Every year our summary of the highest priced photography lots sold at auction subtly divides our audience. On one side are the collectors, art advisers, auction specialists, gallery owners, and other data driven types that want to understand how the secondary market for photography is functioning, which artist reputations are rising (or falling) as gauged by public market prices, and which auction houses are garnering the choicest consignments. On the other are those who find any discussion of money distracting or downright unseemly, reminding us that the importance or quality of any given artwork is often uncorrelated to its price, that the artist almost never directly profits from high priced auction sales (when there is no droit de suite or artist’s resale right in place), and that the long arm of art history isn’t using prices as its primary criteria for judgement. For some, the numbers are useful and instructive; for others, they represent the worst of what’s wrong with the art world.

But given our heritage as active collectors who have been forced to make very real trade offs with respect to prices and available funds, we continue to think that auction results offer plenty of small insights about what’s happening in the world of photography. Last year we tallied up the results from 62 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.

The top photography lot of the year was an early print of Man Ray’s iconic 1924 image Noire et blanche, selling at Sotheby’s in London for just under $2.9M (when converted into US dollars). Down the list came prints by many of the usual suspects – Cindy Sherman, Richard Prince, Helmut Newton, William Eggleston (a portfolio), and Barbara Kruger – with a rare vintage photomontage by El Lissitzky also finding its way into the mix. And after a 2024 where works sold at Christie’s dominated the top ten, 2025 saw a surge back by Sotheby’s, which took five of the ten available spots this year.

In the slideshow below, the top ten highest priced photography lots sold at auction in 2025 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 Sotheby’s, Christie’s, and Phillips, in varying sizes).

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

When matched against the results from the previous decade, the 2025 numbers show a small upswing over 2024, but nowhere near the heights found in 2022, when a vintage Man Ray print broke the $10M barrier for the first time. More generally, 2025 seems to have settled into the middle of the data set, suggesting an altogether average year or a return to the mean.

Going forward, rising price momentum has typically been driven by a combination of broad-based economic optimism (as measured by the performance of the capital markets), frothy bidder competitiveness, and true artistic scarcity (as measured by the quality of the auction consignments), so the presence (or absence) of all three this coming year would be a key signal that the numbers might start to change.