As we turned toward the fall auction season this past year, I was casually looking at the top photography lots of the year so far and wondering where all the action was. Heading into those sales, it had been a decidedly lackluster year for high priced photo lots, with only two prints selling for more than $1M in the first nine months of the year, and those just barely getting over that hurdle.

The fall season ultimately proved to be a bit more exciting, with seven of the top ten photo lots of the year finding buyers in October and November. But as seen below in the final tally of the results, 2024 won’t go down as a particularly robust year for photography at auction.

Last year we tallied up the results from 65 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 many more sales where photographs were on offer, but their aggregate value wasn’t enough to merit a full statistical report (we are typically using roughly $250K of total photo value on offer as a low end cut off point).

The top photography lot of the year was a cowboy print made by Richard Prince in 1997, selling at Christie’s in London for just over $2.6M (when converted into US dollars). The number two and three lots in the 2024 list were also Prince cowboy prints (is a Prince cowboy now so accepted/safe that the demand is nearly constant?), with other artists breaking in after that, including a new world record for a William Eggleston print at number four. Perhaps the only real piece of news in this list is how much Christie’s dominated the year’s top consignments – Darius Himes and his team took the first eight lots in the top ten list in 2024, and Christie’s was the only auction house to sell a photograph for more than $1M this past year.

In the slideshow below, the top ten highest priced photography lots sold at auction in 2024 are shown in descending price order, with image details, pre-sale estimates, realized prices (including buyer’s premiums, all converted into US dollars), and venues/dates as background (images courtesy of Christie’s, Phillips, and Sotheby’s, in varying sizes).

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

After the frame breaking results of the 2022 auction season, when a Man Ray print broke the $10M barrier for the first time, it seemed possible that the market might slowly wander upward toward that new anchor point. But in the succeeding two years, the available photography consignments haven’t drawn anything like outsized attention, and in comparison to the top results of preceding decade, they seem either altogether in line or even a bit soft.

The combination of broad-based economic optimism, frothy competitiveness, and true artistic scarcity is typically what drives prices upward, with all three generally necessary for big outcomes. Heading into a Presidential transition in the US in early 2025, it will be intriguing to see whether the initial tumult of that change eventually steadies out into real forward momentum or whether continued economic uncertainty keeps the auction markets for photography on eggshells for another year.