MEMPHIS BY William Eggleston.

Today, Weston and Arbus are considered modern masters, representing two genres in photography, both of which bring high valuations at auction and in the private trade. Weston—along with Walker Evans, Paul Strand and Ansel Adams—is a key figure in the group of photographers who were active in the decades between the two World Wars, long considered one of the most important periods in American photography. Arbus is one of the early street photographers from the 1960s and 1970s (Friedlander, Winogrand, William Klein and, even earlier, Robert Frank, are others) whose influence is reflected in the works of any number of younger contemporary artists.

EDWARD WESTON'S Two Shells, 1927.

The Arbus exhibition has certainly drawn attention to this period, but the artistic legacy these photographers have passed on to a younger generation—a more intimate, personal approach to documentary photography and a keen attention to the mundane and the ordinary—is becoming clearer. This growing interest was amply evidenced by the spate of exhibitions in New York this winter focusing on pioneering photographers of the 1970s. Cheim & Read Gallery mounted a William Eggleston show that focused on his early black and white work. His Memphis, an image of a seemingly monster-sized tricycle on a suburban street, brought $207,500 at Phillips, de Pury & Luxembourg in October. The Kennedy Boesky Gallery showed Seventies Color Photography, which included work by Eggleston, Joel Sternfeld, Richard Misrach and Joel Meyerowitz, all of whom had solo shows in Manhattan’s Chelsea district this winter.

The market for these images has grown exponentially since the first photography auctions were held and the first photography dealers opened their doors in the 1970s. “The pricing has gone haywire,” says Alan Siegel, chairman and CEO of Siegelgale, a New York-based strategic-branding firm. “The market has changed so radically that something has to be really extraordinary before I buy today.”

Fortunately, Siegel already has a large and enviable collection of 20th-century photography, which was presented in the book One Man’s Eye, published by Abrams in 2000. “It was never designed to be an investment,” says Siegel of his collection. “Photography gave me a way to see the world in a more discriminating way. It was a labor of love. The collection just grew out of my own intuitive feel for what I liked. I surrounded myself with images that excited me.” Siegel took photographs himself when he was in the Army and even studied for a time with Alexey Brodovitch, the influential art director of Harper’s Bazaar, as well as émigré photographer Lisette Model, and his tastes run from masterworks to vernacular imagery.

PENNY PICTURE Display by Walker Evans

A few years ago, he was looking through a bin of photographs at Sotheby’s when he found a picture entitled Circus Freaks by a little-known photographer named Edward Kelty; he bought it for $200. People scoffed, he says, “But I thought it was one of the most incredible pictures I’d ever seen.” That discovery led Siegel to build a collection of Kelty’s photographs of circus performers from the 1920s and ’30s that was exhibited at the International Center of Photography in 2002 and collected in the book Step Right This Way: The Photographs of Edward J. Kelty. Today these photographs might sell for between $1,500 and $3,500, but when Siegel first began buying them, they were closer to $500. “When I started searching for these prints, the dealers began to catch on that there was some value in them,” he recalls. 

Most of the photographs in Siegel’s collection have doubled or tripled in value. He is the owner of, among other things, a vintage print of Arbus’s famous Twins. Model was an influential teacher of Arbus, encouraging her intimate, intense portraits of so-called “freaks” and fringe cultures, and it was through Model that Siegel first became enamored of Arbus’s enigmatic portraits. San Francisco dealer Jeffrey Fraenkel’s 1967-68 print of Arbus’s well-known images, Teenage couple on Hudson Street, N.Y.C., 1963, which bears an original label on the back marked $65, demonstrates just how far off the charts the prices of the artist’s work have gone: If he were to sell that photograph today, says Fraenkel, he would price it at more than $200,000.

Michael Mattis and his wife, Judith Hochberg, also began buying photographs years ago, when their graduate school stipends helped finance their obsession with Edward Weston. She is a computational linguist at IBM; he is a theoretical particle physicist who recently left his job at the Los Alamos National Laboratory to devote his time to adding to his Weston collection. (This compilation is traveling the country in a show that will be at the Utah Museum of Fine Arts in Salt Lake City through April 11, then continue on to the Greenville County Museum of Art in Greenville, S. C., through July 4.) “Weston is the Picasso of photography. He sort of did it all,” says Mattis. “With most photographers, you have to make a choice: Is the image the primary thing, or is the print the primary thing? With Weston, no compromise is necessary.” For the catalog accompanying the Weston show, Mattis wrote: “I think of Edward Weston’s peppers, cabbages and shells as ‘elementary particles of photography’…. Like the pioneer physicists of the time, Weston intuitively grasped the unity of it all.”

Mattis and Hochberg have clearly grasped the unity of all of Weston’s phases of photography—collecting his images from Mexico, his portraits and his late landscapes, as well as his more iconic still lifes and nudes, and doing their best to make certain no elementary particles escape them. In 1994, the couple and their children were about to leave for a camping trip, the family already packed into the car, when Mattis spied a mail truck heading toward their house. With the kids fussing in the back seat, he intercepted the mailman and found a letter from a dealer notifying him that a signed, vintage print of Weston’s Shell and Olla, 1927, was available for purchase. (“Vintage” is generally understood to mean that the photographer made the print close to the time the negative was made. Photographers may return to earlier negatives years later and make new prints, but vintage prints are reliably more valuable, the idea being that they reflect the photographer’s aesthetic vision at the time the negative was made.) Mattis wanted to go back into the house to call the dealer, but his wife convinced him to depart. Shortly thereafter, however, they pulled over at a gas station, and as his disgruntled family waited in the baking car, Mattis recalls, “I managed to track down the dealer, literally minutes ahead of three other clients who had received the identical mailing.”

More recently, Mattis obtained a 1925 print of Weston’s Pear-Shaped Nude. The image shows a nude woman from the rear, her head bent over, her body suggesting a ripe pear or a gourd. Mattis thinks of it as Weston’s first fruit and vegetable still life—taken four years before he began his series on peppers. In his Daybooks, Weston himself called it “one of my most perfect photographs,” and Mattis had patiently negotiated for more than three years with the model’s family, finally convincing them to part with it.

Mattis also collects lesser-known 20th-century photographers, among them Larry Fink, an artist he considers hugely undervalued and ripe for a revival of attention. Photographers from the 1960s and 1970s such as Fink, Todd Papageorge and Frank Gohlke are, in Mattis’s estimation, among the best of the postwar street photographers who have not achieved the fame of Arbus or Eggleston—yet. Fink and Papageorge, not to mention Robert Frank, captured the gestures of ordinary people in images with broad sociological sweep. Photographers such as Richard Misrach, Joel Sternfeld and Mitch Epstein, who began working in color in the 1970s, located the harmony and beauty in the mundane and pedestrian and established the particular visual poetry of color photography. As the flurry of winter exhibitions in New York showcasing this work suggests, these artists are attracting more interest as well.

According to Shelbyville, Ind., dealer Lee Marks, the show Taken by Design: Photographs from the Institute of Design in 2002 at Chicago’s Art Institute brought renewed attention to people such as Harry Callahan, Aaron Siskind and Art Sinsabaugh, postwar photographers who combined an experimental and documentary approach. “There are people left to be discovered,” says Marks. “Not too many, it seems, but there are some photographers who have not been given their due, and people are recognizing them.”