Why Collecting Photography and Documentation Matters in 2025 - Jonathan Ludlow (CEO)

The story of art is never only about objects. It is about events, actions, performances, and interventions that refuse to remain still. For much of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, some of the most radical artistic gestures have not been made with canvas or marble, but with environments, performances, ephemeral constructions, or acts carried out in public space. What remains after those gestures fade is often not the object itself but its record: a photograph, a film, a print, a document that captures the moment of encounter. To collect such documentation is not to accept a substitute; it is to preserve the very thing that makes art history possible. In 2025, when artists are again working with the transient, the performative, and the site-specific, the importance of collecting photography and documentation has never been clearer.

One can trace this lineage back to the avant-gardes of the twentieth century. The Futurists and Dadaists produced performances and interventions whose material traces survive almost entirely through photographs and manifestos. Consider the events staged at Zurich’s Cabaret Voltaire in 1916, Hugo Ball’s sound poems, Emmy Hennings’ performances. Without photographic records, those actions would exist only in anecdotes. Similarly, much of the early work of the Bauhaus, especially its theatrical experiments under Oskar Schlemmer, is accessible today primarily through photographs and rehearsal notes. These are not ancillary; they are the only way the work can be experienced across time.

By the 1960s and 1970s, artists began to work deliberately in modes that privileged documentation as the primary vehicle of legacy. Yves Klein’s Leap into the Void (1960), in which the artist appeared to hurl himself from a Parisian rooftop, survives as a photomontage printed in the newspaper Dimanche. The work itself is the image; the photograph is not a record of an action but the action’s definitive form. Likewise, the interventions of Gordon Matta-Clark, cutting through abandoned houses, opening voids in architecture, remain largely inaccessible except through photographic series, drawings, and films. To own a photograph of a Matta-Clark cut is not to own “evidence”; it is to own the very body of work as it can exist today.

Performance art sharpened this logic. Marina Abramović and Ulay’s durational pieces in the 1970s and 80s, from Rest Energy (1980) to The Lovers (1988), now circulate through photographs and video documentation that allow institutions and collectors to preserve works designed to disappear as lived encounters. Chris Burden’s Shoot (1971), in which the artist was shot in the arm with a rifle, exists only as a brief Super-8 film and a handful of photographs. Joseph Beuys’s I Like America and America Likes Me (1974), where the artist shared a room with a coyote, lives on as a photographic and textual record. The importance of these documents is not incidental; it is constitutive. Without them, the works would not enter history.

Photography has played a similar role in the preservation of street art and graffiti. By definition, graffiti is impermanent: walls are painted over, demolished, or simply eroded by weather. The great subway writers of 1970s New York, LEE, FUTURA, LADY PINK, are remembered not because their trains still circulate, but because photographers such as Martha Cooper and Henry Chalfant documented them. Subway Art (1984), their seminal book, effectively canonised graffiti culture for subsequent generations. What began as outlaw practice was transformed into art history through the act of photographing it. Today, institutions such as the Museum of the City of New York and the Smithsonian preserve Cooper’s photographs as canonical works in their own right.

This is precisely why artists working today in ephemeral forms are increasingly conscious of how documentation shapes their legacy. Banksy’s wall works are often destroyed, painted over, or removed, but they live globally through images. Pest Control, the body that authenticates Banksy’s works, refuses to validate pieces detached from their context, underscoring that photographs and prints are often the only legitimate records. Priest, whose work reconfigures cultural icons with a subversive edge, is documented both in canvas and in images of his interventions; Rams, who paints his name across skyscrapers at great personal risk, translates those acts into large-format photographs. In each case, photography is not an accessory, it is the bridge that allows art born in the moment to endure beyond it.

Rams - 'New York 2' - 2025

For collectors, then, the act of acquiring documentation is not a compromise but an insight. It is a recognition that the canon has always depended on preservation beyond the object itself. Museums understand this: major institutions hold as many photographs, films, and ephemera as they do paintings or sculptures, precisely because these are the archives through which art history is written. To collect in this way is to mirror the museum’s role, ensuring that the most vital gestures of our time are not lost to entropy.

In 2025, this has particular urgency. The past decade has seen a proliferation of site-specific installations, street-based interventions, and performance works that are not intended to last in physical form. Climate change, too, has heightened awareness of fragility: outdoor works, land art, and public sculpture are vulnerable to environmental shifts. As artists confront impermanence head-on, the act of documentation becomes central. Olafur Eliasson’s glacial works, where ice blocks melt before audiences, exist primarily in photographs and video. Christo and Jeanne-Claude’s monumental wrappings—of the Reichstag, of the Arc de Triomphe, endure in preparatory drawings and photographic archives after the fabric has been dismantled. These are not lesser traces; they are the works’ intended afterlives.

To collect photography and documentation is also to collect context. A painting might be singular, but a photograph often carries with it the time, place, and conditions of its making. The subway drawings of Haring mean more when one sees them crowded by commuters; Matta-Clark’s cuts resonate when one sees the surrounding neighbourhood. Collectors who invest in documentation are investing in narratives, in the possibility of telling art history with depth rather than flattening it into isolated masterpieces.

None of this diminishes the value of traditional media. Paintings and sculptures will always remain central to collecting and to art history. But the future of the canon will be incomplete without the documents that record the fleeting. For private collections, the inclusion of such works signals not only connoisseurship but also foresight. It places the collector in alignment with museums, which increasingly understand that the archive is as significant as the object.

In the present moment, when speculation often outpaces scholarship, returning to documentation is also a return to substance. A photograph of Rams hanging from a skyscraper, a print of Abramović and Ulay locked in an embrace, a Cooper photograph of a painted subway car, these are anchors of history. They resist hype because they are irreducible: the record of an act that cannot be repeated, only remembered. To collect them is to take part in the responsibility of memory.

Collecting photography and documentation matters in 2025 because it is how art that resists permanence enters permanence. It is how fleeting gestures acquire continuity, how margins become canon, and how the future will know what mattered in our present. The works that last are not always those that survive physically; they are those that survive in history. And history is written through the photograph, the film, the archive. To collect them is not secondary, it is to hold art at its most essential: an encounter, preserved, and carried forward.