How Many Photography Collectors Are There?

I have often wondered about how many photography collectors there really are all over the world if you were to try and count them all up. When asked, no one seems to have any kind of definitive answer, and many folks are secretive about the information they do have.

So I recently decided to try and make a back of the envelope calculation of this elusive number. I began this quest with a few high level numbers that I had gathered from various public sources, and then tried to narrow them down to represent the world of collectors. With a gross estimate in hand, I then sent out some inquiries to a wide variety of sources that might have some insight into the answer, based on their activities in the photography business, and asked them to add their thoughts to the range I provided, or to point me up or down if they preferred to keep their data private.

Of course, finding an answer to this question depends significantly on how you define the word “collector”, and different members of the food chain define it differently, often depending on the kinds of collectors being targeted. While this whole exercise is a collection of assumptions and estimations, I’ve tried to focus the analysis using the following two definitions of collector: a person who is comfortable spending $1000+ (or $5000+) on photography in a single calendar year. Depending on which spending level you choose, quite different total numbers will pop out.

So let’s begin with photography fair attendance numbers. All of the estimates coming up are made with a mind to make the numbers as large as possible, to estimate on the outer edge of what the number might really be. I’ve got three data points from the most recent versions of each fair: AIPAD New York 2009: 8000 visitors, Paris Photo 2008: 35000 visitors, Les Rencontres D’Arles 2008: 60000 visitors. AIPAD is I believe a collector heavy show. So while there are clearly curators, professionals, artists, press and general photo enthusiasts in the crowd, a good portion are real buyers. My estimate is approximately half might fit into the $5000+ category (4000 people), and perhaps three quarters in the $1000+ group (6000 people). The two shows in France have a much larger portion of local photo enthusiasts in the crowd. For Paris Photo, let’s go with as much as 15% of the attendees in the $5000+ group (5250 people), and 25% in the $1000+ group (8750 people). Since Arles is mostly expositions, the percentages need to be even lower: at most 10% for the $5000+ crowd (6000 people) and 15% for the $1000+ crowd (9000 people).

Let’s match this against some magazine numbers. Artforum has a paid circulation of approximately 60000. My guess is that optimistically 10% of these people (6000) could be photography collectors of some kind, most likely in the top price range. Aperture has a subscriber base of 24000. I think as many as a quarter (25%) of these people could be in the $5000+ collector group (6000 people), perhaps as many as half (50%) in the $1000+ group (12000 people).

So where do these first numbers leave us?

For the $5000+ group: 4000, 5250, 6000, 6000, 6000
For the $1000+ group: 6000, 8750, 9000, 6000, 12000

If we take the average for each, we get 5450 on the top and 8350 for the broader group. Call it 6000 and 9000 for aggressive roundness.

As I mentioned above, I then sent out some emails to various photography businesses that have collector client lists, and I tried to pick folks that don’t have obviously overlapping customers (i.e contemporary versus vintage). For the sake of privacy, I will not mention any of them by name or even group type, but suffice it to say, each of these businesses has a list of collectors that they contact frequently. I anchored them higher, with a total range of 8000 to 10000, without any price definitions, and asked them to comment.

The general and consistent impression from this diverse group was that 8000 to 10000 was too high, perhaps meaningfully so. Some highlighted that a much smaller number are active, repeat buyers and that these folks are the bread and butter of the market. Some mentioned the layering of buyers, and found it hard to quantify the lower priced collectors, which there are clearly many more of, but no one really knows how many more (nor do they know how to contact or service them it seems). Several pointed to less than 5000 as about the right range for the number of more active collectors.

Given all the data above, my conclusion from this non-scientific, assumption-heavy analysis is that there are at most 5000 active collectors who spend meaningful amounts of money on photography on an annual basis. I think we can also conclude that there are likely another 5000 or so collectors who are less active and commit fewer dollars each year. All in, 10000 total collectors is the biggest number we can defend with any meaningful credibility, and even that number might be a stretch. Please feel free to add your own data or question our assumptions in the comments, as we'd like to refine the numbers if we can get some additional solid inputs.

Questions for another day (and without obvious answers) include what percentage of these collectors are using the Internet in their collecting activities, how many regularly read blogs, visit artist sites or use social networking tools, and how we can encourage more of them to become involved in what we are doing here.