For my birthday a few months ago, my wife Lisa gave me an art gallery.
Admittedly, it’s not your usual birthday gift, like a pair of cashmere socks. You can wear the socks or just put them in the drawer. An art gallery, you have to run.
Now, I know nothing about owning or running an art gallery, and precious little about the art world in general, so I am starting from scratch.
When you set out to write a book they always say, “write something you know something about.” I figured the same rule probably applies to running an art gallery. I may not know much about art, but I do know something about photography.
I have spent my life starting and running media companies. One of the first media companies I started was called Video New International. At one point I had 102 VJs or MMJs working for me, reporting from all over the world. I sold 51% of the company to The New York Times and it became New York Times Television.
My initial investor in VNI was a man named Nick Nicholas. At that time, he was the Chairman and CEO of Time/Life, which later became Time/Warner. Nick introduced me to all the photographers at both Life and Time, and many of them became my video journalists. They taught me about how to make compelling visual images.
For most of human history, if you wanted to reproduce a scene or create a portrait, you needed a painter. That was the only way to create visual images. If you go to a museum like The Louvre or the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, you’ll see some of the greatest paintings and painters in the world. Their work was technically perfect — they reproduced in oil what they saw.
In 1539, when Henry VIII was contemplating marrying Anne of Cleves, he sent Hans Holbein, the court painter to do a portrait of Anne so that he could see what she looked like. Today, Henry would just go to her Instagram page.
Here is Holbein’s portrait of Henry VIII. Note the extraordinary detail — the jewels, the furs, the brocade.
The role of the painter and the idea of using paints and canvas to capture images and reality were crushed with the advent of photography in the late 19th century. Suddenly, this new piece of technology could do what painters had done for thousands of years, only better, faster and cheaper.
But the arrival of photography also changed what painting meant. Liberated from the need to simply reproduce the world perfectly, painters expanded their work, creating art that now reflected far more than mere perfect reproduction, but capture emotion, passion and pain. Doubtless Henry VIII would have had Lucien Freud executed. Last year, one of his portraits sold for $29 million.
But now the iPhone is doing to photographers what the camera did to painters — obviating the old need for professional photographers that simply capture reality. More photographs are uploaded to Instagram every second than were created in the entire 19th Century. 95 million photos every day. If you spent one second looking at each photo on Instagram, it would take you three years to look at one day’s worth of photos.
What are professional photographers to do? Photo magazines like Life are dead. Even photo magazines like National Geographic have shed most of their contract photographers.
But as the invention of the camera allowed painting to evolve to a higher art form, so too, I think, does the smart phone.
Which brings me back to my little art gallery.
Getting in touch with the many great photographers I have had the privilege to work with, I believe that they can and do create not just representational pictures, but increasingly, great works of art in their own right. You see PF Bentley’s WAVE photo above. PF was for many years Time Magazine’s White House photographer, but now he lives in Hawaii and creates, in my opinion, fine art.
Below is a photograph by Bob Krist, formerly of National Geographic. Look at the power of the image — as good as John Constable. Perhaps better. That’s right, this is a photo.
To me, this is the future of photography — a fine art in its own right. I am going to be carrying the work of PF Bentley, Bob Krist and many others in my new gallery in Milton under Wychwood.
Come by.