Not so long ago, photography was dismissed by the art world as nothing more than a utilitarian medium. In the mid-1970s, a photograph by Edward Weston, an early 20th-century master of optical precision, could be had for less than $200 (roughly $800 today). On Sept. 29, Weston’s “Nautilus Shell, 1927,” a print small enough to hold in one hand, was auctioned at Christie’s for $461,000, an apt barometer of photography’s migration to the realm of high art. Cindy Sherman is a reigning example: At its evening sale of postwar and contemporary art on Nov. 12, Christie’s hopes to sell 21 “Untitled Film Stills” in a single lot for an estimated $6 million to $9 million; images by Ms. Sherman, Andreas Gursky and Jeff Wall have already sold for several million dollars each.
But the value of photography today stands in sharp contrast to the gantlet of art world prejudices that made its coming-of-age so difficult.
The man often cited as photography’s most visible and eloquent champion was John Szarkowski, the curator of photography at the Museum of Modern Art from 1962 to 1991, who almost single-handedly elevated photography’s status to an art world equal. Yet some historians say credit should be shared with his contemporary, Sam Wagstaff, the notable curator and collector, known most conspicuously as the romantic partner and patron of Robert Mapplethorpe. Lost in the glare of Mapplethorpe’s notoriety was Wagstaff’s seminal influence on the field of photography, not only as a tireless advocate of the medium as an art form, but, equally, in his instrumental role in establishing the art market for photography to begin with — for better or worse.
Wagstaff brought the scholarship and regard for craft of a 19th-century connoisseur to a mid-to-late-20th-century world, scoring wider attention for Julia Margaret Cameron, Frederick H. Evans and Nadar, among other photographers. “What Sam brought to collecting was an extraordinarily acute eye and a passion for photography that I think has been absolutely forgotten today,” said Clark Worswick, a photography historian who sat alongside Wagstaff and other important collectors and dealers at the photography auctions in London and New York in the mid-1970s. “This is the man who set the aesthetic benchmarks for what’s good in photography. It’s just an extraordinary level that very, very few collectors have been able to reach.”
At Christie’s sale of photographs in Paris on Nov. 14, evidence of Wagstaff’s prescience will be found in two images by Gustave Le Gray that also appear in albums he acquired for his collection in the 1970s, including “View of the Sky” above the Mediterranean Sea, from 1857, now estimated at $110,000 to $160,000, and “Ships in the Harbor at Sète,” also from 1857, at $27,000 to $40,000.
Wagstaff was handsome, rich and glamorous, and he had serious art world credentials. In 1964, as a curator of painting and sculpture at the Wadsworth Atheneum in Hartford, he organized “Black, White, and Gray,” the first museum show of minimal art. He gave the sculptor Tony Smith his first museum show two years later.
In 1972, when he was a 50-year-old man about town, he met and fell in love with Mapplethorpe, a struggling artist half his age. Mapplethorpe, who attended Pratt Institute, a pre-eminent art school, had gotten his cultural education at Max’s Kansas City and the Chelsea Hotel but had not yet claimed photography as his medium. He was still making collages and assemblages with found photographs from physique magazines and Polaroid self-portraits, often naked. Wagstaff thought they were in keeping with the conceptual work being done in that period, but the unapologetic homoerotic component was completely new.
Photography was still creeping its way to legitimacy. Throughout the 1960s, the photographic image was hiding in plain sight in canvases on the walls of museums and galleries, in works by Andy Warhol, Robert Rauschenberg, John Baldessari and Ed Ruscha, in service of larger conceptual ideas. In 1964, Warhol made 10 silk-screened canvases of a picture by Charles Moore he had seen in a 1963 Life magazine spread about a civil-rights protest in Montgomery, Ala. Wagstaff and Warhol were friends, and Andy gave Sam two of these silk-screened canvases in red. Several years later, Wagstaff bought two others in white and blue from Leo Castelli, Warhol’s dealer, for $768. Wagstaff put them together as a grid called “Race Riot” and kept it his entire life, as I learned while writing a book, “Wagstaff: Before and After Mapplethorpe.” (The book will be published by Liveright in November.) This year “Race Riot, 1964” sold at Christie’s for $62.8 million.
No one considered it photography though the silk-screens on canvas are photo-based. But “Race Riot” and other conceptual work in the 1960s conditioned an artgoing public to the language of the photograph, even as photography continued to be dismissed as an inferior medium.
In 1973, at Mapplethorpe’s urging, Wagstaff turned his art-historical eye to photography, but not until Patti Smith, Mapplethorpe’s ex-girlfriend and not yet the rock star she would become, did a tarot reading to see if it would be an auspicious venture. “I began to collect photographs with Patti Smith’s approval,” Wagstaff wryly said to a Spanish TV interviewer in the 1980s.
“He was buying things like a madman,” Mapplethorpe told Janet Kardon, director of the Institute of Contemporary Art in Philadelphia, in 1988. “He saw beauty on every level, from the amateur all the way up — in postcards and everything.”
By then Wagstaff had bought Mapplethorpe a loft in downtown Manhattan in which to set up a studio, only doors away from his own on Bond Street. He would stop by with shopping bags full of photographs to show the artist, whose patience eventually wore thin. “Sam, I’m taking my own pictures,” Mapplethorpe finally told him. “I’ll never take another picture if I keep looking at these things.”
Curators, critics and even the auction houses started paying attention. Wagstaff’s curatorial activities in the 1960s had given his endorsement of photography credibility; his social standing, with family roots deep in New York society as well as an Ivy League background, secured him a place in the world where philanthropy and connoisseurship overlapped. While Szarkowski had an institutional seat at MoMA from which to wield his formidable authority, Wagstaff was an institution of one.
The group of influential dealers and collectors around him included Harry H. Lunn Jr. and Daniel Wolf; Paul F. Walter, the retired head of Thermo-Electric; Richard Pare, curator of the Seagram Collection; and Pierre Apraxine, curator of the Gilman Paper collection. Each had a hand in establishing the art market for photography, yet, by all accounts, Wagstaff was the acknowledged ringleader.
In 1974, London papers reported his purchase of an album of photographs by Julia Margaret Cameron, then unknown, at auction for $130,000, a staggering sum at the time. Cameron assembled the 95 prints as a gift to John Herschel, the 19th-century astronomer and inventor. Philippe Garner, the international head of photographs for Christie’s, who had brought the gavel down, said the value of the Herschel album today would be at least “several million dollars.” The current record of a single print by Cameron at auction is $249,069. “This feels somewhat like the fulfillment of Sam’s implicit prophecy,” Mr. Garner said.
News of Wagstaff’s acquisition of the Herschel album prompted the landed gentry in England to dust off albums that had languished in their attics for a century, material that trickled to auctions throughout the 1970s: Le Gray, William Henry Fox Talbot, Roger Fenton, Frederick Evans, Francis Meadow Sutcliffe.
The art world snobbery about photography only fueled Wagstaff’s public advocacy: “Gustave Le Gray made pictures in the 1850s. He’s the greatest photographer of all,” Wagstaff told The Washington Post, “and the textbooks hardly mention him.” He added, “It’s like leaving Rembrandt out of a history of Western art.”
Sotheby Parke-Bernet in New York did not have an autonomous department of photographs until 1977. Anne Horton, who headed that department, cited Wagstaff’s acquisitions in Europe as incentive for its regular photography auctions in New York.
“I think Sam belonged to that early generation of true enthusiasts — and there were many just like him — who were passionate about the medium for its own sake, not for what might happen down the road,” said Denise Bethel, chairwoman of the photography department at Sotheby’s since 1995. “No one cared in those days about investment potential, or kudos from academics and curators, or status, or any of the things that now come along with a hot collecting field. You had to be in it for love.”
When Wagstaff sold his photography collection in 1984, he was careful to place it with a major institution, the J. Paul Getty Museum. Judith Keller, the Getty Museum’s senior curator of photography today, considers the Wagstaff collection the core of the museum’s holdings in photography. “It has the greatest range in terms of the history it covers.” She cited Cameron and Nadar, but also lesser-known artists like Gerald Incandela.
It’s anyone’s guess why photographs routinely command six figures today, and whether collectors next month in Paris and New York will be paying for the aesthetic quality of a photograph, the importance of preserving a vintage Cindy Sherman print, or the status of owning a piece of art history. Wagstaff, who died of AIDS in 1987 at 65, might view the current photography market as a perversion of his own interests a medium once underappreciated. But the provocateur in him just might think that it serves the naysayers of his day right.