The status of the fashion photographer is changing. Where once their worth was measured by the campaigns they booked, the rise of the fashion-print sale has transformed their work into highly collectable art. Among today’s most desired items, a Nick Knight print can fetch ￡75,000, a Steven Meisel as much as ￡40,000, while works by Mert Alas and Marcus Piggott (known as Mert and Marcus) and Juergen Teller have sold at auction for more than ￡30,000 and ￡16,000 respectively.

At the recent Frieze Masters art fair in London, early “fashion” images by Erwin Blumenfeld and Edward Steichen were on sale at the Bruce Silverstein gallery, while at Daniel Blau, David Bailey’s “torn” portraits (works with ragged edges, where the photographic paper has been torn before printing) were selling for ￡4,300 each.

Philippe Garner, deputy chairman of and head of photography at Christie’s, was an early advocate for contemporary fashion photography. Sales staged by Garner of works owned by the German collector Gert Elfering did much to promote the genre. The first, in 2005, raised more than ￡4m, while the 2013 sale of a collection of Kate Moss pictures brought in ￡1.7m. “Naysayers thought we’d over face the market,” says Garner. “My instinct was that a concentration oftreasures brings people out of the woodwork. It turned out there were collectors, they just hadn’t been collecting from us.”