Michael Wolf - Industrial (2015) - Flowers Gallery
Against the beautiful backdrop of Somerset House, arguably as spectacular as the Grand Palais, each gallery benefits from their own personal room, making for an enjoyable tour of the fair. The organizers, Candlestar, have invested in the production and have made use of an extensive network in the hope of impressing their first cohort of exhibitors.
The most important players in the photography world are present, and they are paying the price, with exhibition space costing them around £600m2. London is up there with New York in terms of global market importance, but this first edition is a gamble, the world’s important photography collectors do not reside in London, with most serious buyers coming in from France, Belgium and America.
Courtesy James Hyman Photography, London
Gallerist Caroline Smulders confirmed our suspicions concerning collectors, "there are certainly more Belgian and French buyers. The British collectors are more amateur too, the questions they ask are more naive," she told us just a few hours after the opening of the preview.
However some galleries are benefitting from this new fair as an opportunity to exploit their strong London market presence, and strengthen the bond with London’s high-quality institutions. "We decided to participate this year because we have a good collector base in London, and good institutional relationships. A lot of museums here have exhibited our artists, Bernice Abbott was recently at the Barbican for example," said Howard Greenberg Gallery.
The overall quality of the fair is undoubtedly high, with vintage prints and iconic images by the biggest names in contemporary photography. Yet the lack of risk on the behalf of exhibitors and organizers goes to show that the fair is taking tentative first footsteps, leaving us with few surprises, but still the best that photography has to offer.
