A 175-year-old image of a hedgerow plant by the pioneering William Henry Fox Talbot is expected to become one of the most expensive British photographs ever sold.
But with an asking price of £300,0000 it is a bargain, the gallerist James Hyman said on Wednesday.
“This is a photographic equivalent to a Leonardo da Vinci or a Picasso,” he said. “It is an important image by one of the greatest photographers.”
Hyman’s gallery is one of 70 that have been squeezed into almost every nook and cranny of Somerset House in London for the inaugural Photo London fair, an event which organisers hope will stand as one of the best in the world.
Fox Talbot’s Veronica in Bloom is a unique photograph. Made a year after he reported his “art of photogenic drawing” to the Royal Society in 1839, there are no copies.
In 1841 Fox Talbot, one of photography’s true revolutionaries, announced he had discovered the calotype, the first negative-positive process to make possible multiple copies from a single negative.
Hyman said Veronica in Bloom was a milestone in photographic history and not, in his view, priced as highly as it deserved to be.
“In a very inflated art market these works are still incredible value, photography lags behind almost any other part of the art market now. The value to be had, I believe, is in vintage photographs so us doing the fair is trying to make that statement in London.”
Prices elsewhere in the fair start at about £600, but rise considerably more for some of the bigger names – such as contemporary photographers Hiroshi Sugimoto, David Bailey, Annie Leibovitz and Martin Parr.
Photo London is the biggest photography fair staged in the UK and comes with a whole swath of concurrent shows, sales and pop-up events across the capital.
“From Temple Place to Peckham, from Hampstead to Holborn, London has gone photography crazy,” said the fair’s founder, Michael Benson. “Long may that be the case.”
Organisers are trying to create a campus-like atmosphere to tap in to this interest in photography. As well as it being a marketplace there are talks, performances and screenings as well as five commissioned exhibitions.
One of those includes a show called Beneath the Surface at the Victoria and Albert Museum, which started collecting photographs when it opened in 1852.
The V&A’s senior curator of photographs Martin Barnes scoured its vast collection for never or rarely seen works and has chosen about 200.
They include photographs from the 1860s by William Strudwick. He was the V&A’s photographic storekeeper and was commissioned to take photographs of demolition-threatened parts of London – such as East End coaching inns that made way for the railways, crumbling Wapping warehouses and almost medieval-looking buildings on the Thames.
Many of the photographs were only identified as being by Strudwick six months ago as they were scattered through different boxes at the V&A under the generic term London topography.
“We didn’t realise the full extent of the archive we have of them,” said Barnes. “They are really powerful, strong pictures … tremendously evocative.”
Elsewhere in the V&A show there is a set of photographs which show how diverse Photo London is: a series of 1961 London manhole covers by John Gay. “They are really intriguing and we’ve chosen what we think are the most charming ones. It is about how design impacts on your daily engagement with the world ... they are really charming, I like them a lot.”
• Photo London at Somerset House, London, from 21-24 May.
