How Do We Use the Photographic Archive to Trace the Sales and Status of Works of Art?
The Photographic Archive and the Art Market
The extensive photographic archive at the Paul Mellon Centre (PMC) has its own unique qualities and trajectory, containing images that are found nowhere else. Today, the archive forms just one of many components of the Centre, but in the 1970s and 1980s it was the principal point of activity. The impetus to collect photographic images of works of art came initially from Ellis Waterhouse, the Centre’s first director, who had himself assembled an impressive photographic archive, which was central to his own research activities.1 In the early 1970s, under the aegis of the new director, Christopher White, and the Centre’s librarian Frank Simpson, two staff members, Evelyn Newby and Antonia Yates, were engaged full time in scouring auction houses, art dealerships, and exhibitions, seeking out works of art worthy of capturing on film. In 1976 they were joined by Brian Allen, who replaced Simpson as librarian.
As Allen recalls, one of the main drivers in taking photographs of works of art that passed through auction houses and art dealerships was that sales catalogues were then only sparsely illustrated, if at all, and the majority of works were represented only by a title, lot number, the object’s dimensions, and maybe a line or two by way of description, leaving no visual clue as to the work’s actual identity. With this in mind, PMC staff, while photographing major artists in major collections, also made a particular point of selecting works on the art market by minor or little-known artists. The rationale behind the selection process was, admits Allen, entirely subjective and based on the intrinsic visual appeal of a work of art, or even its quirkiness.2 At the centre of operations was another vital member of the Centre’s staff, full-time photographer, Douglas Smith, whose studio and darkroom, together with his boxes of photographic negatives (and collection of jazz LPs), commanded the Centre’s basement at 20 Bloomsbury Square—the veritable engine of the photo archive enterprise.
