From Tribal Cultures and Hollywood Stars to Street Life: The Masters' Photographs Are All Here

Sunday is the last day of Photo Shanghai. If you can't make it, here is our detailed report.

Shanghai is crowded with exhibitions this September. The Shanghai international furniture fair, which we have been covering, has just closed; the "Rain Room," a hit in New York and London and now in Shanghai, is open; there is the art and design fair in the West Bund; and there is the photography fair we cover below, Photo Shanghai.

Photo Shanghai is organized by the World Photography Organisation (WPO). It held a preview on Thursday afternoon and opened to the public on Friday and over the weekend. Together with two other large shows open the same weekend, Art Cities and the West Bund Art & Design fair, it makes up this year's "Shanghai Art Week."

Of the three, the West Bund fair has galleries, sculpture, art installations, design shops and interactive spaces; Art Cities leans toward digital media; and Photo Shanghai is devoted to photography.

That may sound narrower than the other two, but it is actually the largest of the three, with more than 500 photographs from 50 galleries around the world. Its first edition last year broke the attendance record for its venue, the Shanghai Exhibition Centre, selling 25,000 tickets in three days. The fair's director, Alexander Montague-Sparey, told us he was quite satisfied with last year's impact and sales.

If your interests are broad and you can't decide among all the shows this weekend, use QDaily's account of Photo Shanghai as a guide.

Enter on the left and the first thing you see is a special exhibition brought by Gagosian. Two long white walls hold 155 photographs from Birds of the West Indies by the well-known American artist Taryn Simon, the first time the series has been shown in Asia. It is worth walking the whole length of it.

Further in, past themed pavilions sponsored by brands such as Mercedes-Benz and Leica, you reach the main exhibition hall downstairs.On Thursday evening, the organizers invited potential buyers, industry insiders and the press to a preview. This is what sets a fair apart from an ordinary exhibition: every photograph carries a price, and the room is loud with talk. Besides those looking at the pictures and taking souvenir snaps, plenty of people came to socialize, to buy, or to compare notes.

Left: Magnum Photos

At London's ATLAS Gallery, just to the left at the foot of the stairs, a crowd stayed gathered in front of several works by masters. One is the picture below by Henri Cartier-Bresson, the French photographer who coined the "decisive moment," is called the "father of modern photojournalism," and co-founded Magnum Photos, the world's most influential photography agency.

While we were there, three people were debating whether a print from the same series that one of them had bought earlier was expensive or cheap. And when the fair opened on Friday morning, ATLAS staff told QDaily that one edition of René Burri's Horse, Swimming Pool and House Designed by Luis Barragán, below, priced at 186,000 yuan, had sold the night before.

Horse, Swimming Pool and House Designed by Luis Barragán

This was not an isolated case. At MD Gallery, almost at the very back, each image by Erwin Olaf, a photographer regarded as a Dutch national treasure, comes in an edition of 10, and most had sold several editions by the end of the preview night. Camile Merklen, one of MD's managers, told us the buyers were roughly half Asian and half European.

Erwin Olaf will be at the fair himself, giving a talk with MD's owner at 1 p.m. on Saturday. He has made many tense, charged photographs of the human body and has shot advertising for many brands; his unrestrained imagination makes his style instantly recognizable.

Some of Erwin Olaf's works on display at the fair

Other works by Erwin Olaf

Right after Olaf's talk comes one by the British photographer Jimmy Nelson. To commemorate vanishing tribal cultures, he has traveled to Ethiopia, Indonesia, Kenya, New Zealand, Siberia and elsewhere to photograph the people there and how they live. This time he has brought a strikingly Eastern picture:

Jimmy Nelson at work

The legendary Hollywood photographer Terry O'Neill caught many classic moments of the great stars of the last century:

Brigitte Bardot / Audrey Hepburn

There is Jean-Marie Périer, who photographed many of the fashion world's biggest names:

And Candida Höfer, known for her long devotion to photographing public spaces:

The Tokyo-based amanasalto gallery shows several Japanese masters who are household names, such as Nobuyoshi Araki, Daido Moriyama, Shomei Tomatsu and Hiroshi Sugimoto, as well as the architect Tadao Ando, who turns his lens on his own buildings.

At the amanasalto booth, an elderly gentleman who works in architecture seemed to know the pictures better than the gallery's curator. He was telling her the stories behind the buildings in Ando's photographs and, warming to his theme, showed her a photo on his phone of himself at dinner in Ando's home. Beside them, someone was asking another staff member about the price of single prints and of whole series.

Collecting photography is less mature than collecting paintings or sculpture, not least because the camera itself is a late invention and now faces a digital age in which "everyone is a photographer." Many of the galleries at this fair do not specialize in photography and have no established market system behind them, and many visitors were learning for the first time that photographs can be bought and sold as collectibles.

As the largest photography fair in Asia, Photo Shanghai seemed to open new ground with its first edition. It tested the market and found a huge appetite for collecting photography in Shanghai, in China and across Asia, and it gave Asian photographers and galleries a valuable platform.

Asked why their gallery had come to Photo Shanghai, one gallery head said casually: "Everyone in the business knows about it. Sales should be good, too. A booth like ours, 25 square meters, costs 80,000 yuan, but it's still worth it."

The owner of Singapore's YEO Gallery (right in the picture below) told us this was her first time at Photo Shanghai; her Chinese buyers had strongly urged her to come. Her gallery's only Chinese photographer, whose work about bananas hangs in front of her, was the most popular at the preview; the black-and-white series behind her is by a photographer who documented the lives of Singapore's poor decades ago. She said she wanted to "show a different side of Singapore."

Work by Chinese photographers is, of course, everywhere too: Yang Fudong, Xie Chunde, Zhang Kechun, Feng Mengbo, Chien-Chi Chang and others. There are landscapes, documentary pictures and portraits in every mood: psychedelic, modern, deeply Chinese, black-and-white from the mining era, saturated with color.

Yang Fudong, The Light That I Feel

Works by Zhang Kechun

Besides the photographers above who are giving talks, the director, Alexander, told us that Jacob Aue Sobol (Sunday, 1 p.m.), Yuki Onodera (Sunday, 2 p.m.), Chien-Chi Chang and Arno Minkkinen will also be there, in conversation or sharing the highlights and unusual experiences of their careers with the audience. Specialists in photography collecting have also been invited to discuss how photographic art relates to the collecting market.

So the fair is lively and full, all the more because some pictures carry a sign saying "Feel free to take photos." That openness means anyone hoping to look at pictures in peace may be disappointed. Perhaps because the preview was so crowded, one visitor compared it to a "hypermarket."

But here, well-known galleries from China, London, New York, Tokyo and Korea have brought together, in one place, work by some of the most influential photographers in the medium's history and by others just making their names.

Whatever your taste, it is not hard to find something that moves you among so many works, and the person standing next to you may well be a close friend of the photographer or an expert, so a casual chat can turn up plenty of good stories. For collectors, it is the year's best chance to buy or to see where the market is heading.

To attend what may fairly be called the biggest event in Asian photography, people from around the world who make or collect photographs have gathered in Shanghai this week. Many of the galleries may have planned events beyond the fair itself, such as exhibitions, talks and parties. Even if you aren't a buyer, when you see a work you like, go and ask about it; there may be more fun waiting for you to find.

QDaily interviewed Alexander, the director of Photo Shanghai. He holds a master's degree in art history from Oxford and was the youngest director in the history of Christie's. Sales at the London photographs department he ran grew fast, and with the world's largest art dealers and collectors it set several world auction records. He could not hide his fondness for Shanghai, and he called the city "elegant" again and again.

Q = QDaily; A = Alexander

Q: How long did it take to put on a fair like this, and what is it for?

A: From the first idea, we spent two years on research. The first edition took eight months to prepare; this year took six. The aim is to give top international galleries a chance to come to Shanghai and to let Shanghai see the 50 best galleries in the world, bringing together outstanding photographers from New York, London, Berlin, Singapore, Tokyo, Seoul, Shanghai and elsewhere. Our ultimate goal is to be the art fair with the highest standards in the industry.

Q: What makes Photo Shanghai distinctive?

A: Experience and quality. We are the only fair with such strong resources that covers work from both East and West. It is carefully curated and gives people access to high-quality images. We will keep our standards high; I choose the galleries and the photographers myself.

Q: How do you choose galleries and works?

A: The best! Gallery-grade work from the Americas, Europe and Asia, by artists who are representative. Work that blends Eastern and Western elements and shows more imagination is also very good. There may be work by Western photographers that the Asian market can't easily get to. And of course, East or West, we cover everything from the top end (in price) to entry-level pieces.

Q: Has your selection changed since last year?

A: It's more modern. Last year's experience told us that large, fashionable, more modern works were more popular. And given Shanghai's fashionable, elegant character, we lean toward a stylish, modern look.

Q: Why did you choose Shanghai as the home of Asia's largest photography fair?

A: (beginning to gush) Shanghai is very interesting. It's an elegant, modern city, better than Beijing or Hong Kong! It's full of energy, the people of Shanghai really understand art, and they take great care over how they live.

Q: I would have thought of Tokyo...

A: We did consider Tokyo at first, because Japan has many famous photographers. But we found the Japanese public wasn't very enthusiastic, and there were far fewer collectors than in Shanghai.

Q: Why are you so devoted to photography? What draws you to it most?

A: I think the elegance of photographs makes them the best decoration for a home or any space. They have the design appeal of furnishings, they freeze a real moment, and they seem to tell the story behind it. And the poses, expressions and bearing of the people in photographs are very beautiful. Oil paintings and sculpture can't do that.

Q: Do you decorate your own home with photographs? Whose work hangs there?

A: Of course! Cecil Beaton, Irving Penn, Viviane Sassen, Robert Mapplethorpe...

Example of Cecil Beaton's work

Example of Irving Penn's work

Example of Viviane Sassen's work

Example of Robert Mapplethorpe's work