Elliott Erwitt’s New York @Houk

JTF (just the facts): A total of 22 black and white images, taken between the 1940s and 1980s, enlarged to 16×20 or reverse, framed in white and displayed in the main gallery space. The exhibit was designed in conjunction with the publication of Elliott Erwitt’s New York (teNues, 2008). (Marginal installation shots at right.)

Comments/Context: Elliott Erwitt’s New York isn’t a tough place. It isn’t gritty or scary or challenging. His images of quintessential New York moments and places are just the opposite: optimistic, light hearted, nostalgic, and laced with wry humor and tender jokes. Virtually every signature New York location or event is captured in this exhibit: from Times Square, the Empire State Building, the Flatiron Building and the World Trade Center, to 5th Avenue, the Metropolitan Museum, Central Park, train platforms, taxis, and eating Nathan’s hot dogs on the Coney Island boardwalk. In all of these places, Erwitt has captured people in the context of the city, with an eye for the romantic moment or composition. While there isn’t anything new to be found in this show, the consistency of his playful vision across the decades is clear.

The artist’s website can be found here. His page at Magnum Photos can be found here.

Collector’s POV: The recent prints in this exhibit are retailing for $4500 each. Erwitt’s work is routinely available at auction, generally under $5000, with a few key vintage prints pressing up toward $10000.

Rating: * (one star) GOOD (rating system described here)
Through March 7
745 Fifth Avenue
New York, NY 10151

Collectors as Market Makers

There was a fascinating article in the New York Times Sunday Magazine about Jose, David, and Alberto Mugrabi, the famous and powerful collectors of Warhols and other Pop and contemporary artists. (Article here.) With over 3000 works and over 800 Warhols in their collection, they have evolved into an entirely new kind of collecting animal: the market maker. Following over 100 auctions a year, the Mugrabis buy and sell their inventory and protect/defend/run up the prices of their artists all over the world. They are likely involved in one way or another in every major transaction of Warhol’s art that occurs on the planet. They collect on a scale and in a pattern unlike nearly all other collectors: they are full-time professionals.

This got me thinking about this collecting approach and its impact on the photography markets. We know of only a very small number of photography collectors that operate as market makers in any form, but there are a few that use this model. The challenge to this approach is that it requires enormous scale and meaningful financial resources. More importantly, it takes time to amass a significant inventory of any one artist’s best output (unless one buys an estate in one fell swoop) and then real effort to follow each and every transaction that occurs for that artist going forward.

It seems to us there are a couple of bright lines that define collectors. The first is when a collector makes those first handful of purchases that change his/her perspective from someone looking for decoration for their walls to someone fascinated and obsessed by the art and the artists. The second bright line comes when a collector evolves to the point that they are buying art they don’t really have room to display (we call this “buying for the box” and unfortunately, we would reluctantly place ourselves in this category). At this point, the collections are larger, more defined, and often more manic.

The Mugrabis and the others like them in the uppermost tier have moved beyond another final bright line. They are gathering inventory at such a pace and scale that they effectively start to corner the market in their areas of interest, which leads them to behave in ways that are wholly different from other collectors. We might call them pseudo dealers, or wholesalers, or just museums in the making. I’m not sure that we have any conclusion to offer here, other than given the fact that most major collectors are extremely wary of talking about themselves and their collecting activities in public, it was interesting to see the piece about the Mugrabis in the magazine section. Of course, when you are a market maker, you live in the bizarro world where big PR is actually a good thing.

Paul Graham, a shimmer of possibility @MoMA

JTF (just the facts): A total of 49 color images, displayed as 8 sequences of between 4 and 9 images each, and two single images. All of the images were taken between 2004 and 2006. The prints are made in varying sizes, framed in white, without mats and with very little wall text, and hung at varying heights in a two room gallery with a single dividing wall. The curator of the exhibition is Susan Kismaric. (Installation shots at right.)

Comments/Context: I’m going to go out on a limb here, but I think British photographer Paul Graham is a complete unknown for most collectors. Even though he has had a nearly 30 year career, published a dozen high quality books, and made some memorable pictures, I think he has been overlooked by many, mostly because he isn’t easily categorized. While one might attach the labels “color” or “documentary” to his work, his isn’t the first name that comes up when you think of these terms, and so I’m afraid many folks have missed out on some amazing photography (ourselves included for the most part, I must admit).
The new show at the MoMA takes a sampling from his most recent work, a shimmer of possibility, a group of images he took during many trips across America from 2004 to 2006. What is surprising is that this work is not a group of standard, stand alone documentary pictures. Instead, the images are sequenced into spare narratives, with almost cinematic slices of time (reframing the subjects minute to minute) propelling the stories along, sometimes quite linearly but often in a more elliptical undirected flow.

In many ways, nothing much happens in these stories; they are tiny vignettes of ordinary life. Here are a few of the moments that are captured:

  • A woman eats takeout at a bus stop, and then smokes
  • A man camps out near a Jack-in-the-Box trash can
  • A girl with her toys on the sidewalk
  • A man mows the grass, as it begins to rain
  • Kids play basketball as the sun sets
  • A man sells flowers on a street corner
  • A man on a break savors a cigarette
The overall mood of these short stories is the same exhausted melancholy that permeates Alec Soth’s recent work. And yet, Graham’s economical narratives are oddly engaging and satisfying; the details all seem to matter a bit more. The exact moments when the rain falls on the man mowing the grass (sparkling in the sunlight), or when the smoker exhales, or when the basketball is released all have a hyper reality, saturated with our attention. And then there is a sense that life goes on – the open ended stories will all continue. While this show is relatively small, take your time to savor each thread; they’ll grow on you.
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The artist’s website can be found here. The 12 volume set of books published by Steidl can be found here.

Collector’s POV: Paul Graham’s work has been virtually unavailable in the secondary markets in the past few years, except for a few copies of his first book A1, The Great North Road, which have started to show up in the newer photo book auctions. Graham is represented in New York by Greenberg Van Doren Gallery (site here), who will be having a retrospective show of his work starting later in March.

Rating: ** (two stars) VERY GOOD (rating system described here)

Through May 18
11 West 53rd Street
New York, NY 10019
5B4’s review of the books can be found here.
UPDATE: My email has been full of readers with links and ideas for educating us further about Paul Graham (a few politely pointing out just how out of touch and misinformed we are). There is currently a show of the 2009 Deutsche Borse finalists up at the Photographers’ Gallery in London (site here). A second good resource is the Anthony Reynolds Gallery in London (site here), who has represented the artist for most of his career and has access to all of his work. Perhaps there is a real difference in knowledge of Graham’s work between working photographers and other photo “insiders” (who all know Graham well) and many collectors (particularly in America) who only know him tangentially.

Ruud van Empel: Souvenir, Dawn, Moon, World @Stux

JTF (just the facts): A total of 22 works (20 photographs and 2 bronze sculptures), displayed throughout the entry, the two lower galleries, and the upper galleries. The photographs are glossy Cibachrome prints, mounted to Dibond and plexiglass (not framed), all from 2008, ranging in size from approximately 33×24 for the smallest images up to wall sized murals. (Installation shots at right.)

Comments/Context: While digital manipulation has become the rule rather than the exception in new contemporary photography, Ruud van Empel’s approach is something altogether more radical than a simple touch up. His works are composed of literally thousands of fragments and components of various photographs, meticulously merged and constructed within the confines of his computer. His images of children in lush garden settings are at once realistically detailed and fantastically fabricated, creating a surreal world where beauty and innocence are mixed with a small dose of an undefined and unsettling undercurrent: what is really going on here?

Van Empel’s process leads to pictures that are extremely painterly, with lush colors and classical compositions. In a previous post on Van Empel, we touched on connections to Rousseau and Disfarmer (post here); during this visit, we were struck by the relationship to early Renaissance portraits and allegorical paintings, where figures were abstracted to represent an idealized version of a person, rather than anyone in specific. The children in these images are expressionless, with big eyes and flawless skin; at one level they are perfect, at another they are just a bit creepy.
Van Empel has several series of works progressing at the same time, all of which are represented in this show of new work. The World images are likely the most recognizable to collectors, with deadpan white and black children situated in idealized tropical rain forests and lagoons (complete with water droplets and amazing insects). The Venus series uses this same setting for a series of symbolic nudes. The Moon series follows a similar formula of formal children against a natural background, only this time the images are moonlit, bringing darker blues and greens into van Empel’s palette. The recent Dawn series has a more casual compositional style, with the children often resting in beds of flowers or lying in the leaves. While each of these projects has its own specific details, they all share the same general approach: the mix of natural beauty with the innocence of childhood, boiled down to neutral and artificial symbolic types.

A series of wholly different and much more personal pictures entitled Souvenir are shown in the upper galleries. In these images, van Empel constructs dense interior still lifes out of images of items from his childhood home. While many of the tokens and mementos have a kitchy quality to them, it is clear that each and every one has been wrapped in some personal significance or memory. Van Empel uses the same computer driven composite approach, and the resulting feeling of unreality of his other works is found in these smaller pictures as well. These pictures jump off the wall quite a bit less than the more vibrant tropical scenes, but perhaps show van Empel experimenting with new narrative directions beyond those which made him famous.

Overall, this is a terrific show, with many eye-popping works to draw your attention, many of the kids seeming even more surreal than in earlier images. There is a catalogue of van Empel’s new work entitled Ruud van Empel Photoworks available from the gallery for $50.

The artist’s website can be found here.
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Collector’s POV: The World, Venus, Moon and Dawn images in this show range from $14000 to $69000, with most in the $30000 range. The Souvenir series is priced between $9500 and $14000. The prints are in editions of various sizes, ranging from 7 to 13. The two white statues are $47000 each, in editions of 3. Van Empel’s work has only been available in the secondary markets since 2007, but has performed well, fetching prices from approximately $15000 to $45000. Given the originality of his work, it seems likely that these prices will continue to rise.
Rating: ** (two stars) VERY GOOD (rating system described here)
Through March 7th
530 West 25th Street
New York, NY 10001
Another review of this show can be found at The Year in Pictures here.

Small Museum Profile: Cantor Arts Center @Stanford University

If you have ever been to the Cantor Arts Center at Stanford, my guess is your memories are full of the astounding Rodins. Stanford has a massive collection of Rodin sculptures, displayed both inside the museum and outside in the garden, including The Gates of Hell, which is the epitome of a monumental work that is 100% more awe inspiring in person than via reproductions. What you might not remember is that this museum has a strong collection of photography, anchored by its collection of images by Eadweard Muybridge.

In what is now one of the most famous stories in the history of photography, Leland Stanford wanted to definitively find out whether a running horse had at least one foot on the ground at all times, and hired Muybridge to make a series of stop motion photographs to determine the truth. Muybridge went on to make studies for his book, Animal Locomotion, at Stanford’s farm in Palo Alto, CA, which later became Stanford University. Those pictures are now housed in the Cantor Arts Center.

The museum does not have a full time curator for photography, so the job is split between Betsy Fryberger (Curator of Prints and Drawings) who handles the 19th century work, and Hilarie Faberman (Curator of Modern and Contemporary Art) who handles the 20th and 21st century images. In general, photography is housed within the Prints and Drawings Department.

There are approximately 4000 images in the photography collection, with roughly 1650 of the images from the 19th century and the remainder (2350) from more recent times. Beyond the collection of Muybridge images, the Cantor Arts Center has strength in works by Robert Frank, Bill Brandt, Ansel Adams, and 19th century travel photography. On a going forward basis, the curators would like to develop the early modern collection, specifically German and Russian photography (so collectors out there, here’s where you can help).

In the past 10 years, the Cantor Arts Center has acquired approximately 700 images, with the bulk of those coming the past few years. The collection is being built via a combination of donations by patrons and artists and dedicated funds for photo acquisitions.

Unlike many smaller museums, the Cantor Arts Center always has a portion of the permanent collection of photography on view, often upstairs in the Contemporary galleries. The exhibition schedule for photography has been consistently active and of high quality. Here are a handful of the most recent shows:

  • Andy Warhol Photographs (2008)
  • Private and Public: Class, Personality, Politics, and Landscape in British Photography (2008)
  • Bare Witness: Photographs by Gordon Parks (2007)
  • In the American West: Photographs by Richard Avedon (2007)
  • Yosemite’s Structure and Textures: Photographs by Eadweard Muybridge, Carleton Watkins, Ansel Adams, and Others (2007)
  • Beefcake: The Physique Photography of Dave Martin (2006)
  • Manufactured Landscapes: The Photographs of Edward Burtynsky, 1982–2002 (2005)
  • Time Stands Still: Muybridge and the Instantaneous Photography Movement (2003)

The museum has also produced two solid publications in conjunction with recent shows: Bare Witness: Photographs by Gordon Parks and Time Stands Still: Muybridge and the Instantaneous Photography Movement.

Visitors can access the photography collection at the museum via direct contract with a registrar or curator/curatorial assistant. There is a print viewing room that can be reserved by appointment to look at specific works.

Overall, the Cantor Arts Center’s photography program seems to be well run and the collection merits your attention during any visit to the Bay Area. In the spirit of full disclosure, I did my graduate degree at Stanford and both our children were born at Packard Children’s Hospital at Stanford, so we are perhaps less than perfectly objective. That said, 4000 images, a strong exhibitions calendar, and a historic relationship with one of the masters of the medium speak for themselves.

Photography in Smaller Museums

When the firestorm around the proposed closing of the Rose Art Museum at Brandeis University started to swirl around (admirably led by Modern Art Notes), as a photography collector, one of the first questions I had, which I didn’t see asked anywhere else in all the discussion, was what exactly does the Rose have in its collection in terms of photography? The only mention photography got at all that I could see was a protest letter from photographer David Maisel, whose work is in the collection.

Of course, there is no easy way to get a simple answer to this question. Like many smaller museums, the Rose does not have its complete collection digitized and up on the Internet, nor does it have a stand alone photography curator who can be contacted. There have been few photography exhibitions at the Rose in the past years, so there is not much of a trail that can be followed in this way either. The only real way to answer this question is to button hole the Director (not practical in this situation), or perhaps find a willing trustee or accessions committee member who is excited about photography and has some information.

This got us thinking in a broader way about the photography housed in smaller museums. In the vast majority of cases, photography is one of many disciplines represented for these institutions, and so images that are in the collections are often stuck in the black hole of storage, rarely seeing the light of day. Even when photography is seen as a crucial part of the exhibition and education plan, and photographs are part of the normal rotation of shows, they still may not get the kind of focus we would like to see. As collectors, we are, of course, fascinated by what any individual museum might have in its storage boxes. Who knows what treasures are hiding there, underappreciated?

With this in mind, we have begun a process of reaching out to various smaller museums (in American and all over the world) to ask these very questions about their photography collections. We’ve designed a simple set of routine questions (sent via email) that cover the following areas:

Curators/Staff
Photography Collection Facts
Photography Collection Design
Acquisitions
Exhibitions/Publications
Accessing the Collection

Our goal here is to develop profiles of the photography collections at smaller museums and to bring those profiles to you, our audience of collectors. We think this benefits everyone. The museums get the word out to a targeted group of people who are interested in their collections and can be supporters, patrons, and even contributors on a going forward basis. (One important question we ask is what the museums are looking to add to their collections on a going forward basis; this information can help match potential donors with museums that want their prints.) On the other side, the collectors get a better view into museums that hold works or have programs that they are interested in, so they can visit or get involved as appropriate.

Later today, we will begin this series with a profile of the photography collection of the Cantor Arts Center at Stanford University. If you are a museum curator, trustee, or accessions committee member out there (anywhere in the world), or simply a supporter of a particular museum and would like to see that institution profiled as part of this series, just send us an email (info@dlkcollection.com) and we’ll get the questionnaire out to you. We hope everyone will find these profiles as interesting as we do. There are literally hundreds of small museums out there with amazing photography collections, and we want to be a strong voice in getting the word out about what they’re up to.

Photo Blog Triangle, Version 2.0

I had originally planned to let the Art Blog Triangle quietly die into the oblivion of the archives, but there has been so much interest in it that I feel compelled to provide a follow up post with some additional comments and ideas. For those of you that find this discussion tedious, we’ll be back to our normal range of topics tomorrow.

Soon after the first post, Joerg Colberg of Conscientious contacted me and mentioned that he had been thinking about some of the same ideas. In fact, last fall, he collected some detailed statistics on nearly 40 photography blogs he was following (not designed to be a representative sample of all that is out there, just a group that he was reading consistently). For the period of roughly two months (October 17 through December 16 of 2008), he categorized each and every post by these blogs into nine different buckets, based on the content of the post. His original purpose was just to get a more detailed look into what various blogs really contained, including some aspects that aren’t relevant to this study.

He hadn’t yet decided what to do with the data, and so he sent it all over to me. He wasn’t following us during that time, since we had just gotten started, so I went back and used his formulas to categorize our posts into his buckets, using that same time period. Joerg also didn’t collect data on some of the broader art blogs we follow, so we’ve left those aside for the moment (these were C-Monster, Edward Winkleman, MAO, and Modern Art Notes, even though I believe they are generally accurately placed in the first triangle).

We then spent some time slicing and dicing the data into a spreadsheet, merging his categories into the COMMENT, CURATE, PROMOTE framework and recasting the formulas. What popped out were some detailed statistics about each blog and its relative position in the triangle, but instead of using my finger in the air anecdotal method, we now had actual numerical data to back up the placement of the blogs in the map. Of course, underlying these numbers are the original definitions of the categories, so if you don’t buy those definitions, then you won’t likely agree that the conclusions are valid (which is OK by the way). So another person might arrange these data in another way and get very different conclusions. Thus, as a reminder, the particular categories here and the specific view they represent drive the data.

Without going into the gory statistical detail of each and every blog, we can start with the conclusion that the general placements in the first version of the Art Blog Triangle were right for the most part. From there, we have the following second level of detail:

*We (DLK COLLECTION) were the only blog in the study pinned into the COMMENT corner. 5B4 and Fugitive Vision were a bit further out, slightly closer to PROMOTE than I had placed them originally, but still mostly in this zone. Horses Think (which I wasn’t following) is another located in this general corner.

*The CURATE corner had Conscientious and Mrs. Deane as we had expected, but was much more crowded than we knew. Other active blogs that were clustered in this corner were: I Heart Photograph, Hippolyte Bayard, The Sonic Blog and Shooting Wide Open among others.

*The PROMOTE corner did have Exposures at its vertex as we claimed, and there were many, many more blogs that live in this neighborhood (Joerg had 18 blogs that I wasn’t aware of that ended up in this area). Nymphoto was another I wasn’t following that was centered in this corner. As I mentioned in the first post, most of these are artist blogs that include some form of discussion/PR of their own work and activities, with a smattering of commentary on other topics of interest. Mangum did indeed have the most in depth commentary of these artist blogs, and thus stayed about where it was in the first version. Rather than listing them all, we’ll continue to use Amy Stein’s blog as the proxy for all the rest in this genre.

*There were another dozen blogs that were more balanced, living in the middle zones of the triangle, often with surprisingly equal parts of each approach. The Year in Pictures was actually much further to the left and much closer to the middle than I had placed it. So overall, this area was more populated than I had led you to believe.

So without much fanfare here’s the Photo Blog Triangle diagram, version 2.0, now built upon more reliable statistical data (with the general art blogs removed and using the Tri-Plot Excel add-in for accuracy):

A few other comments. The data came from a specific period last fall, so if you weren’t posting “normally” in those two months, the placement of your blog may not be where you naturally envision it. As an example, Conscientious is actually closer to COMMENT in this set of data than normal; on average, it usually lives closer to the tip of CURATE than is shown here. Also the data is inherently somewhat subjective in terms of the category in which any given post might have been placed. So this is an inexact science, and you should take it as such.

Many of you have offered other ideas or parameters to consider. One interesting idea (from Blake Andrews’ blog) was that there could be a fourth axis for REFLECT, as many artists blogs are in concept about thoughtfully considering their art, rather than crassly promoting it, as the triangle might have you believe. This indeed is possible, but if artists were actually writing in depth pieces about photography (theirs or someone elses), I think this would have been captured in the data by COMMENT, as we basically threw anything that was text heavy into this bucket. So while many of you out there may think of yourselves as using your blog to reflect, I’m not sure the data we gathered supports that conclusion; maybe you just need to write more deeply more often, as short snippets tend to be captured in CURATE.

Another idea was that blogs are used to EDUCATE. I think that’s entirely right, and different folks use the medium in different ways to educate others (and themselves). We find COMMENTing the best way to increase our education. Conscientious uses CURATEing (misspelling on purpose) to introduce us to photographers we might not know. Others use a mix of both, plus discussion of their own work to teach others. All these paths are valid and successful. The data we used for this study didn’t distinguish between text heavy posts that were meant to REFLECT or EDUCATE, so someone else will have to gather some more fine grained data to get at these nuances.

We have purposely tried not to list every last blog that was tallied, in the effort to be inclusive rather than exclusive in the findings. Again, the sample used is not meant to be representative and the absolute number of posts is not reflected in the way the data is presented. There are many, many great blogs out there covering photography in different ways, and we don’t want anyone to feel like we think their approach is somehow less “right”, especially if they post more infrequently (as many of these blogs were generally left off of this study due to lack of good data).

At the core, this was an exercise in observation of just what was really going on out there in the photo blogosphere, not any kind of judgment of good and bad. That said, our general conclusion is that we’d like to see even more great photography writing of all kinds. So we both feel doubly compelled to upgrade our efforts and keep up the pace. We hope you will too. As always, comments are welcome, and who knows, maybe there will be a Photo Blog Triangle version 3.0 someday.

The original post, as background, can be found here. Joerg’s post on the project can be found here.

Arnold Newman, The Early Work

JTF (just the facts): Published by Steidl in 2008. 232 pages, including 107 black and white plates. Essays by Ron Kurtz, Howard Greenberg, and Philip Brookman. (Imperfect cover shot at right.)

Comments/Context: Odds are that the first thing most collectors remember about Arnold Newman is that he was a master portrait photographer. His images of Piet Mondrian in his studio, Albert Giacometti in front of his sculptures, and Igor Stravinsky at the piano (among many, many others) made him the father of “Environmental Portraiture”, where subjects were photographed in the context of their lives, rather than pinned to monochrome surfaces like Penn or Avedon.
This book however chronicles the first five years of Newman’s career as a photographer (1938-1942), when he was experimenting with documentary and abstract imagery (non-portraits). In these images, Newman arranges fragments into carefully composed formal structures of light and form, digesting the ideas of both Modernism and Cubism. There are also echoes of the Walker Evans of American Photographs, both in subject matter and approach, particularly in the more documentary pictures.
To our eyes, the images of walls and doors, ladders and light fixtures, clapboard houses and wood shacks compare well with Evans, Strand, and Steiner (who predate him), and inform early Siskind and Ralston Crawford (who came slightly later). This is a well crafted book of an excellent body of work, right in the wheelhouse of the kind of abstract city images we like for our collection.
Collector’s POV: Newman’s early work isn’t available much in the secondary markets, but his portraits are nearly always up for sale, fetching anywhere from $2000 to perhaps $20000, depending on the subject. Arnold Newman is represented by Howard Greenberg Gallery (here) and the estate is owned by Commerce Graphics (here).

Auction Results: Photography in the London Contemporary Art Sales, Spring 2009

The last of today’s auction results posts cover the photography buried in the various Contemporary Art sales in London over the past few weeks (the original preview post is here). The three houses had decidedly different results, as follows. The results are below (all results include the buyer’s premium):

Sotheby’s

Whether it was the selection of the lots, the wooing of the right collectors, or the setting of realistic estimates, Sotheby’s found the formula for selling contemporary photography in its pair of London sales. Only one photography lot was bought in out of 29 up for sale, and the total sale proceeds of photography for the two sales combined exceeded their total high estimates. Well done.

Evening Sale

Total Lots: 5
Pre Sale Low Total Estimate: £890000
Pre Sale High Total Estimate: £1270000

Total Lots Sold: 5
Total Lots Bought In: 0
Buy In %: 00.00%
Total Sale Proceeds: £1218250

80.00% of the lots that sold had proceeds in or above the estimate range. One surprise (defined as having proceeds of at least double the high estimate) was Rashid Rana’s Veil IV at £313250. Complete lot by lot results can be found here.

Day Sale

Total Lots: 24
Pre Sale Low Total Estimate: £471000
Pre Sale High Total Estimate: £663000

Total Lots Sold: 23
Total Lots Bought In: 1
Buy In %: 4.17%
Total Sale Proceeds: £732825

A staggering 95.84% of the lots that sold had proceeds in or above the estimate range. Surprises (defined as having proceeds of at least double the high estimate) included Vik Muniz’ Black Marilyn at £46850, Tracey Emin’s Good Smile Great Come at £16250, Candida Höfer’s Trinity College Library, Dublin II at £32450 and Robert Mapplethorpe’s Self Portrait at £33650. Complete lot by lot results can be found here.

Christie’s

Christie’s didn’t have much photography included in its two sales, and the results for these lots were mixed. As a result, Christie’s had the lowest total proceeds from photography of the three houses in this round of sales, by a meaningful margin.

Evening Sale

Total Lots: 2
Pre Sale Low Total Estimate: £420000
Pre Sale High Total Estimate: £500000

Total Lots Sold: 1
Total Lots Bought In: 1
Buy In %: 50.00%
Total Sale Proceeds: £271250

The one lot that sold (Gursky) sold above the estimate range. There were no surprises in this sale. Complete lot by lot results can be found here.

Day Sale

Total Lots: 8
Pre Sale Low Total Estimate: £104000
Pre Sale High Total Estimate: £144000

Total Lots Sold: 6
Total Lots Bought In: 2
Buy In %: 25.00%
Total Sale Proceeds: £123750

83.33% of the lots that sold had proceeds above the estimate range, but the two highest value lots didn’t sell, which explains the lower total proceeds. There was only one surprise (defined as having proceeds of at least double the high estimate): Vanessa Beecroft’s VB 35 at £16250. Complete lot by lot results can be found here.

Phillips

Phillips had the most photographs on offer and took a few more risks in its selections in these sales. The results were very uneven, with proceeds from both sales falling under the low estimates.

Evening Sale

Total Lots: 9
Pre Sale Low Total Estimate: £710000
Pre Sale High Total Estimate: £1050000

Total Lots Sold: 4
Total Lots Bought In: 5
Buy In %: 55.56%
Total Sale Proceeds: £587000

75.00% of the lots that sold had proceeds above the estimate range, but less than half of the lots on offer sold. There were no surprises in this sale. Complete lot by lot results can be found here.

Day Sale

Total Lots: 31
Pre Sale Low Total Estimate: £296000
Pre Sale High Total Estimate: £411000

Total Lots Sold: 22
Total Lots Bought In: 9
Buy In %: 29.03%
Total Sale Proceeds: £212525

68.18% of the lots that sold had proceeds in or above the estimate range, but the combination of buy-ins and sales below the low estimate led to the lower total proceeds. Again, there were no surprises in this sale. Complete lot by lot results can be found here.

So what conclusions can we draw from all this data? First, photography generally performed quite well in these sales. Second, Sotheby’s seems to have discovered the formula for the successful recession era sale (the details of the recipe are of course secret). The others would be well advised to steal from their playbook for the next round of sales.

Auction Results: 100 Fine Photographs, February 19, 2009 @Swann

Swann’s February 19th sale of 100 Fine Photographs was a solid performer, with total proceeds covering the total low estimate by nearly $100000, something that was a rarity last fall. The results are below (all results include the buyer’s premium):

Total Lots: 117
Pre Sale High Total Estimate: $816400

Total Lots Sold: 79
Total Lots Bought In: 38
Buy In %: 32.48%
Total Sale Proceeds: $641520

Here is the breakdown (using the Low, Mid, and High definitions from the preview post, here):

Low Total Lots: 98
Low Sold: 66
Low Bought In: 32
Buy In %: 32.65%
Total Low Estimate: $543400
Total Low Sold: $316440

Mid Total Lots: 17
Mid Sold: 13
Mid Bought In: 4
Buy In %: 23.53%
Total Mid Estimate: $213000
Total Mid Sold: $133080

High Total Lots: 2
High Sold: 2
High Bought In: 0
Buy In %: 00.00%
Total High Estimate: $60000 + 1 lot estimate on request
Total High Sold: $192000

Complete lot by lot results can be found here.

69.23% of the lots that sold had proceeds in or above the estimate range. Surprises (defined as having proceeds of at least double the high estimate) included William Henry Jackson’s Grand Canyon of the Colorado at $16800, Dave Heath’s Vengeful Sister, Chicago at $19200, and Francis Bedford’s suite of 3 albums at $132000.

Auction Results: Constantiner Collection, Part II @Christie’s

Part II of the Constantiner Collection of fashion and glamour photography was sold at Christie’s on February 12th, with much more modest success than the record breaking results from Part I. The proceeds from the sale were more than $200000 below the total low estimate. The results are below (all results include the buyer’s premium):

Total Lots: 155
Pre Sale High Total Estimate: $1734500

Total Lots Sold: 104
Total Lots Bought In: 51
Buy In %: 32.90%
Total Sale Proceeds: $910251

Here is the breakdown (using the Low, Mid, and High definitions from the preview post, here):

Low Total Lots: 113
Low Sold: 77
Low Bought In: 36
Buy In %: 31.86%
Total Low Estimate: $523500
Total Low Sold: $276126

Mid Total Lots: 38
Mid Sold: 24
Mid Bought In: 14
Buy In %: 36.84%
Total Mid Estimate: $771000
Total Mid Sold: $334125

High Total Lots: 4
High Sold: 3
High Bought In: 1
Buy In %: 25.00%
Total High Estimate: $440000
Total High Sold: $300000

Complete lot by lot results can be found here.

44.23% of the lots that sold had proceeds below the estimate range, so more work is needed going forward to bring estimates in line with buyer expectations. Surprises (defined as having proceeds of at least double the high estimate) included Alvin Booth’s lot of 9 untitled images ($6875) and Lee Friedlander’s nude of Madonna ($37500).

Eugene De Salignac: Manhattan Bridge, Centennial Exhibition, 1909-2009 @De Lellis

JTF (just the facts): A total of 46 vintage cyanotype images, taken between 1913 and 1922, framed in black and displayed throughout the gallery. Many are annotated directly on the image.(Installation shots at right.)

Comments/Context: Eugene De Salignac was a municipal employee, working for the Department of Bridges in New York in the first few decades of the 20th century, taking photographs to provide a record of the various construction projects undertaken during those years. His images were recently rediscovered and became the subject of a book and exhibit at the Museum of the City of New York in 2007. This small but comprehensive show traces the building of the Manhattan Bridge, one hundred years later.

While the pictures clearly have a historical and documentary purpose, it is their surprising modernity that makes them memorable. There are plenty of roads and trolley tracks, spans and wires, fluttering flags and paving stones, all with strong lines and contrasting patterns. There are views of the plaza in Brooklyn, and from the tops of the suspension towers, densely striped with wires, looking in both directions. In the best of the images, De Salignac captured the romantic aura of those years (enhanced by the blue tint of the cyanotype process), the awe and pride in the face of what man could accomplish.
Collector’s POV: The images in the show are priced between $1200 and $4500. These images would make good companions for some of our early New York bridge scenes by Abbott and Bourke-White.

Rating: * (one star) GOOD (rating system described here)

Eugene De Salignac: Manhattan Bridge, Centennial Exhibition, 1909-2009
Through February 28

1045 Madison Avenue
Number 3
New York, NY 10075

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