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• Issue #261
• Article

By Michael Diemar

Philippe Garner. 23 28 ED 13, MARSEILLE, 1975. (Courtesy of Philippe Garner/Hamiltons Gallery)

Philippe Garner has been a key figure in the international photography world for over 50 years. He was in charge of the December 1971 sale of photographs at Sotheby's in London, the first that was planned to inaugurate a regular program of auctions in this field.

Alongside his career as a specialist in photographs, he has also had a parallel career as a specialist in the decorative arts and design, even authoring a major reference book on the subject.

But now that he's stepped back a bit from those duties, what's in store for the ever-energetic Garner?

Unbeknownst to many, Garner is also a committed photographer, and this autumn, Hamiltons Gallery in London will present the first exhibition of his photographs, entitled "Summer–Seventies–Saint-Tropez". In anticipation of the exhibition, Garner has launched his own website, https://www.philippegarner.com. Below is an interview with Garner about his experiences and new direction.

Q. You're showing an exhibition of your photographs at Hamiltons in London in September-October. This is an unknown side to your activities. Were you always a photographer?

A. I have always had this hunger for images and have always wanted to document precious moments as I go through life, to preserve as a keepsake a fragment or trace of what I have experienced.

When I look back through my activities with a camera, I realise that my earliest pictures go back to the early '60s, when I entered my teens. The seeds were already sown. I became much more focused about my photography in the early '70s, for a variety of reasons, or through coincidences, with my starting to work in the field of the arts, starting to work very specifically in the field of photographs, and having already established a circle of friends who shared my visual interests. I learned from them, and we all benefited from the cross-fertilisation of ideas and enthusiasms.

Philippe Garner. MATERIEL BOULANGERIE-PATISSERIE, AIX-EN-PROVENCE, 1972. (Courtesy of Philippe Garner/Hamiltons Gallery)

This context, and I guess my exacting nature pushed me to think, "Well, if I'm going to take photographs, I should do my very best to make pictures that fulfilled my objectives." And since then, I have been photographing consistently.

Q. The exhibition is not a general overview of your photographs. It's about a specific place, at a specific time.

A. It's very focused and is entitled "Summer–Seventies–Saint-Tropez", though, strictly speaking, it's about a slightly broader area of the South of France, but with a very strong and specific emphasis on Saint-Tropez. What do I have to say about these pictures? I prefer to let people come to their own conclusions about them, so I'll just stick to one or two of the technical points. They were all shot on Kodachrome, a slow color positive transparency film, which delivered such glorious saturated colors. They were all shot on my trusty first Pentax Spotmatic with its razor-sharp Takumar lenses, mostly with a 50mm lens. Technically, they're very straightforward. I was just looking for the telling elements that really captured my experience of the time and the place.

Q. It's very apparent that the photographs weren't taken by a tourist. You had real roots in the region.

A. I was born in Aix-en-Provence. My mother was French, of Corsican origin. My sister and I spent all of our long holidays, Easter and summer, in Aix-en-Provence. We got to know Aix and the area as a second home. Looking back, I think how lucky I was to experience two cultures in real depth, not, as you rightly say, as a tourist. Those extended visits would include trips along the coast between Marseille and Monte Carlo. Those were the glory days of the Riviera, before it became a concrete jungle, choked with cars and gawkers. So yes, it was territory that already meant a great deal to me.

Q. You're hinting in the presentation of the exhibition that you were photographing a vanishing world. Did you have that sense at the time?

A. To some extent I surely did, but with the passage of time that awareness becomes ever more evident and poignant. I was drawn instinctively, for example, to shop façades with wonderful artisanal lettering, which already then represented a tradition that was fading. And one had the sense with any of these subjects I chose to photograph that they might not be there the next time, and give it a few years and they would surely have vanished.

Q. What about the people in the photographs?

A. One, Lucilla, is now my wife, and she has been my greatest champion. I value the fact that she never sugar-coats her feedback. The photographs taken on La Voile Rouge beach, near Saint-Tropez, feature a few of the colourful characters I met there, including the owner, the mattress boy, the girls who defined the spirit of the place.

Philippe Garner. LUCILLA, LA VOILE ROUGE, 1977. (Courtesy of Philippe Garner/Hamiltons Gallery)

Q. How did the exhibition with Hamilton's come about?

A. The exhibition came about organically through conversations with Tim Jefferies. We've got to know one another pretty well over the years and found multiple shared areas of interest. A few years ago, I asked him if he would be curious to see a selection of my photographs. This was when, encouraged by Lucilla, I was starting to consider how best to give my photographs some exposure. And Tim was intrigued; he enjoyed what he saw, and once again a seed was sown. He took one of my prints, sixty inches high, to Paris Photo. The pandemic slowed things, but our conversation led to talk of an exhibition. Tim came back to me with a clear idea: he was keen to focus on an early chapter of my work, and one that happened to be of a territory that he knows and has also very much enjoyed.

Q. Was there much debate about the sizes of the prints?

A. The practicalities of the show came together easily. The majority of the prints are on 20 x 24 inch paper, so the maximum image dimension is 22 inches. That's the size I'd been showing to Tim, and it felt like a good median size for the wall. Tim suggested we print one larger, which we did to 36 inches. And we printed three smaller, to 12 inches wide. It just felt right to break the pattern.

Q. Are you planning to turn these images into a book?

A. Of course, one fantasizes about one's pictures in book form. But I have no particular plan. What will please me the most in the short term is to get more pictures on walls and people seeing and hopefully enjoying them. I love the idea of people seeing the pictures in their best iteration, as prints as opposed to the printed page.

Philippe Garner. MATTRESS BOY, LA VOILE ROUGE, 1974. (Courtesy of Philippe Garner/Hamiltons Gallery)

Q. How big is the archive of your own photographs?

A. Good question. And I don't know the answer! Except to be able to say, this exhibition is the distillation of one chapter; there are many more. This is color; there's plenty of black and white. These were all shot in strong sunlight. There are plenty of night shots, and I love the qualities of the low light of dawn and dusk.

My pattern is that when I've been making pictures over a period of weeks or months, the time comes to edit and get my favourite images printed. I'll go through what I've done, select what I regard as the successes, and visit my loyal printers, one for color, one for black and white. I'm very pleased that I started decades ago with a particular size archive print, and I've stuck with it; so there is an absolute consistency of format. Possibly it's revealing too much about myself to tell you that they're 8 x 12 inches, centered on 12 x 16 inch paper. Why is that magic to me? Because it is the only size on 12 x 16 paper at which you can have equal width borders, two inches, all around. I guess it reveals a certain obsessive, fastidiousness that people surely recognise in me.

I've taken quite a while to make some sort of sense of what I've been doing in my photographs. You take them and then you look at them. You're happy or not happy, and you move on, and you take more, and you go down different paths. Then, after a while, you start to see something of yourself and of what you're about staring back at you from your photographs. It's interesting to see, and sometimes to smile.
I never answered your question in terms of numbers, but it runs to hundreds and hundreds. And I guess it must reach four figures and beyond.

Q. Have you also photographed people in the photo world over the years?

A. I have photographed quite a number of people from the photo world, with a particular flurry of activity in the mid '90s. Systematically in black and white, and taken in a certain way. I tended to prefer the most challenging lighting situations, the less light the better, and try and just coax what I could out of that. The antithesis of forensic, over-sharp images. Yes, I could lay those pictures out now and you'd be looking at a time capsule.

Philippe Garner. PAUL TOMASELLI, PROPRIETOR OF LA VOILE ROUGE, 1974. (Courtesy of Philippe Garner/Hamiltons Gallery)

Q. Are you toying around with dates for your next exhibition?

A. I've got nothing in mind. Though yes, I'm thinking about what the subject matter of the next exhibition might be. I think it is more interesting to focus on a specific theme. Having made this exhibition around the South of France, I'm tempted to do something about my American pictures. I have had extraordinary opportunities, time, and situations, to make photographs in the States. The very earliest were taken in Richmond, VA, in the early '70s and I had fun shooting in Las Vegas in 1977, but most were taken in the last quarter-century, when I traveled so regularly for my work to the States, mostly to New York, but also to Los Angeles, to Miami, and to other cities. Inevitably, in this situation, I ended up being an urban photographer, not a landscape photographer. It was the consequence of my timetable. It got to the point where I ceased to feel like a tourist, though had the curious eye of the outsider as I pursued my photographic lines of inquiry.

Q. Is there anything you would like to add about the exhibition?

A. Not really, because in the end I'd rather the pictures spoke for themselves. I'll tell an anecdote about the taking of any picture, but I have absolutely no desire to dissect or deconstruct the image. I can have my thoughts, but others must bring their own perspectives to my pictures.

One very pleasing observation is that in building up to this exhibition, and to the launch of my website–which is very much focused on my photography, as well as situating it within the context of my career–I have had very precious help from several people half my age or younger. It gave me enormous pleasure to see the response of another generation to my pictures. It's very easy if you live with pictures and know them well, to think you know what they have to say, the messages implicit in them. But until you put them out there and put them to the test, you really don't know for sure. Having such an enthusiastic response from that generation was for me a wonderful adrenaline jolt.

Q. The other big news is the launch of your website, www.philippegarner.com. It seems to me that it marks another change. For most of your career as an auction specialist you kept a very low profile. A first exception being the in-depth interview with pLUK magazine in 2002. The second exception I'm aware of was the talk you gave at the Frick Collection in 2015, now posted on your website. Later, I interviewed you for issue 2 of The Classic, and we have done several interviews since. But it's a big change?

A. Yes, indeed. I remember my colleague Lydia Cresswell-Jones at Sotheby's, being rather surprised by how open I was in the pLUK interview, because it was the first time that I opened up and talked about my influences, my inspirations. I've tended to keep them to myself. That said, one finds close like-minded friends, but I never until then felt I wanted this to be public property.

Q. Was keeping a low profile part of the role of being an auction house specialist?

A. It's a good question. And you're right in that my professional role has been within what you might call a service industry. Pleasing one's clients, doing right by one's clients on both sides of the equation, the sellers and the buyers, is what the job is all about. And obviously one builds a certain reputation just by force of presence in a marketplace. But I recognise that instinctively, with my professional hat on, self-promotion, setting out my personal stall so to speak, was not to be part of the equation.

Philippe Garner. CHEZ HELMUT NEWTON, LA CROIX-VALMER, 1975. (Courtesy of Philippe Garner/Hamiltons Gallery)

Q.There's some very interesting material on your website. Apart from your photographs, there are filmed conversations and interviews, texts, and I very much enjoyed the section "Inspirations", with tear sheets you had kept from your early days.

A. Once I started on the website and got focused on doing it, I had terrific support. Thank you Carolina and Elif! I would have been incapable of getting the images, data, and ideas into the electronic format. But it all came together quite easily as I opted for a straightforward, broad-brush overview.

I needed to have some autobiographical elements to tell my story and give insights into the key circumstances and artistic references that have nourished me. And of course it was a good way to show my photographs and give them context.

I didn't want to bore people to tears on the autobiographical front. So there are brief paragraphs, taking the viewer through the key stages of my life, and these are enlivened with a few pictures. That's the section called "About". There's the section called "Inspirations", where I present tear sheets and cuttings. Almost all of them are from the mid to late '60s; they may just tip into the '70s.

It's a real mix of all the strands of visual culture–the arts, the performing arts, fashion–that impacted me in those years, and that are still very much a part of me. They are the foundation stones of all of my wide cultural interests. And they effectively became the foundation stones of my professional life.

Q. You retired from full time employment at Christie's in the spring of 2016 and became a consultant for the house. And you have been active on many other fronts, publishing your book on British model Jill Kennington for instance?

A. Leaving full-time employment meant that I was no longer under the constant pressure of managing people, budgets, deadlines. I have enjoyed working regularly as a consultant to Christie's, bringing my experience to bear in multiple ways. It's been a very good working relationship since 2016, and a fruitful one.

I have been delighted to be closely involved in certain sales, not least last year when we set a dramatic new record for a photograph with Man Ray's Violon d'Ingres, I think also of the work by Helmut Newton which was sold for over $2 million.

We're looking at the fulfillment of areas of interest of mine that have been running for decades. Being freed from the responsibilities and the ties of full-time employment have allowed me to be my own slave-driver, to fill my time with the pursuit of other, personal projects.

What is rewarding and satisfying for me is that everything I do seems to dovetail very effectively. What I do independently reinforces what one might call my brand and my visibility, which can only be helpful as regards my work for Christie's.

Philippe Garner. CRACKED MIRROR, LA VOILE ROUGE, 1974. (Courtesy of Philippe Garner/Hamiltons Gallery)

Q. Do you ever miss the auction rooms?

A. I'll tell you what I miss most about the auction rooms. I started in the business when I joined the Sotheby's training scheme in 1970. The big auction rooms then were a kind of high-end clearing house for such a wealth of treasures coming to market, very often coming to market for the first time. There was a rich and constant flow of property. And it was a fabulous learning opportunity, seeing and handling so much material, having to sort the wheat from the chaff, very often without the reference documentation that was yet to be written, having to trust your gut, learning what quality meant by sifting through the ore for the diamonds.

The business has changed. There are far fewer surprises, far fewer fresh things coming to auction. The shift in emphasis has been much more towards the post-war and modern than to the historic and not just in the field of photographs.

I'm thinking also of how ways of working have changed. I see today's specialist as very much at a disadvantage compared with the opportunities for a junior specialist as I was in the early '70s. Because they do not get their hands dirty with enough material. And Artnet will not, at the push of a button, deliver expertise. It comes through experience, over time.

Rather than regret anything, I just feel hugely grateful for the span through which I have lived and worked, for the opportunities that I have enjoyed. I see a marketplace that is changing radically, but everything is anyway in perpetual motion.

Philippe Garner: "Summer—Seventies--Saint-Tropez"
Hamiltons, 13 Carlos Place, London W1K 2EU
September 4 - October 4, 2023
https://www.philippegarner.com.

Michael Diemar is a London-based collector and consultant. He is also editor-in-chief of The Classic, a new free magazine about classic photography. He is a long-time writer about the photography scene, writing extensively for several Scandinavian photography publications, as well as for the E-Photo Newsletter and I Photo Central.