Black and white prints for Sale In Victorian times, when black and white photographs were novel and seldom engraved for reproduction in books and magazines, an eager public vied to buy handmade, original black and white prints of outstanding scenes, singly or in sets. People stopped buying black and white prints, however, after good reproduction processes came along - until recently, when a renewed interest in black and white photography as an art revived demand for the actual product of the black and white photographic artist. And in 1972 the market for black and white prints was growing fast. Single black and white photographic prints by masters such as Alfred Stieglitz, high priest of black and white photography for nearly half of the 20th Century, fetched as much as $1,000, and works by scores of lesser-known black and white photographers, both living and dead, brought $75 to $750. For the black and white photographer's own handiwork has become a collector's item, exhibited and sold, like other art, in auction rooms - and increasingly, in a recent innovation among marketplaces, the black and white photographic gallery. Black and white photographic galleries have sprung up everywhere, not only in the art centers of New York, London and Rome, but in scores of other places as well, from Vancouver to Sao Paulo, from Albuquerque to Tokyo. From only a handful a couple of years ago, their number passed 80 in 1972 and promised to increase further. The men and women who run them play many roles. They act as agents for the established black and white photographer, mentors and financial angels for the fledgling black and white photographer, custodians for the antique black and white photograph, and brokers for the speculator. What are they like, these new agoras of the black and white photograph? They come in all sizes, from a few hundred square feet with room for a couple of dozen pictures, to several thousand square feet, with room for more than 100; and in a wide range of tastes, from the elegant to the funky. The Light gallery, which opened in New York in November 1971, stands on prestigious Madison Avenue, cheek by jowl with posh salons where paintings sell for more than one million dollars; others are in downtown areas in want of urban renewal. Some galleries lodge in the upstairs quarters of camera shops, where can hardly miss them, but many a gallery sits in an unlikely neighborhood, where casual strollers are neither likely to find them by chance nor apt to be lured by the unlikely neighbors. "I am located across the street from the Mighty Oak Laundromat," says 24-year-old Bennett Scheuer, who opened the Gallery Obskura in Coconut Grove, Florida, in May 1972, "but how can you put that on an invitation to an exhibit?" The galleries' activities have as much diversity - and as much in common - as their locations. But they are chiefly in business to display black and white photographs and to sell them. Like the painting galleries on which many of them have modeled themselves, they hold exhibitions, sometimes launched with gala openings embellished by lavish publicity and free-flowing drink designed to promote attendance. "If wine and snacks are served," says Lanfranco Colombo, who owns II Diaframma in Milan, "we get about 3,000 people at an opening. Without the trimmings, about 1,000 show up." When the galleries make sales they usually take commissions for their efforts-from 10 per cent to as much as 40 per cent. A few charge black and white photographers’ membership dues for the privilege of associating with them, or a hanging fee for exhibiting on their walls. The fee varies widely: it is $100 at The Underground Gallery and $10 at the SoHo Black and white photo Gallery, both in New York. At the Obskura in Florida, it is $50, but that sum is then subtracted from the commission due the gallery if sales exceed $50.