A photograph recently sold for the astonishing sum of $6.5 million dollars. Here's an article which discusses the sale and which essentially concludes that photographs are not art.
For what it is worth, I quite like the photo described in the article. There is also no question in my mind that this photograph and many other photographs are works of art. While easier to create than a painting or a sculpture of similar compositional complexity, there is no question in my mind that a lot of skill goes into creating a great photograph.
That said, I am uncomfortable with the notion of any photograph (other than a few very special cases that I will get to shortly) having a significant value. The reason for this discomfort is that when one buys a print of a photograph, it is not only impossible to know if there are other identical prints in existence, it is also usefully impossible to know if additional identical copies of the print can be made.
Another way of looking at the issue is that a work of art by a famous artist is valuable in significant part because it is exceptionally rare. In fact, the work of art is so rare that there is often exactly one instance of the work of are in existence in the entire world. Furthermore, even if the artist is still alive and still has literally everything that they need (the scene/model, the equipment, the paint, the lighting, etc., etc., etc.), it is generally if not essentially always impossible for the artist to create another identical copy of the work of art. Even when it is possible for the artist to create subsequent copies which are identical in all the ways that even the most expert expert could use to figure out which copy is the original (i.e. which copy was created first) then there will still only ever be a relative handful of such identical copies. Consequently, the person paying a large sum of money for a conventional work of art has some assurance that the work that they are buying will remain relatively if not truly unique / original and thus preserve much of its value.
In contrast, photographs, as a rule, simply do not have this same property.
There are a few exceptions. For example, if one could purchase the oldest photograph ever taken then one would have in their possession a physical artifact which could be demonstrated to be THE original oldest photograph ever taken because the technology used to create that particular photograph is such that making another copy of the photograph that a seriously expert expert could not identify as being a copy is impractical to the point of being impossible. There are a relative handful of other photographs in existence today with the same traits - that they are effectively impossible to duplicate in such a way that a seriously expert expert would be unable to identify which was the original and which was the copy.
For those interested, the oldest existent photograph in the world was a scene taken by Joseph Nicéphore Niépce in 1826 or 1827. It is a very dark and rather difficult to see image of the view out of an upper floor window of his home in Burgundy, France. See
for more information about Niépce's photo.
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