About
Born in London, Peter Fetterman has been deeply involved in the medium of photography for over 30 years. Initially a filmmaker and collector, he set up his first gallery over 20 years ago. He was one of the pioneer tenants of Bergamot Station, the Santa Monica Center of the Arts when it first opened in 1994.
The gallery has one of the largest inventories of classic 20th Century photography in the country particularly in humanist photography. Diverse holdings include work by Henri Cartier-Bresson, Sebastião Salgado, Steve McCurry, Ansel Adams, Paul Caponigro, Willy Ronis, André Kertesz, Manuel Alvarez Bravo, Lillian Bassman, Pentti Sammallahti, Stephen Wilkes and Jeffrey Conley.
Peter and his colleagues are committed to promote the awareness and appreciation of the most powerful of the mediums in an intimate, user-friendly salon environment.
Availability and Prices:
The availability of artwork is subject to prior sale. All prices are subject to change without prior notice.
Framing:
The gallery provides framing at additional cost. Please inquire at time of purchase about availability of frames.
California Taxes:
There is a 9.5% sales tax for all purchases within the state of California. Sales tax is not applicable to purchases billed and shipped to an out of state address.
Shipping:
Artwork will be packaged professionally and shipped via FedEx at the expense of the client. Any damage to artwork incurred during shipment is insured by the gallery.
Guarantee:
All purchases are guaranteed to be as described. All photographs are in excellent condition unless otherwise noted.
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It is important to remember that photography is the youngest of all collectable art forms. Whereas painting, drawing, graphics and sculpture have centuries of tradition and scholarship behind them, photography in comparison is a mere infant. Invented as recently as 1839, the medium has nonetheless become very much the art form of our time, with photography exhibitions at the forefront of many major museums’ programming.
The first serious auction of photography only took place in 1974 in New York, and its’ real turning point as a highly prized collectable took place in our own city in 1984. That was the year the Getty Museum, in a carefully orchestrated secret coup, swooped up the eighteen most important collections of fine art photography in private hands. They went for the earth-shattering price (at that time) of $25 million. Of course today, only eighteen years later this seems like an extraordinary "steal" when a single Man Ray photograph of"Glass Tears"has changed hands privately for $1 million or a single Paul Strand sells at auction for over $600,000.
What does this all this mean for the "ordinary" collector? Years ago it was always assumed that in order to have a major collection one had to be born into a rather gilded life. One of the wonderful things about photography is that it is still possible to build up a significant collection for relatively small sums of money, if you go about it in a smart way. You may love Modigliani, or Rubens, or Rembrandt or Matisse but for most of us that would be fantasy collecting. Fortunately it is still possible to acquire images by the equivalent masters of photography, at an accessible level, and in a market that has so far only ever gone up in value.
"How do I go about it?" you may be wondering. The best advice I give my new clients is to do what I call"photo aerobics". Exercise your eye. Take every opportunity to look at as many images as you can, be it in museum shows, galleries, art fairs (like this one), and build up a library of photography books. As in any field of collecting the more knowledge you can acquire the greater the pleasure you are going to experience from the whole process. Find a dealer you can communicate with who is willing to share their own knowledge and expertise with you. Remember that there are no such things as stupid questions. As your eye and knowledge develop so will your confidence. Finding the photographs that inspire you is a highly creative endeavor in itself, and can even be an act of self-discovery. As your learning curve grows you will soon understand and appreciate the difference between a silver print and a platinum print, a vintage print and a modern print.
Happily it is still possible to buy an important print in the $1000-$5000 range, and by important I mean a photograph that is going to have longevity not only in terms of the image itself, but also the reputation and importance of the artist. To do this today in any other medium is virtually impossible. This will of course not always be the case with photography either. The realities of increasing demand as more and more collectors enter the arena, will mean a diminishing supply of available, affordable prints of classic images by recognized masters.
What I have seen over the last twenty-five years of collecting is that the medium has enormous power and emotional interest for a large number of people. Many have had their entire sense of reality altered by what they have seen. This is what has contributed to its vibrancy as a collectable art form, and will continue to do so.
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