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This December brings the premiere of Photo Miami to Florida’s already bustling art market. From the 7th to the 10th of December, a new “International Contemporary Art Fair for Photo-Based Art, Video and New Media” will launch itself and, hopefully, impress the already inundated audiences in Miami this winter. Stephen Cohen, the organizer of Photo LA, Photo San Francisco, Photo New York and Art LA, spoke to me about his new venture and his journey up to this point. |
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Not Cute but Very Surprising – Kate Hickey
This December brings the premiere of Photo Miami to Florida’s already bustling art market. From the 7th to the 10th of December, a new “International Contemporary Art Fair for Photo-Based Art, Video and New Media” will launch itself and, hopefully, impress the already inundated audiences in Miami this winter. Stephen Cohen, the organizer of Photo LA, Photo San Francisco, Photo New York and Art LA, spoke to me about his new venture and his journey up to this point.
Kate Hickey: What was your beginning in the art world, how did you get involved in what you are doing now?
Stephen Cohen: I was a private dealer selling some 19th century photos, photo books, monographs and things like that, and this I started that in 1977. Then, in 1985, I started to go cross country on sales trips and meetings with collectors and curators selling prints. It was from there that I went on to organize Photo LA, which was a big success and, finally, I opened up the gallery, Stephen Cohen Gallery, about two months after that.
KH: How did Photo LA, Photo Santa Fe, Photo San Francisco and Art Fairs Inc evolve into the huge business which they are today?
SC: Well, Photo LA was the first to be developed in January of 1992, and then, a year later, I started Photo Santa Fe, which ran for seven years. When that fair sort of had its run—certain fairs just have a set course or a lifetime—I put it to bed. The next year, I started Photo San Francisco.
Then, in 2004, I realized that I had always wanted to do a fair in New York so I organised Photo New York. Now this one is a very different fair than the others. It is very contemporary; photo, video and mixed media-based materials. It’s a smaller fair too. This I started in about 2004 and, this October, we will have our third edition of it.
In 2004, I also thought about organising another fair in LA, which turned into Art LA, and which is a fair for contemporary and new art. There are galleries that have photo-based work in them, but, again, it’s an art fair not a photo-based fair and, for the most part, it has a very different group of galleries showing in it, even though there are some overlaps.
When Art Basel hit, along with some other peripheral fairs, I thought about doing something in Miami in 2002 or 2003. There just was not a lot of support for it. Basel is very big, and it’s grown so much in the past year—there are now three new fairs; Aqua, Pulse and NADA. I think now in total there are going to be about 11 fairs.
The Photo Miami thing was something I wanted to do earlier but it didn’t seem timely, so we’re organising it now.
KH: How was it decided what would be included and what would not? With such competition, did you find a niche in the market?
SC: It’s a vetted show, an invitational show. Most of the shows are invitational, we allow people to apply—there’s nothing stopping them but with certain shows we tell them…
Photo LA and Photo San Francisco have a very wide range of contemporary and vintage work, and they always have had, so that’s not an issue. We just go for the best galleries we could find and, if it fits their schedule and their budget, they do the fair.
But, for Photo New York, it was always considered much more contemporary, ‘skewered’, much more contemporary. Miami is sort of even more than that. The applications are being approached by a committee and Miami is also the first time that we’ve used a committee. In the past, it’s kind of been that people who know us will contact us and now it’s turned into a committee.
KH: Art Fairs Inc now oversees all of these fairs. Through all of this, where did Art Fairs Inc come from?
SC: I realised that I was doing all of this out of the gallery and that I was hiring more staff and that I needed to separate it out into a different corporations. A year ago, I formed Art Fairs Inc and then moved all of the operations for the fairs to that corporate entity.
KH: You seem to be constantly evolving and changing. Do you think this is part of your success?
SC: Evolving is good, yes. We try to improve the fairs every year. Photo LA will be in its 16th year this year so it’s the longest running art fair in LA and we’re really proud of that fact. And, now, the demand for it is bigger than it ever has been and it’s getting a little more contemporary than it has been in the past.
KH: Do you think that this reflects a shift in what customers are buying?
SC: The whole market is shifting toward the contemporary. Vintage stuff is just becoming harder to come by. Generally though, people seem to be buying more contemporary. You can just look at the auction prices to see. Although vintage photography has gained, contemporary photography is being sold now—not just in photo auctions but in art auctions, and the prices are astronomical compared to what they had been before. I mean, a Richard Prince piece went for, I think, $1.2 million and there was some other one that went for $3 million.
KH: Video art and new art media are going to be part of Photo Miami. What can the public expect from these collections?
SC: They can expect to see a lot of new work by some major people. The logo for the show is an image from the work of Enrique Martinez Celaya. It’s an image of a young boy standing by water. That’s part of a series which he did in LA about a year or a year and a half ago where he created large scale works printed on canvases standing about six feet tall. They’re a series of three.
He’s a major painter and sculpture and he’s been commissioned internationally by numerous museums to do installations. He has a number of showings in the United States and Europe each year, and he’s doing a lot of commissioned work. He’ll be talking there and his work will be there.
We know that the work we’re going to have down there will hold its own with Basel, NADA and the other fairs. It is photo-based though, so it’s not going to be a show which has Ansel Adams work in it. It’s going to be a show that will be very contemporary and very new and it will include work that’s from all over the world.
KH: The committee who are putting these wonderful artists together seem to be a very international group. How did they come together in working on Photo Miami?
SC: Tim Fleming, the managing director, comes from the art world and these were all people whom he knew and then some others who came recommended and then they recommended someone else. It’s a new thing for us to work with this kind of committee, but it’s going great so far.
KH: What are your expectations for Photo Miami, with regard to public reaction?
SC: I think it’s going to surprise a lot of people because it has the word photo in the title so people immediately think, “oh I take pictures, I take snapshots!” but we’re working on the brand, which we developed with the other photo fairs which all have a good enough reputation to succeed as a fair in Miami.
The other fairs have cute little names like Inc, Pool, Bridge, Flow, Nova, Aqua and Pulse. So they all have these names and, okay, I wasn’t clever enough to pick out a name, but I think people are going to be really surprised by the quality and range of the work that is going to be exhibited there, and that I’m really excited about. Just seeing the applications that are coming in, people do get it, and they’re applying.
KH: This year you were also named number 65 in the most important people in photography. How did that come about?
SC: That was very nice, to see it in the magazine—I had no idea it was coming. The year before I was in Art and Auction—I was in the top 100 but they didn’t number you. So I felt a lot better about getting 65, I guess it’s better than being 99, right?
A contest like that is all subjective, but it was really very nice to be recognised for the all the work that we’re doing too—to spread the word about photo-based art around the country, so that was very satisfying. I don’t think of myself like that though. I don’t have a cap or a shirt that says “# 65.” No cap—nothing like that. Maybe I should.
