The $1 million price assigned to Manhas’s photographic prints is not a reflection of market value, rarity, or collectible status. It is a conceptual statement—an intervention into the logic of the photography market and the broader art market. The price operates as a provocation, drawing attention to the contradictions that underlie the commodification of aesthetic experience and the arbitrary structures through which art is priced, traded, and legitimized.

This gesture draws on the theoretical tradition established by Walter Benjamin, who argued in The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction that mechanical reproducibility strips art of its “aura,” severing it from the ritual and uniqueness historically tied to its value (Benjamin 220). Yet the art market responded to this loss not by rejecting photography, but by reconstructing aura through mechanisms such as editioning, authorship, and provenance. The $1 million price renders this artifice visible. It exaggerates the logic of scarcity to such an extreme that it forces us to confront the absurdity of applying traditional models of valuation—developed for singular objects like paintings or sculptures—to a medium born of multiplicity.

Juliet Hacking’s analysis in Photography and the Art Market clarifies how photography’s status as fine art was achieved not through ontological transformation, but through market adaptation. She writes that to be accepted as art, photography had to conform to institutional demands for authorship and uniqueness—demands that were imposed, not inherent (Hacking 88). The $1 million figure destabilizes this framework by making its logic hyper-visible. It reveals that pricing is not about inherent worth, but about narrative construction, gatekeeping, and symbolic performance.

Allan Sekula’s critique of the photographic art market is particularly relevant here. He describes the photograph’s transformation into a commodity fetish as a process that renders historical and social meaning inert in favor of market legibility (Sekula 89). The $1 million price does not invite acquisition—it stages a confrontation. It asks: what does it mean to assign extreme monetary value to an image? What systems of power, belief, and speculation are we reinforcing when we do so?

Susan Sontag, in On Photography, reminds us that photographs are often treated as objects to be consumed and possessed. “To collect photographs is to collect the world,” she writes (Sontag 3). The $1 million valuation interrupts that instinct. It is not a price but a refusal—a refusal to allow the work to be assimilated quietly into a system of aestheticized capital accumulation.

Finally, the gesture draws from Pierre Bourdieu’s theory of the field of cultural production, in which the value of art is produced not by the object itself, but by the institutional and discursive structures surrounding it (Bourdieu 142). By inserting a photograph into this system at such an inflated price point, the artist lays bare the mechanisms of consecration and conversion that typically remain invisible: how symbolic capital becomes economic capital, and how belief underwrites financial speculation in art.

In sum, the $1 million price is not an economic assessment but a critical proposition. It is a conceptual tool that interrogates the structural absurdities of the art market—its dependence on scarcity, on constructed hierarchies, on institutional legitimation, and on speculative consumption. It functions not to sell, but to expose.

Works Cited

Benjamin, Walter. The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction. Translated by Harry Zohn, Schocken Books, 1968, pp. 217–251.

Bourdieu, Pierre. The Field of Cultural Production: Essays on Art and Literature. Edited by Randal Johnson, Columbia University Press, 1993.

Hacking, Juliet. Photography and the Art Market. Lund Humphries in association with Sotheby’s Institute of Art, 2018.

Sekula, Allan. Photography Against the Grain: Essays and Photo Works 1973–1983. The Press of the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design, 1984.

Sontag, Susan. On Photography. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1977.

Manhas’s black and white globe symbolizes a world seen through contrast—a stark, binary lens. It reflects both his physical journey across continents and his intellectual engagement with the global art world. The absence of color is intentional: it challenges the oversimplified binaries that dominate contemporary art collecting—East vs. West, established vs. emerging, traditional vs. conceptual. The logo serves as a critique of how collectors often categorize and consume art reductively, flattening nuance for the sake of market legibility. Through his travels and photographic practice, Manhas pushes against this tendency, advocating for a more fluid, pluralistic understanding of culture, context, and creation—where meaning exists in the gradients between black and white.

The Leica logo appears on this site as a mark of the tools used in the creation of all photographic work presented here. Images are produced exclusively using Leica M and Q series cameras, chosen for their full-frame sensors, high-quality Summilux and Summicron lenses, and unmatched optical performance in low-light and high-contrast conditions. The manual focus precision of the M system and the advanced autofocus and image stabilization of the Q series allow for complete creative control and technical fidelity across a range of environments. Leica’s engineering excellence is integral to the visual clarity, tonal depth, and overall aesthetic of the work.