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Photo London runs from May 21 to May 24 at Somerset House and
hosts more than 70 galleries from around the world offering
works including a set of 1967 Beatles portraits by Richard
Avedon and a 1965 Diane Arbus shot of a couple on a park bench.
The event is half the size of France's Paris Photo, Europe's
largest photography fair, which drew 143 galleries to the Grand
Palais last November, and has an offshoot in Los Angeles.
Photography sales are on the rise worldwide, surging 36 percent
to $50.7 million in 2013 at Christie's, Sotheby's and Phillips,
according to the ArtTactic research firm. Sales dipped 3 percent
last year but Sotheby's set a record in December, selling a
single-owner collection for $21.3 million.
The overall figure is still only a fraction of the record 51
billion euros ($57 billion) in art sold globally last year, much
of it in London, according to European Fine Art Foundation data.
"London fell in love with contemporary art in a very big way,
and that's where the collecting preferences tended to be," Photo
London's director, Michael Benson, said.
"People still collect contemporary art in huge numbers, but
there is a feeling that it’s gone as far as it can go, that
photography is an interesting new avenue to pursue."
Photo London also has non-commercial events programmed, such as
an exhibition of rarely seen prints from the Victoria & Albert
Museum's photography collection.
Paris Photo's artistic director, Christoph Wiesner, said France
was historically more fertile terrain because a trio of French
photographers - Henri Cartier-Bresson, Jacques-Henri Lartigue
and Robert Doisneau - popularized photography hugely.
Today, he said, there was room for both fairs. Just as Frieze
Art Fair “managed to create new appetite" for contemporary art
at its launch in 2003, Photo London will do the same for
photography, he said.
(Editing by Michael Roddy and Louise Ireland)
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