The display features a life-size replica of Zahalka’s Newtown studio, complete with items of her furniture and many of her books and archives. It’s on until September 10.

The State Library of NSW’s new photography gallery and the MAPh are significant additions to the photographic landscape. Institutions play a role in the market because of their remit to filter out and show what their curators consider to be the best and most interesting art.

“A market is not just what occurs at auction,” Smith & Singer auctioneers chairman Geoffrey Smith said. “It’s not in a bubble, it’s co-dependent – what books are being published and what’s on at galleries. If they’re not being shown, then how do people get excited about that?”

Internationally, auction houses routinely devote entire sales to photography. In Australia’s far smaller market, photography is more likely to be found among other types of artworks in any given auction catalogue.

That says a lot about the relative lack of development of the photography market here. The upside is there’s a whole market waiting to be explored.

The highest price paid for a single Australian photograph at auction is $122,000 for Vale Street, 1975, by Carol Jerrems. (The price includes buyer’s premium, as do all the other prices in this article.)

Jerrems died in 1980 of a rare liver disease. She was only 30, but still managed to create an extraordinary body of work grounded in the women’s movement and the counterculture. In Vale Street, Jerrems depicted three young people in St Kilda, Melbourne, defiantly nude from the waist up.

Vale Street was printed in an edition of nine. The image that brought the record price was not one of the nine, but a signed artist’s proof. The sale was in November 2019 and the auction house was Sotheby’s (now Smith & Singer).

A print of Vale Street can be found in the National Gallery of Australia’s collection. The NGA purchased the print from one of Jerrems’ first exhibitions in the 1970s.

An examination of recent prices fetched at auction shows that buyers will pay good money for the photographs they really value.

In Deutscher and Hackett’s May 3 auction, for instance, Merv Bishop’s famed image of former prime minister Gough Whitlam and traditional elder Vincent Lingiari sold for $34,364 after being estimated at just $18,000 to $25,000.

“That’s a work of great documentary power,” executive director Damian Hackett said.

Max Dupain’s Sunbaker, snapped on Culburra Beach on the NSW south coast in 1937, is a landmark work in Australian photography. Its auction price varies according to the condition of the print, when the print was made, and whether Dupain signed and dated it.

“Photography collectors are very, very particular about condition,” Hackett said. (A print of Sunbaker sold through Leonard Joel this week; see details below.)

Photographers can also be perfectionists. Hackett said acclaimed artist Bill Henson reprints particular photographs that are faded or in bad condition, so their owners can offer them to market looking spic and span. Henson’s auction record of $62,000 was set in 2017 by Mossgreen Auctions.

Up there with Jerrems in terms of auction values is Tracey Moffatt, the celebrated Indigenous photographer and contemporary artist. Hackett said his firm was “talking to someone” who was contemplating parting with their version of the first image in Moffatt’s acclaimed Something More series of nine photographs.

Something More dates from 1989. Moffatt’s top auction price of $270,000 was set in 2021 when Deutscher and Hackett sold a full set of Something More.

Accessible market

Brook Andrew is an Indigenous photographer and artist who was the artistic director of the 2020 Sydney Biennale, titled NIRIN. Andrew’s most acclaimed photographic works include Sexy and Dangerous, 1996.

A print of the work set an auction record for Andrew in 2007 when Bonhams & Goodman sold it for $84,000. Sexy and Dangerous depicts what appears to be a historical image of a young Aboriginal man, his torso overlaid with Chinese and English writing as well as body decoration.

Hackett described the photography market as accessible. “You can put together a very decent photography collection for not very much money at the moment,” he said.

But he warned against expectations of fast gains. “Everyone has been saying the photography market is really going to climb one day, and they’ve been saying that for a long time,” he said.

Hackett said photography was well suited to online auctions “because it’s all about the image, it’s not about the texture” like painting usually is. Paintings really need to be seen in the flesh, but a photograph on the screen is very similar to what you will get when you buy it.

Sometimes Hackett feels “strange” calling a work a photograph when it’s really a piece of contemporary art using the photographic medium. It’s a good point in an age when so many contemporary artists are embracing every kind of medium available to them.

Another interesting feature of the market was that one or two leading photographers refused to grant copyright for their works to be illustrated in auction catalogues, and this potentially damaged their prospect of sales, Hackett said. There is one photographer whose work he will not put in an auction catalogue because of this issue.

The photography auction market has been something of a rollercoaster, according to Smith.

“At the end of the 1990s and in the early 2000s, Australian photography was a darling of the art market,” Smith said. “It was popular and avidly collected. Tracey Moffatt’s Something More 1 (a print of number one in the series) sold for $117,500. It was an extraordinary moment – I remember being there.

“Then the GFC came along and the market retreated. It’s taken longer to recover from that setback. It wasn’t until 2019 that we saw a renewed interest in Australian photography.”

In July 2019, Smith & Singer sold Petrina Hicks’ bizarre but compelling Shenae and Jade, 2005, to the National Gallery of Victoria for $26,840. Shenae and Jade is a portrait of a pristine young girl with a budgie protruding from her mouth. (Hicks’ auction record to date, set in 2021 through Deutscher and Hackett, is $46,636 for Shenae and Jade.)

Together with Jerrems’ Vale Street, those results recalibrated people’s attention on photography, Smith said. “But what it always takes is for significant works to be brought forward, and this was the case. It did bring out other works.”

Last November, Smith & Singer sold a Julie Rrap photograph for $42,955 after estimating it at $10,000 to $15,000.

On Tuesday night, Leonard Joel sold a Dupain Sunbaker for $28,000 on an estimate of $15,000 to $20,000.

Results in the Leonard Joel sale for works previewed last week in Saleroom included $118,750 for Vietnamese/French painter Vu Cao Dam’s Le Cavalier, 1978. The estimate was $80,000 to $100,000.

Vincas Jomantas’ beautiful sculpture Girl with Birds, 1958/1976, went for $45,000 on an estimate of $25,000 to $35,000. The work was being deaccessioned by the National Gallery of Australia.

Melbourne street artist Rone’s Untitled (Jane Doe), 2013, estimated at $15,000 to $20,000, sold to an online bidder for $30,000.

Jeffrey Smart’s Drawing Study for the Waiting Bus, c.1986, was passed in with expectations it would sell after the auction. It was estimated to fetch $20,000 to $30,000.