The Genius of Photography (2007) s01e06 Episode Script
Snap Judgements
Photography today looks like this But it also looks like this And this And this And this And of course it looks like this too.
80 billion photographic images will be taken this year alone.
Lot number six.
Photography also looks like this.
One million.
An object of desire for dealers, collectors and hedge fund managers.
At 2,400,000.
Today, photography is not only worth bidding for, it's worth fighting for.
Cynical, voyeuristic, exploitative.
all these were the words that I heard.
And it's also worth faking for.
I was told that it was one of two prints.
Then there was another, then there was another one.
And they all looked the same.
This is a snapshot of photography in the digital age.
Diverse, ubiquitous, valuable and technologically advanced.
But like any good snapshot, there's more going on here than meets the eye.
The medium has never been more widely appreciated or more eagerly exploited.
But what does it mean to be a photographer today? And what is a photograph really worth these days? Into the garbage.
On Main Street in Pittsfield, Massachusetts, lights are being rigged, props are being positioned and the talent are taking their places.
Let's getlet's get Larry.
Let's get Larry in the car.
OK, clear frame.
We got lights inside the car, we can still It looks like a movie, sounds like a movie and smells like a movie.
But it isn't.
All of this activity is to make a single photograph by Gregory Crewdson.
Neil, I'm ready for I work with a production crew that all come out of film.
We work with cinematic lighting.
but we're only after creating one single and perfect moment.
Notnot the car track.
Try to clear all those tracks, as much of those as you can.
Crewdson even has his own director of photography and his own camera operator.
Position.
And hold.
Relax.
'I do have a strangely disconnected relationship to photography.
' I don't even like holding a camera.
I don'ttake the actual picture.
'What I'm truly interested in is images, 'and then the camera is just a necessary instrument.
' Smack right in the middle of his side of the street.
Over an 11 day shoot, in a variety of locations, Crewdson's team will make a series of multiple exposures which will be digitally combined to make six final images.
He'll produce an edition of six prints of each image priced at approximately $60,000.
There's already a list of prospective buyers.
Let's get everyone in position.
And hold.
With his striking tableau which combine Hollywood production values with suburbia's bad dreams, Crewdson has become a hot property.
Confident that he has an audience who will appreciate and, if they can afford it, buy his work.
One second.
This is exactly what it should be.
This is the picture.
Let's just really make sure we fucking get it.
Hold.
Final exposure.
That is a wrap.
Fantastic job everyone.
Perfect photograph.
For Crewdson, the business and benefits of being a photographer feel very different from the experience of earlier generations.
Robert Adams, the highly respected photographer who first came to prominence in the early '70s, had to contend with very different realities with only his wife on his team.
It's good that people can earn enough money to free their own time and have their own years when they have full energy to work and explore what's been given to them.
But Kerstin and I lived most of our working life on her income as a librarian, and together we were earning something like the salary of a beginning bus driver.
And we never went hungry, we were never scared, but many is the time that I worried a lot and sleepless nights about whether I could afford to buy the equipment I needed, which is tedious.
The photography world was a different place then, and it had few friends in high places.
I tried to call the New York Times and get our exhibitions listed in the art calendar.
And the woman from the New York Times, and this would be late '71 told me that, the direct quote is "We don't list photography.
"Photography is not an art.
" But something happened that opened up the field where things were just happening and it was like a garden blooming, there were things all over.
The change, which began in America, but would ultimately spread to the rest of the world, began when photo-literate teenagers graduated from buying reproductions of their favourite photographs, to collecting the real thing.
I'm a baby boomer, I'm 53 years old.
I grew up looking at the picture magazines, learning about the world we live in from looking at photographs.
And the fact that the people who love it because they grew up with it, coming of age, helped people understand that photography's something interesting to look at.
And then it's a lot of fun to be a collector.
By the late '70s, baby boom enthusiasm had brought the market of photography into the mainstream, and prices rose accordingly.
Photographers like William Klein who made their names decades before the market boom found prints they'd made for reproductions in books and magazines, now treated with a strange, new reverence.
If I gave a photograph to somebody, they would either fold it up and put it a drawer, or put it on the wall with thumb tacks and so on.
And now people put on white gloves and use two hands, and they go for a lot of money.
You know it's like Russian bonds that you paper your toilet with, and suddenly people decide they're going to redeem these bonds and they're worth money.
Does that make you feel good? Make me feel good? It amazes me.
At 21,000, 22,000.
Bidding at 22,000.
We have pushed the prices of photographs, at auction, up and up and up.
But along with auction house respectability has come a new scale of values for assessing the worth of a photograph.
Prints that command the highest price tags are usually the ones that were made by the photographer himself, closest to the time the picture was actually taken.
Like fine wines, these prints are known as vintage.
So what I just took off the wall here is a print made in the mid-1940s of this signature image of Ansel Adams.
But, in fact, the negative was made nearly 20 years earlier, and this is one of the first prints that he made in 1927.
So this is a true vintage print that Adams made of the monolith in 1927.
This is all blocked up here.
It's all about huge amounts of areas of dark, whereas here he striates the dark with the snow.
And all that is, of course, differences that are done in the dark room.
I'm not actually sure which I like better.
I probably, in this case, in fact, prefer the later print.
But as Mattis knows, his preferred print's monetary value is two-thirds that of its older sibling.
Ever since Henry Fox Talbot discovered how to produce prints from a single negative, infinite reproducibility has been a unique feature of photography's genius and key to its astonishing rapid rise to prominence.
But for dealers and collectors, photography's greatest strength remains its biggest problem.
When it comes to a photograph less, as far as the market is concerned, is more.
It used to be that in the '70s and '80s when the photography market was just getting started, there was no such thing as editions.
It didn't exist.
Ansel Adams did not have editions.
Somebody came to Ansel Adams and said "Why don't we put a cap on this of 100, and we can ask more money for it.
" It's a marketing thing.
Dealers have had their work cut out trying to make photographs behave like works of art.
But the medium is inherently promiscuous, as the market was rudely reminded in 1999.
In the early 20th century, Lewis Hine used his photography to fight for social change and to celebrate the dignity of labour.
But 50 years after his death, Hine's prints had become highly collectable art works.
Peter MacGill bought a print of the Powerhouse Mechanic.
I bought one.
I was told that it was one of two prints.
And it was beautiful.
It was big.
It was warm-toned.
It was signed on the back.
It was stamped on the back.
All the things that we thought were important, were there in place.
Then there was another one.
Then there was another one.
Then there was another one.
And they all looked the same.
Collector Michael Mattis had also bought the Powerhouse Mechanic.
But as a theoretical physicist, he was confident that science could get to the bottom of this sudden glut of Hines.
I thought it might be a weekend's work to conclusively date a sheet of photographic paper.
But we had to develop all sorts of new dating criteria which are now commonly in use in the photography world.
Some we borrowed from the FBI, these were forensic techniques used, for example, to debunk the infamous Hitler diaries.
So it turned out that there are certain kinds of chemicals called OBAs, or optical brightening agents, which were put into photographic paper only starting in 1955.
And, in fact, the Hines were chock full of OBAs, and Hine died in 1940.
Confronted with the evidence, Hine's former dark room assistant, Walter Rosenblum, finally admitted to turning out the prints to profit from the market demand.
Rosenblum was a master printer.
The prints he made were the finest quality struck directly from the negatives Hine had exposed over 50 years before.
But the market was not impressed.
A fake is a fake.
If it's a baseball card, a painting or a photograph, they're not correct.
That history is important.
And now, I have to show a very specific line of provenance.
The picture started in the photographer's hands and went dut dut dut dut, and if there's a blank there, I have to represent it as a blank.
So when a rare vintage print with a perfect pedigree, crafted by the photographer himself, is united with a stunning image, the market gets excited.
That's what happened in 2006 when Sotheby's auctioned Edward Steichen's 1904 masterpiece, The Pond - Moonlight.
This elaborate print is one of only three that Steichen made.
It may not be a one-off, like the Mona Lisa, but for a photograph, it's pretty close.
Lot number 6, Edward Steichen, The Pond - Moonlight.
One million.
1,100,000.
1,200,000.
I've never sold anything for over a million dollars before.
1,500,000.
Not many people who do photo auctions have.
1,800,000.
I thought in my own mind, what am I gonna do when I get to a million? 1,900,000.
But in the back of my mind, I'd also asked myself what am I gonna do if it goes to two million? At 2,400,000.
I want everybody to think hard.
I was completely relaxed and having a great time and was able to wait and just let it happen.
At 2,600,000 up front.
Bidding at 2,600,000.
At 2,600,000, are we all done? Last call.
Going once, and twice.
For 2,600,000.
Thank you.
2,600,000.
The Pond - Moonlight is to date the most expensive photograph ever sold.
Inevitably, the market has changed what it is to be a successful photographer in ways great and small.
Releasing a new body of work demands a whole lot more thought than in the days when William Klein casually handed out his prints.
I've got one little spot that's This is Alec Soth, a rising star in documentary photography.
His latest series is devoted to Niagara Falls and the people who are drawn there.
What number was that Falls? Misty isfor Gagosian 2430.
Today he's at his lab approving prints before they're despatched to his gallery and individual collectors.
I think we're good to go on this one.
When I made the Niagara work, I was thinking about sad love songs.
The whole project after a while was a sad love song.
And there's something really sensual about a sad love song.
It's like taking a bath.
But when it comes to protecting the market value of his prints, Soth can't afford to be sentimental.
Wouldn't you know it? There's a big one.
It's too big.
That wasn't the size that I mean, it doesn't look bad, right? But it's too big.
Although technically perfect, the rogue print is now too valuable to survive.
I've heard of people grabbing prints from the garbage from other labs, making copies and selling them on the streets, which is pretty scary.
So I always cut whatever is rejected in front of the client, just so he knows that it's going straight intothe garbage.
Nowadays great photographs are not only worth stealing, they're also worth fighting over.
In October 1997, the Gagosian Art Gallery in New York introduced a new photographer to its fashionable clientele.
Manhattan was a long way from Bamako in Mali, where in the 1950s and early '60s Seydou Keita served a different kind of market.
By the '90s, he was long retired.
But in his day, he'd been a studio photographer of national renown.
Seydou Keita was the place to go if you wanted a beautiful image of yourself.
That was the studio to go for the local bourgeoisie and even for the middle class who wanted to grow in the social level.
Keita's studio had a ready supply of desirable props for clients to pose with, as if they were their own.
TRANSLATION FROM FRENCH: Bicycles, mopeds, cars, the props went from small to medium to large.
Vespas were average, but a car was a luxury.
And he didn't just stop at one, he had lots.
So people thought he was well off.
And for the time, he was.
TRANSLATION FROM FRENCH: For me, and for many others, the iconic photograph by Seydou Keita is this one.
Seydou Keita didn't know anything about the paintings of Ingres, Manet or anyone else, but you see how he positions this woman, like the Odalisque.
This is an absolute masterpiece.
She came with her blankets to show that she owned lots of them, you had to see it.
Seydou Keita would have remained a strictly local hero if three of his photographs hadn't turned up in a show of African art in New York in 1991.
The pictures were attributed to the world's most prolific photographer - Unknown.
On seeing the exhibition, Andre Magnin, a Parisian curator, set off for Mali immediately with photocopies from the catalogue as his only lead.
By asking around, he managed to track the "unknown" photographer down.
TRANSLATION FROM FRENCH: So I went to Seydou Keita and introduced myself.
and I showed him the photocopies and he said, "They're mine.
" He was astounded that someone would come so far for this.
So I explained to him we were putting together a collection and were interested, amongst other things, in photography.
Magnin left Mali trusted with some of Keita's negatives, hoping to find a new audience for his work in the West.
I talked to Keita many times, many times about having a contract and he told me, "Andre, I will be with you until my death.
"The word of an old man is stronger than a contract.
" With Magnin as a guide around the art market, Keita's photographs, some now blown up to 80 times their original size, migrated from the living room walls of Bamako to the gallery walls of the Cartier Foundation in Paris, and the Gagosian in New York.
There were 2,000 people at that opening at the Gagosian.
It was a huge success.
Everybody was there and knocked out by those photographs.
And they congratulated Keita on his work and Keita was extremely proud.
He was also becoming extremely rich.
His photographs were now selling for up to $16,000 a piece.
He was even commissioned to shoot a fashion story for top American style magazine Harper's Bazaar.
But as Keita's value soared, he attracted the interest of a professional dealer.
I was consultant for a website in the UK, so they sent me to Bamako in order to sign photographers.
And I met Seydou and he proposed me to be his agent.
I said, "Well, you know, you already have people who you work with.
" And he said, "No, you know, it's" I said, "I would love to do it, but I sign contracts with my artists," and he said, "OK, write your contract and come back.
" And that's what I did and he I became his agent until he died.
Keita's death in 2001 sparked a major dispute between Patras and Magnin.
It turned on the custody of 921 of Keita's precious negatives.
Both claim the support of Keita's heirs, and insist they're carrying out the photographer's wishes.
And suddenly the battle started for the happiness of lawyers, like me, and for the happiness of the market, because it made the value of Seydou Keita increasing.
For now, there is a legal stalemate, until a court decides on who has control over the 921 negatives, on which future sales of Keita's work depend.
Nearly 1,000 negatives are missing and this has been really difficult for us to develop Seydou Keita and give Seydou Keita to the world.
TRANSLATION FROM FRENCH: I've seen it done before, you can make some prints out of photographs, as you see here, really well done.
But they're fake.
You need the negatives.
I'm thinking that this battle and this litigation will go on for years and years and years.
But what I can see is that Seydou Keita is now a great value in the market of the photography.
The meeting in Mali between photography and the market led to the courts.
But in China, it's thrown up issues of another sort.
In this crucible of modernity, photography and the market have embraced each other with the same eagerness as the Chinese took to McDonalds.
But theirs is a complex relationship.
For Western photographers, like the Canadian Ed Burtynsky, China's transformation from sleeping giant into industrial superpower provides subject matter for thought-provoking, awe-inspiring panoramas.
But for native-born photographers, tackling the same issues is complicated by ghosts of the not-so-distant past.
Until relatively recently, photography in China was heavily restricted and used almost exclusively as propaganda.
Li Zhensheng was a Red Army news soldier, a photo-journalist, who in the 1960s and early '70s found himself covering the cultural revolution.
TRANSLATION FROM CHINESE: This is the Red soldier's dance.
It echoes the government's slogan, "It is right to rebel.
" This gesture means, "Beat the capitalists down to the ground.
" But in the fever of revolution, the photo-journalist's ideal of being in the right place at the right time could easily become a case of wrong place, wrong time.
In the cultural revolution, it was very chaotic.
One day, you could be a star and the next day you'd be denounced.
So I tried to take care of my pictures and not let anyone find them.
If they found them, they'd have been burnt and I'd have lost all my negatives.
So I hid them in order to protect myself.
Today it's possible for Li's photographs to see the light of day.
But not in China.
In New York, they're being promoted by a top agency, desirable products to be sold alongside the work of celebrity photographers like Annie Leibowitz.
The capitalists may have been beaten to the ground but now they've returned.
HE SINGS IN CHINESE: HE LAUGHS For the younger generation, photography is the perfect medium for exploring the strange no man's land that lies between what China once was and what it is becoming.
In London, one of China's hottest photographers, Wang Qingsong is having his first solo show in the united kingdom.
Though it's rooted in the dilemmas of modern China, Wang's work has found its most appreciative audience a long way from the streets of Beijing.
Tramp is gonna be the centrepiece of Jeff's new office.
So a lot of people from all over the world will see it.
SPEAKS IN CHINESE He thinks he has been like an outsider in the big city.
So he himself is a tramp inside this big city.
We're thinking to have this image for the Venice Biennale But as Wang has realised, even work that tries to address the black comedy of the global market still has to play by the market's rules.
The only problem is I like to buy everything.
TRANSLATION: I discovered there was a danger as the market opens up.
Today the man buys my work, tomorrow he sells it to the auction house.
It's like he's gambling on my work.
He doesn't really like it at all.
So I began to halve my output and refuse to sell to anyone who doesn't really appreciate my work.
This speculation is harmful to art works so I'm going to carry on reducing my production.
This is how I protect my work and forge a better future.
One photographer who would have understood Wang's desire for a better future was Edward Steichen.
He may have created the world's most expensive photograph, The Pond - Moonlight, but at the time he was an art-for-art's-sake artist who got very little for his pains except the odd murmur of appreciation.
It was only later, in the 1920s, he realised he wanted to make photography pay, and so re-establish the link between photography and money which had been one of the medium's founding principles.
It wasn't just about money.
But, on the other hand, Steichen felt there was no reason why talented photographers should starve.
There is an argument that's been going on for years, does art have to be pure and only made for the beauty of the picture, or is it all right to be paid for something that sells products? And, of course when Steichen started that, doing that kind of work in the 1920s, Alfred Stieglitz, who was his great friend and promoter, was horrified.
Stieglitz had a very precious kind of sensibility and also, he never had to earn a living.
Steichen not only had to earn a living, but he was curious about other uses for photography, and about the potential for reaching people.
And when he made a wonderful photograph, it could be advertising, it could be paid for for fashion or whatever, but it was a wonderful photograph and it was a piece of art.
Bolstered by contracts from publisher Conde Nast and ad agency J Walter Thompson, Steichen was defiant about his commercial work.
While Stieglitz bragged about photographing old wagon horses and poor devils, Steichen lavished photographic adulation on lighters, cutlery, shoes and lots and lots of hand cream.
It's a measure of how far photography has come that the battle between Steichen and Stieglitz over photography's commercial instincts seems as distant as photographs of the cultural revolution.
Now you can be a fashion photographer and, at the same time, an art photographer.
You can jump from a magazine to a gallery.
And it's something that a little bit of sacrilege or 10 years ago was something like, nobody can do it, you know? It was two different worlds and it was completely inaccessible.
And it is very interesting, I think this is the big new of photography.
After 10 years as a fashion photographer, Ventura is now enjoying his first New York solo exhibition called War Souvenir.
In these arresting, staged photographs, he's exchanged flesh and blood models for plastic ones.
When I first saw them, I thought this is like this lost, forensic evidence from activity taking place in Italy during World War II.
This unknown, hitherto undiscovered trove of colour photographs of city life during World War II, which is of course nonsense, these are just fictions.
In a juxtaposition at which few eyelids bat, Ventura's photographs are now displayed in the same gallery as esteemed 1970s photo-journalist, Eugene Richards.
But while photo-journalism and art co-exist on the neutral territory of a fashionable gallery, photo-journalism's heartland has proved to be more heavily fortified.
Policed by men and women armed with their camera and their conscious, photo-journalism remained a bastion of 20th-century photographic values - humanistic, politically engaged, liberal and serious.
In 1994, British photographer Martin Parr breached this final frontier when he applied to join photo-journalism's super-agency, Magnum.
I wanted to join Magnum because at heart I'm a populist and I wanted to have this method of getting my work out.
I thought, if I join an agency, I may as well join the most prestigious agency.
Founded as a co-operative in 1947 by legendary photographers, like Cartier Bresson and Robert Capa, Magnum had built its reputation on searing images of conflict and suffering in far flung places.
Magnum photographers were meant to go out as a crusade, if you like, to places like famine and war and such like.
I went round to the local supermarket, cos this to me is the front line.
Parr's territory was very different from the Magnum veterans.
The scruffy beaches of New Brighton, for instance, packed with working-class holiday makers.
Not surprisingly, Parr's application brought Magnum's old guard to the barricades.
His photographs titillate in some way, but the fact is they are meaningless.
The principle objection would be that I would appear to be cynical, voyeuristic, exploitative.
All these were the words I heard.
I think Cartier Bresson put it most succinctly when he said, "I don't know who you are, you're from another planet.
" To a certain extent, I see what he means and I don't have any problem with this.
He got quite irate.
In a final bid to prevent Parr's entry, Jones Griffiths circulated an open letter to the entire membership.
"His penchant for kicking the victims of Tory violence "caused me to describe his pictures as fascistic.
"I have great respect for him as a dedicated enemy "of everything I believe in and, I trust, what Magnum still believes in.
" Great stuff, isn't it? When the members came to the final ballot, Parr scraped in by one vote.
I think he certainly heralded a major change in Magnum, and it's possible, you know, to get on the Magnum website and have to reach for one's anti-nausea pill.
Like anything, I think Magnum has to change and expand and since I became a member, and the other people who've joined since, have been essential to its creative ongoing survival if you like.
Parr had to battle long and hard to bring his distinctive brand of photography into photo-journalism's holy of holies.
By contrast, around the same time, photography was receiving the red carpet treatment in the high temple of fine art.
Once, this was a place where photographers barely had squatters' rights.
But in the 1980s, this began to change as a generation of artists started to use photography as readily as they would a palette or an easel.
Leading the way was Canadian Jeff Wall, who was among the first to gain international recognition for his large-scale photographic works.
Photography was, for a long while, only on the margins of the fine arts, even though I think more perceptive people, from the very beginning, recognised that there was no reason why this technology wouldn't be an art form like any other.
So there's no reason why one can't just be an artist whose medium is photography.
Jeff Wall didn't reinvent photography, but he took it back to the 19th century, to painting, where everything is creative - the people, the light.
Everything is constructed for a meaning.
He fed in a lot of contemporary theoretical concerns.
Concerns about gender, about how men and women look at each other.
Concerns about racial stereotyping.
I like to think that sometimes my work begins by not photographing, but by seeing something, by being a witness, but not photographing.
I think the act of not photographing is quite important, at least to me.
So I remember it and I later decide that it has the potential to be a picture, a kind of picture I want to make.
But when the time comes for a picture to be made, it's more than the work of a decisive moment.
Wall can devote as much time to his photographs as a painter would to his canvas.
One of the women in that picture was hired to make that apartment into her own apartment, and that she had several months to do.
When I asked the one to walk around the corner, you can't really direct a person to walk, you can just say, "Walk.
" How they look, how they feel, what the feeling is, is something you can never really get by asking for it.
You just have to photograph over and over again until something happens.
So I'll probably photograph that woman 1,000 times.
And only one picture was very good.
Though Wall's pictures reflect the themes and traditions of painting, his techniques owe a debt to modern advertising.
Photographs like this new work, called In Front Of A Nightclub, are produced as gigantic transparencies mounted in light boxes to give the luminosity of an old master, but the impact of a billboard.
I never set out to make big photographs, but the size I use is based upon the way I see.
So I work a lot at life scale.
If you see a figure, a person in a picture at a scale similar to you, when you're looking at it, I think you feel rather close to them or closer to them.
And I always felt that traditional photographs were too small.
It's said that, not so long ago, you could conceal a dozen of the world's greatest photographs inside a folded newspaper.
Not any more.
Most top art photographers think big.
But the work of Andreas Gursky probably covers more square metres of gallery wall than anyone else's.
What is a Gursky? Well, it has to talk to us about globalisation, it can't just be a landscape.
It has to be a kind of globalised, urbanised, semi-rural, mixed-use landscape.
And it can't just be a panorama.
It has to have kind of layers that conform to certain traditions of pictorial composition.
Though trained in the famously precise Dusseldorf school of photography, Gursky's breakthrough image was as close as he's come to a snapshot.
This is a photograph, it's made in '86 or '87.
And I travelled to Italy alone looking for landscapes combined with civilisation and human beings.
And so I made a couple of photographs and this situation I found by chance, and went with a big 5 x 7 inch camera.
Andthen I saw the cable car coming and I didn't know before that the cable car was coming there.
So I had to decide very quickly and just hold it and made one shot and this was the final photograph.
This is completely different to the way I work today.
Behind this work stands two years of experience with Formula One and I shot lots of pictures, but I don't bring them to the market.
So I keep them in my archive.
But after two and a half years I produced only two works, one in Monaco and this one in Bahrain.
Much of the time has been spent using digital technology to refine and manipulate the image to produce the ideal final photograph.
Right now I am really interested in vertical images.
So, for me, this was not enough.
So this curve here was more on the left side and I combined it to the original circuit.
And the same was the background was also not exactly in this position.
So I altered.
But I think these are the possibility nowadays working with photography, it's the same like dealing with painting, that in terms of composition it makes sense to combine several details and find the final composition.
Gursky and Wall are both thoroughly modern artist photographers.
But in staging elaborate set-ups or using the latest technologies, they're following in a tradition that reaches back to the early days of photography.
This seemingly realistic photograph by the French photographer Camille Silvy offers a masterclass in 19th-century photographic manipulation.
When I first saw the Camille Silvy River Scene, France, I didn't know anything about it, but I thought it was marvellous.
And then I realised this was the directorial mode in 1858 because I realised that Camille Silvy arranged where the people should stand, so the working-class people are in the common land on the right of the picture.
The country bourgeoisie are on the private property on the left at the end of their garden, about to go on a boat trip.
We have this artificial sky that he has added.
But more than that, he's done extraordinary things.
In fact, Ansel Adams was the person who told me the most dastardly thing Camille Silvy did, which was to introduce a white cloud just above the horizon, where the two bits of the photograph meet, the sort of dead zone.
And he did that so we would read the two as one picture.
He added leaves to the trees, cos he wasn't satisfied that they were lively enough.
And what's really surprised me is that Camille Silvy, one of the great photographers of the 19th century, didn't even take this photograph himself.
It was taken, we now know, by somebody called Francois Moutard, Frank Mustard.
Isn't that terrible? Don't worry about your footsteps, I just wanna get rid of that track.
Although Frank Mustard would find much that was strange and wonderful in the world of 21st-century photography, there are some things he would recognise instantly.
Position.
And hold.
But the parallels between the 19th century and today go beyond staging and manipulation.
Then, photography was too new to be confined by definitions of what it could or couldn't be.
It was anything that photographers wanted it to be, from high art to low commerce.
In the 20th century, definitions and distinctions grew up, confining photography's erratic genius into tightly controlled channels.
In the 21st century, the rigid division of photography into categories, like fashion, advertising, art or documentary, have collapsed.
Once again, photography is anything photographers want it to be.
Even if that means exchanging the wizardry of today for the magic of the past.
Photographer Sally Mann uses the same wet-plate collodion process that Camille Silvy did.
In the 21st century, the techniques of the 19th are as readily available as the latest digital technology, so long as you have a steady enough hand.
You pour the collodion on the plate and you have to sort of spread it around very carefully and then drain it off.
It's harder than it looks to actually pour those plates so that you don't get lines and ridges and streaks.
And it has to reach a certain kind of texture before it really works properly.
And when it gets to that feeling, you put it in the silver nitrate.
And when you remove it, the silver nitrate has adhered to the collodion.
At which point, it's sensitive, so you have a fairly short period of time in which to get your picture.
Mann has been taking pictures of her family for years.
Today she is photographing her husband Larry.
You have a fairly short period of time in which to get your picture generally around six minutes, because as it's drying, it's losing sensitivity.
So you put it on your camera, pull out the dark slide and start counting.
I've photographed him for years and years to just document him as a human being.
But also because, you know, he's a lovely male.
So that was how it started.
But coincidentally he was diagnosed with muscular dystrophy and his body was beginning to change, he was losing his muscles in his right arm and his left leg.
So the pictures began to take on a certain poignancy.
It does seem a little peculiar to be regressing rather than stepping into the next century.
I think the pictures that I take are fairly modern, however, so I don't think it matters what the technique I use is.
I think it'll be great to use digital.
I have no problems contemplating that.
It would be fine if I could get the same feeling that I get with collodion, which I'm sure might be possible with some really fancy, you know, programme.
.
.
Fire hydrant here is a problem Meanwhile, in his New York studio, Gregory Crewdson is pulling out all the digital stops with re-toucher Kylie Wright.
He's putting the finishing touches to the picture he began weeks before on snowy Main Street in Pittsfield.
This building looks really bright and kind of flat at the same time so we really amped up the contrast and darkened it a lot.
Took the fire hydrant out in the final one.
Another thing that we do in all the photographs when we're on streets is we work with the electrical company to turn off the street lamps because they're the wrong colour temperature for our film.
And then Kylie turns them all back on.
What we're finished with at the end of the day is its own thing.
It's definitely photographic but something that's also something other than a photograph.
What I'm hoping to do is create a world that feels subjective and recognisable.
That's the thing that keeps me engaged.
Final exposure.
And that is a wrap.
Fantastic job, everyone.
Perfect photograph.
Last call.
Going once and twice Thank you.
80 billion photographic images will be taken this year alone.
Lot number six.
Photography also looks like this.
One million.
An object of desire for dealers, collectors and hedge fund managers.
At 2,400,000.
Today, photography is not only worth bidding for, it's worth fighting for.
Cynical, voyeuristic, exploitative.
all these were the words that I heard.
And it's also worth faking for.
I was told that it was one of two prints.
Then there was another, then there was another one.
And they all looked the same.
This is a snapshot of photography in the digital age.
Diverse, ubiquitous, valuable and technologically advanced.
But like any good snapshot, there's more going on here than meets the eye.
The medium has never been more widely appreciated or more eagerly exploited.
But what does it mean to be a photographer today? And what is a photograph really worth these days? Into the garbage.
On Main Street in Pittsfield, Massachusetts, lights are being rigged, props are being positioned and the talent are taking their places.
Let's getlet's get Larry.
Let's get Larry in the car.
OK, clear frame.
We got lights inside the car, we can still It looks like a movie, sounds like a movie and smells like a movie.
But it isn't.
All of this activity is to make a single photograph by Gregory Crewdson.
Neil, I'm ready for I work with a production crew that all come out of film.
We work with cinematic lighting.
but we're only after creating one single and perfect moment.
Notnot the car track.
Try to clear all those tracks, as much of those as you can.
Crewdson even has his own director of photography and his own camera operator.
Position.
And hold.
Relax.
'I do have a strangely disconnected relationship to photography.
' I don't even like holding a camera.
I don'ttake the actual picture.
'What I'm truly interested in is images, 'and then the camera is just a necessary instrument.
' Smack right in the middle of his side of the street.
Over an 11 day shoot, in a variety of locations, Crewdson's team will make a series of multiple exposures which will be digitally combined to make six final images.
He'll produce an edition of six prints of each image priced at approximately $60,000.
There's already a list of prospective buyers.
Let's get everyone in position.
And hold.
With his striking tableau which combine Hollywood production values with suburbia's bad dreams, Crewdson has become a hot property.
Confident that he has an audience who will appreciate and, if they can afford it, buy his work.
One second.
This is exactly what it should be.
This is the picture.
Let's just really make sure we fucking get it.
Hold.
Final exposure.
That is a wrap.
Fantastic job everyone.
Perfect photograph.
For Crewdson, the business and benefits of being a photographer feel very different from the experience of earlier generations.
Robert Adams, the highly respected photographer who first came to prominence in the early '70s, had to contend with very different realities with only his wife on his team.
It's good that people can earn enough money to free their own time and have their own years when they have full energy to work and explore what's been given to them.
But Kerstin and I lived most of our working life on her income as a librarian, and together we were earning something like the salary of a beginning bus driver.
And we never went hungry, we were never scared, but many is the time that I worried a lot and sleepless nights about whether I could afford to buy the equipment I needed, which is tedious.
The photography world was a different place then, and it had few friends in high places.
I tried to call the New York Times and get our exhibitions listed in the art calendar.
And the woman from the New York Times, and this would be late '71 told me that, the direct quote is "We don't list photography.
"Photography is not an art.
" But something happened that opened up the field where things were just happening and it was like a garden blooming, there were things all over.
The change, which began in America, but would ultimately spread to the rest of the world, began when photo-literate teenagers graduated from buying reproductions of their favourite photographs, to collecting the real thing.
I'm a baby boomer, I'm 53 years old.
I grew up looking at the picture magazines, learning about the world we live in from looking at photographs.
And the fact that the people who love it because they grew up with it, coming of age, helped people understand that photography's something interesting to look at.
And then it's a lot of fun to be a collector.
By the late '70s, baby boom enthusiasm had brought the market of photography into the mainstream, and prices rose accordingly.
Photographers like William Klein who made their names decades before the market boom found prints they'd made for reproductions in books and magazines, now treated with a strange, new reverence.
If I gave a photograph to somebody, they would either fold it up and put it a drawer, or put it on the wall with thumb tacks and so on.
And now people put on white gloves and use two hands, and they go for a lot of money.
You know it's like Russian bonds that you paper your toilet with, and suddenly people decide they're going to redeem these bonds and they're worth money.
Does that make you feel good? Make me feel good? It amazes me.
At 21,000, 22,000.
Bidding at 22,000.
We have pushed the prices of photographs, at auction, up and up and up.
But along with auction house respectability has come a new scale of values for assessing the worth of a photograph.
Prints that command the highest price tags are usually the ones that were made by the photographer himself, closest to the time the picture was actually taken.
Like fine wines, these prints are known as vintage.
So what I just took off the wall here is a print made in the mid-1940s of this signature image of Ansel Adams.
But, in fact, the negative was made nearly 20 years earlier, and this is one of the first prints that he made in 1927.
So this is a true vintage print that Adams made of the monolith in 1927.
This is all blocked up here.
It's all about huge amounts of areas of dark, whereas here he striates the dark with the snow.
And all that is, of course, differences that are done in the dark room.
I'm not actually sure which I like better.
I probably, in this case, in fact, prefer the later print.
But as Mattis knows, his preferred print's monetary value is two-thirds that of its older sibling.
Ever since Henry Fox Talbot discovered how to produce prints from a single negative, infinite reproducibility has been a unique feature of photography's genius and key to its astonishing rapid rise to prominence.
But for dealers and collectors, photography's greatest strength remains its biggest problem.
When it comes to a photograph less, as far as the market is concerned, is more.
It used to be that in the '70s and '80s when the photography market was just getting started, there was no such thing as editions.
It didn't exist.
Ansel Adams did not have editions.
Somebody came to Ansel Adams and said "Why don't we put a cap on this of 100, and we can ask more money for it.
" It's a marketing thing.
Dealers have had their work cut out trying to make photographs behave like works of art.
But the medium is inherently promiscuous, as the market was rudely reminded in 1999.
In the early 20th century, Lewis Hine used his photography to fight for social change and to celebrate the dignity of labour.
But 50 years after his death, Hine's prints had become highly collectable art works.
Peter MacGill bought a print of the Powerhouse Mechanic.
I bought one.
I was told that it was one of two prints.
And it was beautiful.
It was big.
It was warm-toned.
It was signed on the back.
It was stamped on the back.
All the things that we thought were important, were there in place.
Then there was another one.
Then there was another one.
Then there was another one.
And they all looked the same.
Collector Michael Mattis had also bought the Powerhouse Mechanic.
But as a theoretical physicist, he was confident that science could get to the bottom of this sudden glut of Hines.
I thought it might be a weekend's work to conclusively date a sheet of photographic paper.
But we had to develop all sorts of new dating criteria which are now commonly in use in the photography world.
Some we borrowed from the FBI, these were forensic techniques used, for example, to debunk the infamous Hitler diaries.
So it turned out that there are certain kinds of chemicals called OBAs, or optical brightening agents, which were put into photographic paper only starting in 1955.
And, in fact, the Hines were chock full of OBAs, and Hine died in 1940.
Confronted with the evidence, Hine's former dark room assistant, Walter Rosenblum, finally admitted to turning out the prints to profit from the market demand.
Rosenblum was a master printer.
The prints he made were the finest quality struck directly from the negatives Hine had exposed over 50 years before.
But the market was not impressed.
A fake is a fake.
If it's a baseball card, a painting or a photograph, they're not correct.
That history is important.
And now, I have to show a very specific line of provenance.
The picture started in the photographer's hands and went dut dut dut dut, and if there's a blank there, I have to represent it as a blank.
So when a rare vintage print with a perfect pedigree, crafted by the photographer himself, is united with a stunning image, the market gets excited.
That's what happened in 2006 when Sotheby's auctioned Edward Steichen's 1904 masterpiece, The Pond - Moonlight.
This elaborate print is one of only three that Steichen made.
It may not be a one-off, like the Mona Lisa, but for a photograph, it's pretty close.
Lot number 6, Edward Steichen, The Pond - Moonlight.
One million.
1,100,000.
1,200,000.
I've never sold anything for over a million dollars before.
1,500,000.
Not many people who do photo auctions have.
1,800,000.
I thought in my own mind, what am I gonna do when I get to a million? 1,900,000.
But in the back of my mind, I'd also asked myself what am I gonna do if it goes to two million? At 2,400,000.
I want everybody to think hard.
I was completely relaxed and having a great time and was able to wait and just let it happen.
At 2,600,000 up front.
Bidding at 2,600,000.
At 2,600,000, are we all done? Last call.
Going once, and twice.
For 2,600,000.
Thank you.
2,600,000.
The Pond - Moonlight is to date the most expensive photograph ever sold.
Inevitably, the market has changed what it is to be a successful photographer in ways great and small.
Releasing a new body of work demands a whole lot more thought than in the days when William Klein casually handed out his prints.
I've got one little spot that's This is Alec Soth, a rising star in documentary photography.
His latest series is devoted to Niagara Falls and the people who are drawn there.
What number was that Falls? Misty isfor Gagosian 2430.
Today he's at his lab approving prints before they're despatched to his gallery and individual collectors.
I think we're good to go on this one.
When I made the Niagara work, I was thinking about sad love songs.
The whole project after a while was a sad love song.
And there's something really sensual about a sad love song.
It's like taking a bath.
But when it comes to protecting the market value of his prints, Soth can't afford to be sentimental.
Wouldn't you know it? There's a big one.
It's too big.
That wasn't the size that I mean, it doesn't look bad, right? But it's too big.
Although technically perfect, the rogue print is now too valuable to survive.
I've heard of people grabbing prints from the garbage from other labs, making copies and selling them on the streets, which is pretty scary.
So I always cut whatever is rejected in front of the client, just so he knows that it's going straight intothe garbage.
Nowadays great photographs are not only worth stealing, they're also worth fighting over.
In October 1997, the Gagosian Art Gallery in New York introduced a new photographer to its fashionable clientele.
Manhattan was a long way from Bamako in Mali, where in the 1950s and early '60s Seydou Keita served a different kind of market.
By the '90s, he was long retired.
But in his day, he'd been a studio photographer of national renown.
Seydou Keita was the place to go if you wanted a beautiful image of yourself.
That was the studio to go for the local bourgeoisie and even for the middle class who wanted to grow in the social level.
Keita's studio had a ready supply of desirable props for clients to pose with, as if they were their own.
TRANSLATION FROM FRENCH: Bicycles, mopeds, cars, the props went from small to medium to large.
Vespas were average, but a car was a luxury.
And he didn't just stop at one, he had lots.
So people thought he was well off.
And for the time, he was.
TRANSLATION FROM FRENCH: For me, and for many others, the iconic photograph by Seydou Keita is this one.
Seydou Keita didn't know anything about the paintings of Ingres, Manet or anyone else, but you see how he positions this woman, like the Odalisque.
This is an absolute masterpiece.
She came with her blankets to show that she owned lots of them, you had to see it.
Seydou Keita would have remained a strictly local hero if three of his photographs hadn't turned up in a show of African art in New York in 1991.
The pictures were attributed to the world's most prolific photographer - Unknown.
On seeing the exhibition, Andre Magnin, a Parisian curator, set off for Mali immediately with photocopies from the catalogue as his only lead.
By asking around, he managed to track the "unknown" photographer down.
TRANSLATION FROM FRENCH: So I went to Seydou Keita and introduced myself.
and I showed him the photocopies and he said, "They're mine.
" He was astounded that someone would come so far for this.
So I explained to him we were putting together a collection and were interested, amongst other things, in photography.
Magnin left Mali trusted with some of Keita's negatives, hoping to find a new audience for his work in the West.
I talked to Keita many times, many times about having a contract and he told me, "Andre, I will be with you until my death.
"The word of an old man is stronger than a contract.
" With Magnin as a guide around the art market, Keita's photographs, some now blown up to 80 times their original size, migrated from the living room walls of Bamako to the gallery walls of the Cartier Foundation in Paris, and the Gagosian in New York.
There were 2,000 people at that opening at the Gagosian.
It was a huge success.
Everybody was there and knocked out by those photographs.
And they congratulated Keita on his work and Keita was extremely proud.
He was also becoming extremely rich.
His photographs were now selling for up to $16,000 a piece.
He was even commissioned to shoot a fashion story for top American style magazine Harper's Bazaar.
But as Keita's value soared, he attracted the interest of a professional dealer.
I was consultant for a website in the UK, so they sent me to Bamako in order to sign photographers.
And I met Seydou and he proposed me to be his agent.
I said, "Well, you know, you already have people who you work with.
" And he said, "No, you know, it's" I said, "I would love to do it, but I sign contracts with my artists," and he said, "OK, write your contract and come back.
" And that's what I did and he I became his agent until he died.
Keita's death in 2001 sparked a major dispute between Patras and Magnin.
It turned on the custody of 921 of Keita's precious negatives.
Both claim the support of Keita's heirs, and insist they're carrying out the photographer's wishes.
And suddenly the battle started for the happiness of lawyers, like me, and for the happiness of the market, because it made the value of Seydou Keita increasing.
For now, there is a legal stalemate, until a court decides on who has control over the 921 negatives, on which future sales of Keita's work depend.
Nearly 1,000 negatives are missing and this has been really difficult for us to develop Seydou Keita and give Seydou Keita to the world.
TRANSLATION FROM FRENCH: I've seen it done before, you can make some prints out of photographs, as you see here, really well done.
But they're fake.
You need the negatives.
I'm thinking that this battle and this litigation will go on for years and years and years.
But what I can see is that Seydou Keita is now a great value in the market of the photography.
The meeting in Mali between photography and the market led to the courts.
But in China, it's thrown up issues of another sort.
In this crucible of modernity, photography and the market have embraced each other with the same eagerness as the Chinese took to McDonalds.
But theirs is a complex relationship.
For Western photographers, like the Canadian Ed Burtynsky, China's transformation from sleeping giant into industrial superpower provides subject matter for thought-provoking, awe-inspiring panoramas.
But for native-born photographers, tackling the same issues is complicated by ghosts of the not-so-distant past.
Until relatively recently, photography in China was heavily restricted and used almost exclusively as propaganda.
Li Zhensheng was a Red Army news soldier, a photo-journalist, who in the 1960s and early '70s found himself covering the cultural revolution.
TRANSLATION FROM CHINESE: This is the Red soldier's dance.
It echoes the government's slogan, "It is right to rebel.
" This gesture means, "Beat the capitalists down to the ground.
" But in the fever of revolution, the photo-journalist's ideal of being in the right place at the right time could easily become a case of wrong place, wrong time.
In the cultural revolution, it was very chaotic.
One day, you could be a star and the next day you'd be denounced.
So I tried to take care of my pictures and not let anyone find them.
If they found them, they'd have been burnt and I'd have lost all my negatives.
So I hid them in order to protect myself.
Today it's possible for Li's photographs to see the light of day.
But not in China.
In New York, they're being promoted by a top agency, desirable products to be sold alongside the work of celebrity photographers like Annie Leibowitz.
The capitalists may have been beaten to the ground but now they've returned.
HE SINGS IN CHINESE: HE LAUGHS For the younger generation, photography is the perfect medium for exploring the strange no man's land that lies between what China once was and what it is becoming.
In London, one of China's hottest photographers, Wang Qingsong is having his first solo show in the united kingdom.
Though it's rooted in the dilemmas of modern China, Wang's work has found its most appreciative audience a long way from the streets of Beijing.
Tramp is gonna be the centrepiece of Jeff's new office.
So a lot of people from all over the world will see it.
SPEAKS IN CHINESE He thinks he has been like an outsider in the big city.
So he himself is a tramp inside this big city.
We're thinking to have this image for the Venice Biennale But as Wang has realised, even work that tries to address the black comedy of the global market still has to play by the market's rules.
The only problem is I like to buy everything.
TRANSLATION: I discovered there was a danger as the market opens up.
Today the man buys my work, tomorrow he sells it to the auction house.
It's like he's gambling on my work.
He doesn't really like it at all.
So I began to halve my output and refuse to sell to anyone who doesn't really appreciate my work.
This speculation is harmful to art works so I'm going to carry on reducing my production.
This is how I protect my work and forge a better future.
One photographer who would have understood Wang's desire for a better future was Edward Steichen.
He may have created the world's most expensive photograph, The Pond - Moonlight, but at the time he was an art-for-art's-sake artist who got very little for his pains except the odd murmur of appreciation.
It was only later, in the 1920s, he realised he wanted to make photography pay, and so re-establish the link between photography and money which had been one of the medium's founding principles.
It wasn't just about money.
But, on the other hand, Steichen felt there was no reason why talented photographers should starve.
There is an argument that's been going on for years, does art have to be pure and only made for the beauty of the picture, or is it all right to be paid for something that sells products? And, of course when Steichen started that, doing that kind of work in the 1920s, Alfred Stieglitz, who was his great friend and promoter, was horrified.
Stieglitz had a very precious kind of sensibility and also, he never had to earn a living.
Steichen not only had to earn a living, but he was curious about other uses for photography, and about the potential for reaching people.
And when he made a wonderful photograph, it could be advertising, it could be paid for for fashion or whatever, but it was a wonderful photograph and it was a piece of art.
Bolstered by contracts from publisher Conde Nast and ad agency J Walter Thompson, Steichen was defiant about his commercial work.
While Stieglitz bragged about photographing old wagon horses and poor devils, Steichen lavished photographic adulation on lighters, cutlery, shoes and lots and lots of hand cream.
It's a measure of how far photography has come that the battle between Steichen and Stieglitz over photography's commercial instincts seems as distant as photographs of the cultural revolution.
Now you can be a fashion photographer and, at the same time, an art photographer.
You can jump from a magazine to a gallery.
And it's something that a little bit of sacrilege or 10 years ago was something like, nobody can do it, you know? It was two different worlds and it was completely inaccessible.
And it is very interesting, I think this is the big new of photography.
After 10 years as a fashion photographer, Ventura is now enjoying his first New York solo exhibition called War Souvenir.
In these arresting, staged photographs, he's exchanged flesh and blood models for plastic ones.
When I first saw them, I thought this is like this lost, forensic evidence from activity taking place in Italy during World War II.
This unknown, hitherto undiscovered trove of colour photographs of city life during World War II, which is of course nonsense, these are just fictions.
In a juxtaposition at which few eyelids bat, Ventura's photographs are now displayed in the same gallery as esteemed 1970s photo-journalist, Eugene Richards.
But while photo-journalism and art co-exist on the neutral territory of a fashionable gallery, photo-journalism's heartland has proved to be more heavily fortified.
Policed by men and women armed with their camera and their conscious, photo-journalism remained a bastion of 20th-century photographic values - humanistic, politically engaged, liberal and serious.
In 1994, British photographer Martin Parr breached this final frontier when he applied to join photo-journalism's super-agency, Magnum.
I wanted to join Magnum because at heart I'm a populist and I wanted to have this method of getting my work out.
I thought, if I join an agency, I may as well join the most prestigious agency.
Founded as a co-operative in 1947 by legendary photographers, like Cartier Bresson and Robert Capa, Magnum had built its reputation on searing images of conflict and suffering in far flung places.
Magnum photographers were meant to go out as a crusade, if you like, to places like famine and war and such like.
I went round to the local supermarket, cos this to me is the front line.
Parr's territory was very different from the Magnum veterans.
The scruffy beaches of New Brighton, for instance, packed with working-class holiday makers.
Not surprisingly, Parr's application brought Magnum's old guard to the barricades.
His photographs titillate in some way, but the fact is they are meaningless.
The principle objection would be that I would appear to be cynical, voyeuristic, exploitative.
All these were the words I heard.
I think Cartier Bresson put it most succinctly when he said, "I don't know who you are, you're from another planet.
" To a certain extent, I see what he means and I don't have any problem with this.
He got quite irate.
In a final bid to prevent Parr's entry, Jones Griffiths circulated an open letter to the entire membership.
"His penchant for kicking the victims of Tory violence "caused me to describe his pictures as fascistic.
"I have great respect for him as a dedicated enemy "of everything I believe in and, I trust, what Magnum still believes in.
" Great stuff, isn't it? When the members came to the final ballot, Parr scraped in by one vote.
I think he certainly heralded a major change in Magnum, and it's possible, you know, to get on the Magnum website and have to reach for one's anti-nausea pill.
Like anything, I think Magnum has to change and expand and since I became a member, and the other people who've joined since, have been essential to its creative ongoing survival if you like.
Parr had to battle long and hard to bring his distinctive brand of photography into photo-journalism's holy of holies.
By contrast, around the same time, photography was receiving the red carpet treatment in the high temple of fine art.
Once, this was a place where photographers barely had squatters' rights.
But in the 1980s, this began to change as a generation of artists started to use photography as readily as they would a palette or an easel.
Leading the way was Canadian Jeff Wall, who was among the first to gain international recognition for his large-scale photographic works.
Photography was, for a long while, only on the margins of the fine arts, even though I think more perceptive people, from the very beginning, recognised that there was no reason why this technology wouldn't be an art form like any other.
So there's no reason why one can't just be an artist whose medium is photography.
Jeff Wall didn't reinvent photography, but he took it back to the 19th century, to painting, where everything is creative - the people, the light.
Everything is constructed for a meaning.
He fed in a lot of contemporary theoretical concerns.
Concerns about gender, about how men and women look at each other.
Concerns about racial stereotyping.
I like to think that sometimes my work begins by not photographing, but by seeing something, by being a witness, but not photographing.
I think the act of not photographing is quite important, at least to me.
So I remember it and I later decide that it has the potential to be a picture, a kind of picture I want to make.
But when the time comes for a picture to be made, it's more than the work of a decisive moment.
Wall can devote as much time to his photographs as a painter would to his canvas.
One of the women in that picture was hired to make that apartment into her own apartment, and that she had several months to do.
When I asked the one to walk around the corner, you can't really direct a person to walk, you can just say, "Walk.
" How they look, how they feel, what the feeling is, is something you can never really get by asking for it.
You just have to photograph over and over again until something happens.
So I'll probably photograph that woman 1,000 times.
And only one picture was very good.
Though Wall's pictures reflect the themes and traditions of painting, his techniques owe a debt to modern advertising.
Photographs like this new work, called In Front Of A Nightclub, are produced as gigantic transparencies mounted in light boxes to give the luminosity of an old master, but the impact of a billboard.
I never set out to make big photographs, but the size I use is based upon the way I see.
So I work a lot at life scale.
If you see a figure, a person in a picture at a scale similar to you, when you're looking at it, I think you feel rather close to them or closer to them.
And I always felt that traditional photographs were too small.
It's said that, not so long ago, you could conceal a dozen of the world's greatest photographs inside a folded newspaper.
Not any more.
Most top art photographers think big.
But the work of Andreas Gursky probably covers more square metres of gallery wall than anyone else's.
What is a Gursky? Well, it has to talk to us about globalisation, it can't just be a landscape.
It has to be a kind of globalised, urbanised, semi-rural, mixed-use landscape.
And it can't just be a panorama.
It has to have kind of layers that conform to certain traditions of pictorial composition.
Though trained in the famously precise Dusseldorf school of photography, Gursky's breakthrough image was as close as he's come to a snapshot.
This is a photograph, it's made in '86 or '87.
And I travelled to Italy alone looking for landscapes combined with civilisation and human beings.
And so I made a couple of photographs and this situation I found by chance, and went with a big 5 x 7 inch camera.
Andthen I saw the cable car coming and I didn't know before that the cable car was coming there.
So I had to decide very quickly and just hold it and made one shot and this was the final photograph.
This is completely different to the way I work today.
Behind this work stands two years of experience with Formula One and I shot lots of pictures, but I don't bring them to the market.
So I keep them in my archive.
But after two and a half years I produced only two works, one in Monaco and this one in Bahrain.
Much of the time has been spent using digital technology to refine and manipulate the image to produce the ideal final photograph.
Right now I am really interested in vertical images.
So, for me, this was not enough.
So this curve here was more on the left side and I combined it to the original circuit.
And the same was the background was also not exactly in this position.
So I altered.
But I think these are the possibility nowadays working with photography, it's the same like dealing with painting, that in terms of composition it makes sense to combine several details and find the final composition.
Gursky and Wall are both thoroughly modern artist photographers.
But in staging elaborate set-ups or using the latest technologies, they're following in a tradition that reaches back to the early days of photography.
This seemingly realistic photograph by the French photographer Camille Silvy offers a masterclass in 19th-century photographic manipulation.
When I first saw the Camille Silvy River Scene, France, I didn't know anything about it, but I thought it was marvellous.
And then I realised this was the directorial mode in 1858 because I realised that Camille Silvy arranged where the people should stand, so the working-class people are in the common land on the right of the picture.
The country bourgeoisie are on the private property on the left at the end of their garden, about to go on a boat trip.
We have this artificial sky that he has added.
But more than that, he's done extraordinary things.
In fact, Ansel Adams was the person who told me the most dastardly thing Camille Silvy did, which was to introduce a white cloud just above the horizon, where the two bits of the photograph meet, the sort of dead zone.
And he did that so we would read the two as one picture.
He added leaves to the trees, cos he wasn't satisfied that they were lively enough.
And what's really surprised me is that Camille Silvy, one of the great photographers of the 19th century, didn't even take this photograph himself.
It was taken, we now know, by somebody called Francois Moutard, Frank Mustard.
Isn't that terrible? Don't worry about your footsteps, I just wanna get rid of that track.
Although Frank Mustard would find much that was strange and wonderful in the world of 21st-century photography, there are some things he would recognise instantly.
Position.
And hold.
But the parallels between the 19th century and today go beyond staging and manipulation.
Then, photography was too new to be confined by definitions of what it could or couldn't be.
It was anything that photographers wanted it to be, from high art to low commerce.
In the 20th century, definitions and distinctions grew up, confining photography's erratic genius into tightly controlled channels.
In the 21st century, the rigid division of photography into categories, like fashion, advertising, art or documentary, have collapsed.
Once again, photography is anything photographers want it to be.
Even if that means exchanging the wizardry of today for the magic of the past.
Photographer Sally Mann uses the same wet-plate collodion process that Camille Silvy did.
In the 21st century, the techniques of the 19th are as readily available as the latest digital technology, so long as you have a steady enough hand.
You pour the collodion on the plate and you have to sort of spread it around very carefully and then drain it off.
It's harder than it looks to actually pour those plates so that you don't get lines and ridges and streaks.
And it has to reach a certain kind of texture before it really works properly.
And when it gets to that feeling, you put it in the silver nitrate.
And when you remove it, the silver nitrate has adhered to the collodion.
At which point, it's sensitive, so you have a fairly short period of time in which to get your picture.
Mann has been taking pictures of her family for years.
Today she is photographing her husband Larry.
You have a fairly short period of time in which to get your picture generally around six minutes, because as it's drying, it's losing sensitivity.
So you put it on your camera, pull out the dark slide and start counting.
I've photographed him for years and years to just document him as a human being.
But also because, you know, he's a lovely male.
So that was how it started.
But coincidentally he was diagnosed with muscular dystrophy and his body was beginning to change, he was losing his muscles in his right arm and his left leg.
So the pictures began to take on a certain poignancy.
It does seem a little peculiar to be regressing rather than stepping into the next century.
I think the pictures that I take are fairly modern, however, so I don't think it matters what the technique I use is.
I think it'll be great to use digital.
I have no problems contemplating that.
It would be fine if I could get the same feeling that I get with collodion, which I'm sure might be possible with some really fancy, you know, programme.
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Fire hydrant here is a problem Meanwhile, in his New York studio, Gregory Crewdson is pulling out all the digital stops with re-toucher Kylie Wright.
He's putting the finishing touches to the picture he began weeks before on snowy Main Street in Pittsfield.
This building looks really bright and kind of flat at the same time so we really amped up the contrast and darkened it a lot.
Took the fire hydrant out in the final one.
Another thing that we do in all the photographs when we're on streets is we work with the electrical company to turn off the street lamps because they're the wrong colour temperature for our film.
And then Kylie turns them all back on.
What we're finished with at the end of the day is its own thing.
It's definitely photographic but something that's also something other than a photograph.
What I'm hoping to do is create a world that feels subjective and recognisable.
That's the thing that keeps me engaged.
Final exposure.
And that is a wrap.
Fantastic job, everyone.
Perfect photograph.
Last call.
Going once and twice Thank you.