What is the value of a photograph?

Answer 1

What someone might PAY for a particular photograph varies so widely that the question cannot be answered in that context. Philosophically, however, all photographs have intrinsic historical value inasmuch as all photographs may be perceived as moments frozen in time. The more time passes, the greater the value of even the most insignificant snapshot. People change and pass on, streets are rerouted, buildings torn down and rebuilt … Ansel Adams, the acknowledged dean of American landscape photographers, said, "Not everybody trusts paintings but people believe photographs." Adams also said, "These people live again in print as intensely as when their images were captured on old dry plates of sixty years ago ... I am walking in their alleys, standing in their rooms and sheds and workshops, looking in and out of their windows. And they in turn seem to be aware of me."

We all make dreadfully exposed, unfocused little horrors of snapshots, disasters from an artistic and technical standpoint, but still they capture that unique instant in time that is gone in that instant and will never come again. Most of us discard such dreck, yet perhaps we ought not; it may not be art, but it is history. What monetary value can be placed on that in, say, a hundred years?