Buying Photography - By: Alice Shown

Any conversation about photography will touch on the relationship between painting and photography. On the one hand, we can say that after cameras were invented painters eventually were able to stop copying the real word and start drawing their own world, create their own reality. But on the other hand, I keep meeting people who will view a new painting and say "Poor painter, he probably has no money to buy a Nikon camera."

Whichever way you slice it, photographs and paintings are living together now. You can see photographs hanging on the wall in the same neighborhood as paintings in almost any contemporary art gallery. However, although we take it for granted now, it was not easy for photography to become an independent art form, in terms of creative perception and in relation to buying and selling works.

One of the first and best-known occasions of someone buying photography as a work of art was in 1857. It was a work by a pioneer art photographer, Oscar Gustave Rejlander, entitled The Two Ways of Life. Queen Victoria bought a 10-guinea copy for Prince Albert's collection. The Two Ways of Life was a seamlessly ready-mounted combination print made of thirty-two images from about six weeks, but in the final analysis it was photography.

Despite this promising beginning, it was only in the 20th century that fine art photography and documentary photography became accepted by the art world and the gallery system. Now we have digital cameras and Photoshop, and photography holds a significant place in the world of art. Moreover, the price of photography considerably exceeds 10 guineas. On February 14, 2006 Sotheby's London sold the 2001 photograph "99 Cent II Diptychon" for $3,346,456 making it the most expensive photograph of all time. Today the medium accounts for 7% of the total global auction revenue generated from Contemporary art.

Unsurprisingly, the process of buying fine art photography is the same as buying any other work of art. If you want to invest money it is worth contacting an art dealer, but if you want it for yourself then you should find something special - something that speaks to you. Seek the photograph that will be a window to another world for you, and it doesn`t matter if it is well-known world to which you want to return in your thoughts, or some absolutely new reality, where you can give freedom to your imagination.

About the Author

Art-mine.com is the premier online marketplace for photography for sale by various artists.

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