Last night wealthy art collectors Fatima and Eskandar Maleki opened up their frankly jaw-dropping Mayfair home to celebrate the Prix Pictet, the photographic award in sustainability (the winner of which will be announced next week in Paris).
Chair of the Prix Pictet judging panel and head of photographs at Sotheby's Francis Hodgson gave a speech, declaring his immense satisfaction with the award. 'Photography prizes have tended to be very specialist, known only to people within the photographic community,' he said. 'This is a prize for photography that is really taken seriously, just as prizes for art and cinema are.'
Photography, he added, has long played second fiddle to other art-forms, but the balance is now, at last, being redressed. It was something perhaps borne out in the Maleki's own house - of the many amazing works of art on display, very few were photographic, but the couple has nevertheless got behind the Prix Pictet - a sign, perhaps, of changing times.
The Malekis did have a few photographs in their collection though - snapshots, depicting their family and friends at various social events and lovingly presented in ornate picture frames. Perhaps it's easy to be snobby about such images, but I found it very touching that a couple who number original artworks by Damien Hirst and Jean-Michel Basquiat among their collection can also find space for this kind of imagery. In next week's BJP, Paul Lowe refers to the 'memorialising power of the still image', and that's a unique power, really. Photography's now considered art - brilliant. But if and when it is art, in my book, it's not just art. It's art and more, something above and beyond.