Pictures Worth a Thousand Words and Thousands of Dollars

April 14, 2007 — -- From black-and-white landscapes by Ansel Adams to William Eggleston's early color photographs to the muted nudes of contemporary artist Mona Kuhn, the annual photography show in New York showcases some of the most evocative and moving images taken by photography's top artists.

Sponsored by the Association of International Photography Art Dealers, the show brings together more than 90 fine art galleries along with museum curators and collectors from across the United States and elsewhere.

"It's the show of the year for us U.S. photography dealers," said Peter Fetterman, a gallery owner based in Santa Monica, Calif., whose booth featured massive black-and-white images of Antarctica by the Brazilian photographer Sebastião Salgado.

And while strolling through the show in the Park Avenue Armory in New York's Upper East Side is reminiscent of a visit to a museum, it's also a place where art meets commerce. Every image is for sale, with prices for prints ranging from a few hundred dollars to several thousand.

As art shows and auctions have exploded in popularity, they have become big business and, in turn, another form of investment like the stock market or real estate.

Michael Moses, a professor at New York University's Stern School of Business, and his colleague Jianping Mei have studied the art market, and together they developed an index of 10,000 works of art that have sold at auction at least two times.

"It looks a lot like a stock market, but it just doesn't quite have the same trading frequency," said Moses.

According to their findings, art had an 8.5 percent annual rate of return over the past 10 years, slightly ahead of the return on stocks over the same period. And while art can be riskier over the long run, Moses found that it can be a part of a balanced investment strategy.

"It tends to reduce risk of a well-diversified portfolio without substantially reducing the return," he said.

Their index, however, does not include photographs because there can be multiple prints of the same image and the quality of each print can vary, unlike one-of-a kind paintings and sculptures.