For much of the past year, in my rounds through gallery shows and art fairs, I have anecdotally heard rumbles about slowing demand for photography, about much of photography being “out” at the moment, and other muted tales of woe, but without looking at the private sales books of gallery owners, it’s difficult to get a feel for just how much of a slowdown was actually occurring, and whether it was driven by broad economic malaise or something more intrinsic to the medium. And as the year passed, in tracking the auction data from sale to sale, I had an inkling that the numbers weren’t quite as frothy as we had seen in years past, but again, I hadn’t taken the time to tease out the patterns or conclusions.

Last year we tallied up the results from 81 auctions around the globe, providing data on a wide range of specialist photography and photobook sales, as well as contemporary art auctions that included a significant percentage of photography lots. We also tracked another dozen or so sales where photographs were on offer, but their aggregate value wasn’t enough to merit a full statistical report.

While 2022 was a blockbuster year for photography at auction, with a 1924 print of Man Ray’s Le Violin d’Ingres finding a buyer at an astonishing $12.4M, with a 1905 print of Edward Steichen’s The Flatiron close on its heels at $11.8M, in 2023, the results were altogether more modest. The top photography lot of the year was a 1999 Richard Prince cowboy print, clocking in at $1.56M. That figure was the lowest top lot amount we have seen in the past decade, and decently clear evidence of a slowdown, at least in the top end of photography market.

In the slideshow below, the top ten highest priced photography lots sold at auction in 2023 are shown in descending price order, with image details, pre-sale estimates, realized prices (including buyer’s premiums), and venues/dates as background (images courtesy of Christie’s and Sotheby’s, in varying sizes, with no top ten lots from Phillips this year).

Here’s the aggregate data in table form, for easier comparison:

What the softness in this list seems to point to is a holding back of top consignments – while many of the photographs in the list above fit the label of being photographic icons, many are somewhat secondary works by well known names, with the real blockbusters (vintage or contemporary) nowhere in sight. Which begs the question of why those top tier consignments have gone missing, and the resulting chicken and egg conundrum – is the market soft because there are no attractive consignments or are there no consignments because the market is soft? Or both?

The table above puts a point on just how different this year’s results are from last year’s. In last year’s auction summary, I wondered about whether the high prices for the Man Ray and Steichen prints in 2022 would cascade further, pulling in more high end lots to capitalize on a flow of upward repricing taking place – that doesn’t seem to have occurred. Instead, with persistent inflation and a possible recession dogging the economic news in the past year, the well seems to have essentially run dry. With a bit more optimism providing a rising tide of late, it will be interesting to see if the top photography consignments come out to play in 2024, or stay hunkered down for another year.