Photography today looks like this.
But it also looks like 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?
Garbage.
(Man) Just go back and don't...
0n Main Street in Pittsfield, Massachusetts,
lights are being rigged, props are being positioned
and the talent are taking their places.
(Man) Let's get... OK, let's get Larry...
Let's get Larry in the car.
OK, clear frame.
We got lights inside the car.
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.
I work with a production crew that all come out of film.
We work with cinematic lighting.
But we are only after creating one, single, perfect moment.
Not 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.
And... hold.
Relax.
(Crewdson) I do have this strangely disconnected relationship to photography.
I don't even like holding the camera.
Erm... I don't take 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 the street. - Yeah, a car width.
0ver 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 tableaux,
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.
(Crewdson) The hand goes back.
One second. This is exactly where 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, a 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.
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 was 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...
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.
The fact that people who love it, because they grew up with it, coming of age,
helped people understand that photography's interesting to look at...
and that it's a lot of fun to be a collector.
By the late '70s, baby-boom enthusiasm
had brought the market in photography into the mainstream.
And prices rose accordingly.
Photographers like William Klein,
who made their names decades before the market boom,
found prints they had made for reproductions in books and magazines
now treated with a strange new reverence.
If I would give a photograph to somebody,
they would either fold it up and put it in 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 a Russian bond that you paper your toilet with
and suddenly er... people decide
that they're going to redeem these bonds and they're worth money.
(Woman) 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 darkroom.
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 astonishingly 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,
"Hey, 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 artworks.
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.
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.
(Mattis) I thought it might be a weekend's work
to conclusively date a sheet of photographic paper.
But it turned out that we had to develop all sorts of new dating criteria,
which are now commonly in use in the photography world,
some of which we borrowed from the FBI.
These were forensic techniques used, for example,
to de-bunk 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 darkroom 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 of 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... 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 doot doot doot doot
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.
(Auctioneer) Lot number six, Edward Steichen, The Pond - Moonlight.
1,000,000.
1,100,000.
1,200,000.
I've never sold anything for over $1 million 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. - (Laughter)
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. - (Applause)
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 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? - 02.
- Misty is for Gagosian, 2430.
Today he's at his lab, approving prints
before they're dispatched to his gallery and individual collectors.
OK, so I think we're good to go on this one.
When I made the Niagara work I was thinking about sad love songs.
I was sort of thinking of the whole project, after a while, as 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? Then 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 stories of people just grabbing prints out of the garbage from other labs
and 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 into...
the garbage.
Nowadays, great photographs are not only worth stealing,
they are also worth fighting over.
In 0ctober 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 to have 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.
(Man) La bicyclette, la moto...
(Translator) 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.
Pour moi et pour beaucoup...
(Translator) 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 or 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.
0n seeing the exhibition, André 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.
(André Magnin speaking French)
(Translator) So I went to Seydou Keita and introduced myself
and I showed him the photocopies. And he said, "They're mine,"
and 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.
(Translator) I talked to Keita many times about having a contract,
and he told me, "André, 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.
(Translator) 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 apiece.
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, it's... You already have people who you work with,"
and he said, "Oh, you know, it's er..."
And I said, "Well, I would love to do it but I sign contracts with my artists,"
and he said, "OK, write a 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 are 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 meant 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.
J'ai déjà vu...
(Translator) 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 of 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 have taken to McDonald's.
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 photojournalist who in the 1960s and early '70s
found himself covering the Cultural Revolution.
(Translator) This is the Red Soldiers' dance.
It echoes the government slogan, "It is right to rebel."
This gesture means "Beat the capitalists down to the ground."
But in the fever of revolution,
the photojournalist's ideal of being in the right place at the right time
could easily become a case of wrong place, wrong time.
(Translator) 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 Leibovitz.
The capitalists may have been beaten to the ground
but now they've returned.
(Sings)
(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 Qinsong,
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 Geoff's new office,
so a lot of people from all over the world will see it.
(Translator) He thinks that he has been like an outsider in the big city
so he himself is a tramp inside this big city.
(Man) 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.
(Translator) I discovered there was a danger as the market opens up.
Today the man buys my work and 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 artworks
so I'm going to carry on reducing my production.
This is how I protect my work
and forge a better future.
(Directs model)
0ne 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-established 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 sake of the beauty of the picture
or is it all right to be paid for something that sells products?
And of course, when Steichen started 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 Condé 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 professional photographer
and at the same time you can be an art photographer.
You can jump from a magazine to a gallery
and it's something that a little bit of sacrilege or...
Ten years ago was something like nobody can do it, you know.
It was two different worlds and there was completely unaccessible.
And is very interesting. I think this is a big new of the photography.
After ten 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 photojournalist, Eugene Richards.
But while photojournalism and art
co-exist on the neutral territory of a fashionable gallery,
photojournalism's heartland has proved to be more heavily fortified.
Policed by men and women armed with their camera and their conscience,
photojournalism 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 photojournalism'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.
And 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.
(Parr) Magnum photographers were meant to go out as a crusade, if you like,
to places like famine and war and suchlike.
I went out and went round the corner 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 holidaymakers.
Not surprisingly, Parr's application brought Magnum's old guard to the barricades.
Anyone who was described as Margaret Thatcher's favourite photographer
certainly didn't belong in Magnum.
His photographs titillate in some way
but the fact is they are meaningless.
(Parr) The principle objection would be that I would appear to be cynical,
voyeuristic, exploitative. All these were the words that I heard.
Well, 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.
And he got quite irate.
In a final bid to prevent Parr's entry,
Jones Griffiths circulated an open letter to the entire membership.
(Parr) "His penchant for kicking the victims of Tory violence
"caused me to describe his pictures as fascistic.
"Let me state that 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.
(Jones Griffiths) 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.
(Parr) Like anything, I think, Magnum has to change, Magnum has to 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 photojournalism's holy of holies.
By contrast, around the same time,
photography was receiving the red-carpet treatment in the high temple of fine art.
0nce, this was a place
where photographers barely had squatter's 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,
sort of 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 artform like any other.
So there's no reason why one can't just be an artist whose medium is photography.
(Lewis) Jeff Wall didn't re-invent photography
but he took photography back to the 19th century
to painting, where everything is created - the people, the light.
Everything is kind of constructed for a meaning.
But he sort of fed in a lot of kind of contemporary theoretical concerns -
concerns about gender, about how men and women look at each other,
concerns about racial stereotyping.
(Wall) I like to think that sometimes my work begins by not photographing -
that is, by seeing something, by being a witness but not photographing it.
I think the act of not photographing is quite important. At least, it is to me.
So I remember it and I later decide that it has the potential to be a picture,
the 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.
(Wall) 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 that you can never really get by asking for it.
You just have to photograph over and over and over again until something happens.
So I'll probably photograph that woman a thousand 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 0f A Nightclub
are produced as gigantic transparencies mounted in light-boxes
to give the luminosity of an 0ld Master but the impact of a billboard.
I never set out to make big photographs.
But the size that I use is based upon the way I see,
so I work a lot at life-scale.
If you see another figure of a person
in a picture, at a scale similar to you,
when you're looking at it you... 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 Düsseldorf School of Photography,
Gursky's breakthrough image was as close as he's come to a snapshot.
(Gursky) This is a photograph, it's made in late '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 five-by-seven-inch camera.
And... then 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... 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... the final composition.
Gursky and Wall are both thoroughly modern artist-photographers.
But in staging elaborate set-ups or using the latest technologies,
they are 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.
(Howarth-Booth) When I first saw the Camille Silvy River Scene, France,
I didn't really know anything about it but I just 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 on 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
was to introduce a white cloud just above the horizon,
just where the two bits of the photograph meet, this 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, you know.
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 François Moutarde - Frank Mustard.
Isn't that... Isn't that terrible?
(Crewdson) Just 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.
OK. 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.
0nce again, photography is anything photographers want it to be...
even if that means exchanging the wizardry of today
for the magic of the past.
(Dripping liquid)
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.
(Mann) 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.
(Mann) You have a fairly short period of time
in which to get your picture - generally around, like, 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 would be great to use digital. I have no problems even contemplating that.
I think 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, program.
So I feel like we're still having problems with this.
The fire hydrant here is a problem.
Meanwhile, in his New York studio,
Gregory Crewdson is pulling out all the digital stops
with retoucher, Kylie Wright.
He's putting the finishing touches to the picture he began weeks before
on snowy Main Street in Pittsfield.
(Wright)... in the earlier one where this building was really bright
and kind of flat at the same time,
so we really amped up the contrast and we darkened it a lot.
Took the fire hydrant out from 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 all the street lamps
because they're the wrong colour-temperature for our film.
And then Kylie then turns them all back on. (Laughs)
What we're finished with at the end of the day is its own thing.
Erm... 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.
That is a wrap.
Fantastic job, everyone. Perfect photograph.