Inside a Fine Art Photography Gallery

In 1999, Holden Luntz opened the Holden Luntz Gallery in Palm Beach, Florida. With a family background in the art gallery business and an MFA from New York University, he was perfectly placed to open his own gallery, one of the first to specialize in fine art photography in the southeastern United States.

Over the years, Luntz, aided by his wife, Jodi, and their family, has earned a reputation as both a respected gallery owner and published expert on classic and contemporary fine art photography. “Holden’s knowledge of photography, from its history to its newest trends, is unsurpassed,” says Harry Benson, whose works have been exhibited and sold in Luntz’s gallery for decades. “He and his team have created a gallery that is a modern, cutting-edge showcase for fine art photography. He is at the very top of his field.”

Luntz has specialized in acquiring and exhibiting the works of modern greats like Henri Cartier-Bresson, Horst P. Horst, Diane Arbus, and Edward Weston as well as contemporary standouts such as Benson, Michael Eastman, David Yarrow, and Elliott Erwitt. We asked him about the world of fine art photography and how a photographer can consider the benefits of being shown in a gallery.

Robert Kiener (RK): After years as an art gallery owner and dealer showing and selling paintings, sculpture, and photography, you decided to concentrate solely on selling fine art photography in 1999. What was it—and is it—that attracts you to fine art photography?

Holden Luntz (HL): If you really think about it, I don’t know of another art form that is a more telling, more visible cultural currency of our times. Fine art photography has this opportunity to show us where we came from and where we’re going. It also reveals to us the world we know and the world we don’t know, a world we could be afraid of and a world we could desire. 

RK: What do you look for in a fine art photograph? What grabs or resonates with you? 

HL: In short, something that is not forgettable. We are barraged with visual images every day and are conditioned to forget almost everything we see. If we didn’t, our brains couldn’t process all that information. So I am always looking for a photograph that leaves an impression that is unforgettable, one that goes from your eyes to somewhere else. A special photograph either tags your sense of desire, your sense of emotion, your sense of fear, or your intellect.

A great photograph has to be more than just a visual experience. If you can look at a photograph and can look away—and you don’t want to look back—it’s nothing that is going to stay with you.

I look for someone who uses a camera to say something unique. If they are seduced by beautiful sunsets or sailboats on the water or by an adorable laughing child, then the material basically owns them; they don’t own the material. The camera is just an instrument that helps an artist or photographer communicate. What I want to see when I look at a body of work is the vision, a voice of whoever is behind that camera.

RK: As you don’t normally examine portfolios of “beginners,” what advice would you offer them?

HL: Coincidentally, I just had a young photographer come in. He showed me the pictures that he had taken all over the world, from the USA to Europe to Japan. I examined his portfolio and told him, “Look, you obviously love photography. You are committed to being a photographer, but your pictures are really about what’s in front of the camera; they do not say enough about what’s in your mind, what’s in your heart or your imagination. This is what I need to know—to see—when I look at your pictures.”

I think for photography to be a full medium, to be really worthy of holding one’s attention and being expressive, you have to connect very strongly with the person on the other side of the camera. If you do, then you have a shared experience.

Probably no one said to this photographer before he started taking these pictures, “What is it you want your work to say?” If your work is true to your spirit, true to your interests, true to the world around you, and if you have something unique that you want to show, the pictures will be validated by these goals.

RK: How would you describe today’s fine art photography market? 

HL: I think it’s a pretty complex market in the sense that there are so many photographers finding ways to create bodies of work that are very much their own. Take Stephen Wilkes, for example, who came up with the idea that a photograph is not merely an instant in time but can be an entire day. He created this new vision of what happens in life. Or David Yarrow, who shoots such different bodies of work, from elaborately staged cinematic, inspired scenes to pictures that require him to put his own health and safety on the line by going to remote and dangerous places.

Others, such as Michael Eastman, Harry Benson, and Joyce Tenneson, who have been with us for decades, have moved through different bodies of work as well as different work styles, from analog to digital and from making darkroom prints to digital prints.

On a broader scale, I like a lot of what is being done, and there’s also a lot I am not partial to. There is a lot of fine art work that borders on being commercial, where there is a slickness to it. You see a lot of that at art fairs where there is so much “product.” Because dealers have to spend a lot of money to get there, pay for hotels, pay for the build-out of the space, they sometimes feature work that can be particularly aggressive, noisy, flashy. They can sometimes bring work that is “big and shiny” rather than substantial.

RK: How have the buyers changed?

HL: The collecting base has expanded. Back in the 1970s and 1980s, you worked with a smaller group of collectors. Photography was its own separate market. Most of the pictures were darkroom pictures, and pictures were basically a specific size: either 11x14 or 16x20 or 20x24. Some of them were larger, but basically photography was made in the darkroom with an enlarger, paper, and all of the chemistry that went into printing analog film.

If you wanted to see photographs, you would go to a photography gallery or museum. I don’t think photography was mainstreamed into the art market until the last 20 to 25 years. Now there are so many more dealers that have interest and components in the photography world.

Also, clients now realize it is as acceptable to collect photography as it is to collect painting and sculpture. Thirty to 40 percent of all the museum shows are devoted to photography, and photography has been mainstreamed into the larger art market.

RK: How has pricing changed with the introduction of limited editions and other factors?

HL: When money started to move into the photography market, which was basically in the mid-to-late 1980s, dealers sort of followed the template that was set up for lithographs or serigraphs or works on paper. As those got more expensive, they decided to make people feel more secure by limiting the number of images by making limited editions.

However, if you look at classic photography, say the early days of Horst P. Horst or [Edward] Steichen or even Elliot Erwitt, there were no early editions because the pictures probably cost a [couple hundred] dollars, so people would not be upset if someone else had one of the pictures. As it costs more money to own the work, the industry thought it was only right that the artist would not turn out huge editions. That limiting has helped make the fine art photography market more stable. Generally you don’t have the wide price fluctuations with photography prices that you can have with other art.

RK: You’ve opened a second gallery nearby with your daughter. How has the gallery experience worked for you and your team?

HL: When someone comes into a gallery, especially down here in Palm Beach, they’re not looking at their watch. They’re not between appointments. Many are here to relax and learn. You have the time and opportunity to get a sense of who they are and what they like. They have time to talk to you and time to pull up their JPEGs on their phones to show what their houses and walls look like and what other artwork they own. So, for us, the joy of our galleries is that you can slow down, you can concentrate on peoples’ attention. You can selectively show a body of work instead of one or two pictures of this or one or two pictures of that. That’s so unlike an art fair where there may be 100 or 200 dealers jockeying for space, and you may have a buyer’s attention for only a minute or two. We are thrilled to have the time to educate buyers, to help them understand what’s special about what we have and what’s being done in the world of fine art photography.

Frankly, merely selling a photograph is not of much particular interest to me. It’s a much greater experience if you get to know somebody so you can watch them light up when they find something really nice. We are most satisfied when we are helping clients build collections. Educating them is a wonderful way of expanding their artistic intelligence.

RK: Did you ever hear back from that young photographer whose portfolio you reviewed recently?

HL: Good question. I forgot to mention that I also told him I was sorry for being such a tough critic. But he later wrote me, telling me that my advice encouraged him and reminded him of the adage, “Being good is not enough when you dream of being great.” 

Robert Kiener is a writer in Vermont.