THE CONCEPT of vril, the mystical life force invented by Edward Bulwer-Lytton in his novel The Coming Race, is easy to dismiss, and indeed to mock. It is, however, also hard to ignore, because it’s so useful. Why, for example, is an original Cartier-Bresson print worth t30,000 (a price tag I actually saw recently), when another and probably better print from the same negative, on, say, Ilford Art 300, made by a modern master printer, might be worth perhaps one-tenth as much, or at most, one-fifth? Does the original print not derive much of its value from being suffused in some mystical way with Cartier-Bresson’s life force?
You might say that what I’m talking about here is no more than provenance. We can trace an unbroken link from the picture…
