sensuality, compassion,” says the exhibition’s curator Hilary Floe. “And also, my intuition is that photography itself has a particular resonance at the moment. On the one hand it’s relatable — we all take hundreds of images on our phones — but the difference between the evanescence of a digital image and the power and beauty of a historical print is enormous.”
In an age of short-form video, the {photograph} represents one thing categorically steady and bodily current. This is maybe why images exhibitions appear as soon as once more to be rising in important numbers, because the medium is reassessed for modern instances, and tastes.
Among a number of institutional choices is a present centered on images’s earliest days as an artwork type at Tate Modern later this year, whereas the work of Robert Mapplethorpe is at present being celebrated on the Palazzo Reale in Milan. The Nederlands Fotomuseum, with a set of some 6.5mn gadgets, opened in Rotterdam final month. An exhibition of Catherine Opie’s high-colour portraits will open on the National Portrait Gallery in London on March 5.
According to a Morgan Stanley report revealed in 2025, the images market reached its peak in 2014. But sellers are unperturbed. At Tefaf a number of cubicles shall be exhibiting images both completely or in dialogue with different media. “I feel there is a comeback for photography,” says gallerist André Buchmann. “We’ve had so much painting and sculpture, and suddenly you put up photographs and it’s interesting again. It’s outside of expectation.”
“We are in the middle of a generational shift,” says Darius Himes, worldwide head of pictures at Christie’s, “from the collectors, curators and dealers who built the market to a new set of younger collectors who are learning about the nuance of historical printing techniques, or loving the dynamism of a peer like [30-year-old US photographer] Tyler Mitchell.”
Buchmann’s namesake gallery shall be bringing work by Anna and Bernhard Blume from their sequence Im Wald (“In the forest”) to Tefaf. For the Blumes, images was a medium to convey what was in essence a efficiency follow. Less thinking about perfection than evocation, they allowed blurring and bursts of sunshine to bathe throughout the pictures to brighten their constructed eventualities.
The four-panel piece, made in 1987, depicts the Blumes as a bourgeois couple — him in a hat and coat, her in a floral costume — having fun with the countryside, although maybe in a lower than typical method. Bernhard’s interactions are dramatic and quasi-religious, as he throws himself on the trunks of timber.
“This was the mid-1980s, and acid rain was on everyone’s mind,” says Buchmann of a time when the affect of industrialisation on the setting had turn out to be a significant problem. “But also, from the German perspective, the forest is a powerful symbol, a place of fairy tales and imagination.”
Thomas Schulte, like Buchmann, is returning to Tefaf after an absence of a decade or so. “We’re a conceptually led gallery,” says Schulte, who is predicated in Berlin. “Our focus is on art which goes back to the 1960s — Gordon Matta-Clark, Alice Aycock. Robert Mapplethorpe also fits into the programme, as an artist who completely changed the discussion around photography.”
Beginning completely with Polaroids, Mapplethorpe moved to a dramatic reframing of male physicality and want. Schulte, nonetheless, is specializing in his flower photos, which display an equal seek for perfection and erotic cost. “Where his idea of the body is connected to drawings of the 17th-century, the tulips are akin to a modern vanitas, another art historical strand,” says Schulte. “That makes his work relevant at this fair that was previously known for its focus on Old Masters and still lifes. He represents the contemporary take.”
Mapplethorpe’s work is among the many greater priced images that involves public sale. “Self-Portrait” (1988) offered for £548,750 (with charges) at Christie’s in 2017, for instance. Flower works are decrease in worth, however can nonetheless attain the €200,000 mark, relying on high quality and composition. In the context of the truthful, explains Schulte, it’s the Mapplethorpe Foundation that units the value.
“When you’re faced with a choice between a painting and a photograph that could possibly come in multiples, it can create a sense of insecurity for a collector,” says Gagosian’s director of images, Joshua Chuang. “But we’re actively engaged in foregrounding it.” At the start of this yr, Gagosian selected to indicate images in 4 galleries concurrently: Richard Avedon and Nan Goldin in London, Roe Ethridge in Athens and Irving Penn in Gstaad, with plans to indicate Deana Lawson and Francesca Woodman later within the yr. “The gallery doesn’t have a photography programme per se. Larry [Gagosian] just wants to promote great artists,” says Chuang. “We think this work conforms to that.”
Back at Tefaf, Michael Hoppen shall be exhibiting the work of Sohei Nishino, a Japanese artist who creates diorama maps utilizing images, collage, cartography and psychogeography. Taking inspiration from the 18th-century Japanese mapmaker Inō Tadataka, his newest is of Venice.
Meanwhile Ron Mandos gallery from Amsterdam is exhibiting work associated to, slightly than by, Mapplethorpe. The late Erwin Olaf, a homosexual photographer and activist, was impressed by the American, and labored with the identical medium-format Hasselblad digital camera to supply photos of erotic masculinity. Olaf, who died in 2023, is at present the topic of a significant retrospective on the Stedelijk in Amsterdam. Mandos’s sales space in Maastricht shall be an homage to each him and the choreographer Hans van Manen, with whom Olaf collaborated intently. Van Manen died in December final yr.
“We’re showing some of Olaf’s Ladies Hats series, which he began in 1985,” says Lars Been, the gallery’s in-house curator who has organised the sales space. “The pictures are a comment on toxic masculinity and a fight against macho behaviour. He would give a guy a hat and their behaviour and their face would immediately change, maybe soften, or become humorous.” With inspiration taken from the chiaroscuro of Rembrandt and Caravaggio, the work once more connects to the core artwork historic issues of the truthful.
Photography aficionados, although, could be attracted by Olaf’s handmade carbon prints — a fancy Nineteenth-century approach the place a print can take a day to make because the carbon is labored into the paper. “This is where photography gets technical and crafted,” says Been. “The carbon prints are unique and very special.” In the heady context of Tefaf, although, they won’t really feel unreachable at €35,000.
March 14-19, tefaf.com
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