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I just came back from Art Basel (one of the world's biggest contemporary art fairs).
I was surprised how little photography was represented. The photography which was for sale was mostly either antique (Brassai, Cartier Bresson, Helmut Newton - which was odd for a contemporary art fair) or work where the photography was only part of the exhibit, rather than the main focus.
Are the worlds of photography and contemporary art now so separated that there is really such little connection?
I sometimes get that feeling as well, I have seem some fantastic photography which can be classed as contemporary art but it seems difficult for the artists to sell their work and get the correct exposure.
Having said that I have invested some money in art myself and although I love photography, at the time, I found it more difficult to research photographers / photography as an investment.
Hopefully this will change in the future, there is some mind blowing young talent around and maybe attitudes will change
A decent light meter should do the trick.....!
I guess that just reflects the profile of Art Basel. The Swiss tend to be very 'conceptual' in their approach, even the photographers. And conceptual artists, as well as artists working with traditional media (painting) need to have a place to showcase their stuff occasionally.
If you look at exhibitions in contemporary art galleries in big cities, I reckon about a third of the contemporary exhibitions, maybe even half, is photography.
Even Edinburgh, which is a bit culturally backward in the visual arts stakes, has quite a high percentage of photography exhibitions. If you go to the Scottish Museum of Modern Art at the moment for example, they have their high profile 'Artists Rooms' exhibition on at the moment - three of the five featured exhibitions are photography (the other two, non-photographers, being Damien Hirst, which includes the odd photograph, and Tracy Emin - I think even she has the odd photograph too for that matter). The more conceptual Fruitmarket Gallery is showing photography and video, the Stills as always showing photography, City Arts Centre usually has a mixture of painting/graphic and photography, Scottish National Portrait Gallery usually has a photography as well as a painting exhibition (it's closed for renovation at the moment), Ingleby Gallery (one of the best galleries in town) has an excellent Francesca Woodman photography exhibition (same photographer as in the MOMA Artists' Rooms) etc.
I begin to feel a bit sorry for painters, as they're pretty much relegated the small commercial galleries around town mostly trying to sell pretty pictures of Edinburgh and surrounds to tourists.
Art basel is very international, I don't suppose that more than a tenth of the galleries exhibiting were Swiss.
On reflection, it may be that galleries are more likely to display work which will turn a decent profit at an art fair. With the cheapest painting selling for €50,000, its hard to give wall space to photographs which will sell for much less (unless they are classics).
I've spent significant sums on paintings over the years, but asked myself if I would buy/invest in photographs; same answer - only if they were classics. The photograph has an image of reproducability about it that a painting does not.
Maybe they are completly different worlds after all.
Quote: The photograph has an image of reproducability about it that a painting does not.
So does a Warhol silk-screen print. Didn't stop people buying them, though.
Quite a lot of modern art is reproducible. It's hard to walk into a room anywhere nowadays without tripping over a dead sheep in formaldehyde. I just wonder what the dead sheep factory looks like.
Mmmm, it sounds like a good photo project. Could be the next big thing, making a fortune at Art Basel selling prints of people producing dead sheep, titled something like "Are We Stark Raving Mad?"
There is the Arles Festival should you want a true contemporary devotion to photography. Strange how here in Britain fine art photography is treated with some indifference being often technical and at most purely commercial such as Focus.
You might notice that any film of interiors in the States you will see photographs hung on the walls where in Britain it is rare.
Quote: So would you say modern art and contemporary art are the same thing?
I think they're slightly different. Modern Art is really the stuff from around the time of Expressionism onwards, ie. more or less the last 100 years. Whereas contemporary art is art that's being made more or less at the moment. So for example the paintings of Joan Miro would be modern art, but not contemporary art.
Quote: There is the Arles Festival should you want a true contemporary devotion to photography.
I really wanted to go to Arles, hoped to go this year but couldn't make it. I think it tends to have more of an emphasis on documentary photography.
ParisPhoto is also excellent. I went a couple of years ago and it was fab.
My impression from following similar discussions ad very nauseam, is that modern art is now fairly old, and since the era of modern art we've been through post modern and are now coming out the other end into something we haven''t yet agreed a name for.
Contemporary art isn't what it sounds like, its either (depending who you listen to) a past genre, or its anything in the last 60 years, but not necessarily including modern or post modern. Although it could be brand new.
There's a "competing site" which has a Philosophy of Photography forum, and now and then they have long wrangling arguments about this. Probably best not to get too serious about it 
Problem is, people seem to pick a name like modern, without considering the trouble we'll have with it 50 years in the future.
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