GALERIE BRUNO TARTARINTHE PLACE

It’s fair to say that you were born and raised in a world of photography.

My father, Jean Luc Tartarin, is a photographer. He was also a photography teacher at Beaux Arts, the Art School in Metz, in fact the youngest teacher ever in the art department. At the age of 20, he was awarded the Prix Niépce. When I was 10, my parents started organising big exhibitions in Metz, with accompanying catalogues and books. One of the exhibitions, Théâtre des Réalités, was also shown at Palais de Tokyo in Paris, at the time managed by Robert Delpire. The artists my parents worked with, John Coplans, Sandy Skoglund, Joel-Peter Witkin and others, would visit us in Metz. In the early ’80s, when I was still quite young, I framed photographs, helped hang them at exhibitions and I loved to be part of the whole process. I also travelled a lot with my parents to visit photographers and galleries abroad, Brussels, Amsterdam and other places.

I recall you telling me that they also took you to antique fairs and flea markets.

Yes, and that was totally different from the contemporary scene. They loved going to flea markets and buying things for the home. I think I was 14 when I bought my first Daguerreotype. Later, in my student years, I would go to the flea market every weekend. I started buying and selling and also helped some of the dealers to make a little money. After I finished art school in 96, I moved to Paris and did my civil service with Agnès de Gouvion Saint-Cyr at Délégations aux arts plastiques. There were quite a few of us doing the civil service and she used to call us “les petits Kikis”, after Kiki, the Japanese toy monkey. It was a great experience because I dealt with a lot contemporary photography, framing prints for exhibitions, photographing them for.

It’s fair to say that you were born and raised in a world of photography.

My father, Jean Luc Tartarin, is a photographer. He was also a photography teacher at Beaux Arts, the Art School in Metz, in fact the youngest teacher ever in the art department. At the age of 20, he was awarded the Prix Niépce. When I was 10, my parents started organising big exhibitions in Metz, with accompanying catalogues and books. One of the exhibitions, Théâtre des Réalités, was also shown at Palais de Tokyo in Paris, at the time managed by Robert Delpire. The artists my parents worked with, John Coplans, Sandy Skoglund, Joel-Peter Witkin and others, would visit us in Metz. In the early ’80s, when I was still quite young, I framed photographs, helped hang them at exhibitions and I loved to be part of the whole process. I also travelled a lot with my parents to visit photographers and galleries abroad, Brussels, Amsterdam and other places.

I recall you telling me that they also took you to antique fairs and flea markets.

Yes, and that was totally different from the contemporary scene. They loved going to flea markets and buying things for the home. I think I was 14 when I bought my first Daguerreotype. Later, in my student years, I would go to the flea market every weekend. I started buying and selling and also helped some of the dealers to make a little money. After I finished art school in 96, I moved to Paris and did my civil service with Agnès de Gouvion Saint-Cyr at Délégations aux arts plastiques. There were quite a few of us doing the civil service and she used to call us “les petits Kikis”, after Kiki, the Japanese toy monkey. It was a great experience because I dealt with a lot of contemporary photography, framing prints for exhibitions, photographing them for catalogues. A lot of interesting people stopped by, including Rik Gadella who was then preparing the very first edition of Paris Photo in 1997. And that year, I helped Arnaud Delas frame photographs and hang them at the fair. I just loved the fair atmosphere and that love has stayed with me. What I particularly love about fairs is to offer the best selection of photographs to the public, a gaze reflecting the gallery’s spirit, and working on the installation, getting everything absolutely right before the doors open.

You studied art. Was it a big decision to choose whether to become an artist or a dealer?

I loved creating art and taking photographs. When I finished the art school, I received a prize called Les Moins Trente, for photographers under 30, created by Robert Delpire at Centre national de la photographie. The committee couldn’t choose between four nominees that year so in the end, we all got the prize. There was a beautiful catalogue and an exhibition at Hôtel Salomon de Rothschild in Paris. In the end, it was a financial decision. I had to support myself. As I said, I started buying and selling very early, loved flea markets and fairs and I was fascinated by the photography business, especially the 19th century. There was a lot of activity in Paris at that time, a great many dealers and collectors. I met Harry Lunn, Pierre-Marc Richard, Christophe Goeury and others. I had discovered the wonders of 19th century photography as a child, when a friend of my parents, Joachim Bonnemaison, came to visit. He had built big collection of panoramas and he always had some albums or panoramas in his car. Once he had a complete album of Charles Nègre’s Sud de la France. I remember being very impressed by it.

How did you establish yourself as a dealer?

I was very active, buying and selling, at auctions as well, and I was building relationships. Then in 1998, I found a complete album of Désiré Charnay’s images of Mexico and that was a real step up for me. In 2001, I was the first photography dealer to exhibit at a fair called Pavillon des antiquaires, high quality and quite chic, in the garden of Tuileries. I met Daniel Blau there, and some important collectors. Then I started a collaboration with Régis Besse, the owner of Photo Verdeau, a shop near Drouot. He was focused on cameras and I suggested adding photographs. He was reluctant at first but I gave him a big folder of prints and said, “See what you can do with that.” It worked well, and we built a business selling photographs on the web. We moved to Passage Jouffroy, one of the beautiful arcades in Paris. I was buying a lot of stock and then I started selling on eBay. In 2012, we decided to split the business. I moved to Arnaville in the countryside, where I had ample room for my growing stock. Initially, I called my business Photo Vintage but later changed it to Photo Discovery.

In 2017, you launched Photo Discovery – The Fair.

There had been a small tabletop fair, organised by Joseph Delarue in collaboration with Serge Plantureux. The problem, as I saw it, was that the venues and dates kept changing, causing confusion, and most visitors were well, “insiders”. I felt that it would be possible for a tabletop fair to reach a much wider audience and that it should be held during Paris Photo. In 2017, I held the first edition at Pavillon Wagram. We had 100 tables, a lot of visitors, curators and collectors and it was a big success. It was also evident that the market needed this kind of fair. It wasn’t a competitor to Paris Photo. The fair was a different way to see and buy photographs, in a price range from 5 euros to 10 000 euros. Small fairs are very important, I think. They attract real aficionados, collectors and curators and I regard the latter as indirect collectors. They’re all addicted. But the small fairs also give people who aren’t established collectors to make their first purchases and that’s crucial to help grow the market.

In summer of 2024, it was announced that you were handing over the reins of the fair to the young Parisian dealer Barnabé Moinard.

It’s a lot of work to do a fair, promoting it, dealing with exhibitors, making sure that everything runs smoothly. I decided it was time to hand over to somebody else. Barnabé put his own stamp on the fair, changing its name to 24.39. His first edition worked out really well. But the main reason for the handover was that in 2024, I exhibited at AIPAD’s The Photography Show in New York and Paris Photo for the first time.

Why did you decide to take that step in 2024? You had been in the business for many years.

I had wanted to show at the two fairs for many, many years but the timing had to be absolutely right. In the life of a dealer, sometimes things take time. You need to have the right material, create the right presentation. In 2024, all those pieces came together. I planned the booths for the fairs meticulously and built walls to exact scale in my office, hung the works and tried different solutions. Creating mock-ups in computers or on paper just doesn’t give you a real impression of how it will look in real.

Your booths at both fairs received a lot of praise. At Paris Photo, there was a wide range of material, from different periods. How did you plan it?

It’s a long process. I select the material, see how it works together. I mix periods, look at works as images, without thinking that much of whether a name is famous or not. not. And then I live with those ideas for a long time, I adjust, add, remove, etc. For me, it’s really important to surprise people with what you show. I have never limited myself to a period. I always consider photographs as images. The presentation in New York was more classic but in Paris, the range was much wider and it worked really well. We achieved strong sales but the biggest success for me was the reaction of the public, not just from the established collectors but also the general public.

People also know you as the publisher of The Classic. In late November 2018, you sent me an email, requesting a meeting in London the following week. You told me that you had an idea for a magazine to be focused on classic photography. Why did you feel that it was important that classic photography should its own magazine?

The idea was in the same spirit that I built the fair. The market needed a fair. It also needed a magazine, and by extension, I needed it. At the time, if you wanted to get information on classic photography, be it galleries, dealers, collectors, curators or auction house specialists, you had to go 20 different places and read different newsletters. It needed to have it all in one place. I also felt it should be a magazine on paper, this in order to make it special.

A string of photography magazines had closed down recently and you were talking about a free magazine, to be distributed at fairs and galleries. I said I’d think about it. Around 18 December, we spoke again and made an agreement. You were going to take on the role as publisher, while I took on the role as editor-in-chief and main writer. You had one condition. The magazine had to be ready in order to be launched at AIPAD in April 2019. That meant it had to be printed in late February. Looking back on it, the timeline strikes me as insane. I had Christmas and the New Year holidays to come up with a complete concept for the magazine, plus its name. I came up with the name a few days later, then decided that the magazine should be interview-based. Luckily, in early January, Alex Novak, Martin Barnes, Robert Hershkowitz and David Fahey all agreed to be interviewed. Miraculously, it was ready for the fair.

It was a challenge but it worked out well and we are now at issue 13. To be honest, I was surprised by the quality, and art director Mike Derez and later, graphic designer, Jasmine Durand, played important parts in this. And we survived the pandemic. Galleries and museums were closed. That was when we launched the digital version of the magazine, available as a free download from the website, giving it a global reach. The Classic grew and grew with each issue.

You alone chose the paper, praised by many people

I chose it with great care and felt that this particular paper in was tune with fine photographs, especially 19th century photographs. It’s very expensive but it has to be right. I have always loved beautifully printed publications. Alongside the magazine, I also produce printed catalogues, mostly in small editions, 100 copies or so. By now, I have produced around 30 and they have since become collector’s items. In general, catalogues are now only available digitally but paper makes something feel special. It’s not the same on a screen. In some ways, it goes back to my early days in Paris. I was always fascinated by the catalogues Serge Plantureux used to print, back in the day when he had his shop at 4 Galerie Vivienne. In 2021, I started a new series of catalogues, on different themes such as portraits and Persia.

On the subject of Serge Plantureux’s shop. In 2023, you opened a shop/gallery in the very same premises, Photo Discovery – The Place.

After so many years spent building a large inventory of nearly half million items, from documentary to topographic, from 1850 to 1950, I wanted to be back in a physical place. I had only one space in mind because 4 Galerie Vivienne had a long history of photography, first with Serge Plantureux and then Joseph Delarue. We opened in July 2023. The first year was pretty difficult financially but it gradually got better and better. We get established collectors and people who have never bought a photograph before come in and are amazed that they can handle the photographs.

What do you have planned for The Photography Show?

The selection for New York will be along the same line as my booth at Paris Photo last year, mixing 19th and 20th century, jumping from salt prints to silver and C-prints. The presentation includes rare works by Franck Chauvassaigne, such as a 1855 salt print nude, and a great still life by Achille Bonnuit from 1860, a previously unknown portrait by Man Ray from the early period. Later works include a great series taken in the early ’70s for the architectural firm of Minoru Yamasaki and Associates and a fantastic vintage fashion portrait of Dorothy McGowan by Richard Avedon.