New York Photography Auction Sales Total $17.9m

Via Art Market News
April 6, 2012 By Marion Maneker


Sotheby's NY

Christies NY

Phillips de Pury
$6.1m ; 193 out of 267 lots sold for 72% sell-through

SWANN Galleries
PRELIMINARY RESULTS OF SALE 2274, April 4 2012:
Sale total: $1,202,122 with Buyer’s Premium
Hammer total: $1,001,230
Estimates for sale as a whole: $1,245,350 – $1,834,950
We offered 435 lots; 304 sold (30% buy-in rate by lot)
Top lots, Prices with buyer’s premium:

6 William Eggleston, Untitled (from the series Los Alamos), dye-transfer print, 1970. $60,000 C
347* Ansel Adams, Portfolio #4: What Majestic Word, In Memory of Russell Varian, with15 silver prints, 1963. $54,000 C
183* Camera Work Number 36, illustrated with 16 photogravures, signed & inscribed by Stieglitz, New York, 1911. $26,400 C
168** Portfolio with 90 photographs of a German dignitary’s travels to Asia and the Americas, silver prints, 1930s. $24,000 C
18 Weegee, Love Story & Ice Cream…Aspirin…Soda Pop…Vitamin Pills…Etc, maquette including two silver prints, with Weegee’s notations, circa 1940s. $20,400 D
292* Margaret Bourke-White, DC-4 Flying over New York City, silver print, 1939, printed circa 2000. $20,400 D
470* Sebastiäo Salgado, Kuwait (oil fields), oversize silver print, 1991, printed 2000s. $19,200 C
187 Edward S. Curtis, Chief of the Desert, Navajo, orotone, 1904. $15,600 D
210 Ralph Steiner, Ten Photographs from the Twenties and Thirties & One From the Seventies portfolio, silver prints, 1920s-30s, 1970s, printed 1977. $15,600 C
419 Adams, Holy Cross Church, Santa Cruz, mural-sized silver print, 1960s. $14,400 C
417 Adams, triptych with three color studies: Rusted Metal, Leaves & Red Rock, offered with four color studies, all unique Polaroid SX-70 prints, 1972. $12,000 C
240 Imogen Cunningham, The Bath & Agave, two silver prints, 1925 & 1920, printed 1952-60s. $10,800 C
14 Helen Levitt, New York (boys playing over doorway), silver print, 1942, printed circa 1980. $10,800 C
385 Brett Weston, Guatemala Hills, silver print, 1968, printed 1970s. $10,200 C
4 Bruce Davidson, East 100th Street Facade, oversize silver print, 1966-68, printed 1980s-90s. $10,200 D
467 Salgado, Dinka Cattle Camp, Southern Sudan, oversize silver print, 2006, printed 2011. $10,200 C
39 Ellsworth Kelly, Grape Leaves II, lithograph, 1973-74. $10,200 C
174 Alfred Stieglitz, Picturesque Bits of New York and Other Studies, containing 9 of 12 photogravures, 1894-97, printed 1897. $9,600 D
345 Adams, Lichens and Rock, silver print from a Polaroid Type 55 negative, 1962, printed 1962-63. $9,600 C
3 Henri Cartier-Bresson, Swan Lake, Bolshoi Theatre, Moscow, silver print, 1954, printed 1980s. $9,000 D

AIPAD: Bill Eppridge and Steve Schapiro Selects

Via PHOTO/arts Magazine

AIPAD 2012 (part 2)

"Susan May Tell is a career fine art photographer and photojournalist, with a very impressive background. She is currently the Fine Arts Chair for ASMP/NY. As one might expect, her magnet draws her towards classic black & white photography, photojournalism and documentary work.

One of the highlights of the afternoon for Susan was meeting, photographing, and being photographed by Bill Eppridge, surely among the greats of modern photojournalism. Eppridge is most well known for his iconic image of the busboy supporting the head of Robert Kennedy as he lay dying from a gunshot wound in 1968. His work was being shown by Monroe Gallery (419). Another image Susan noticed and loved at Monroe Gallery was Steve Schapiro's Freedom Rider Jerome Smith, Mississippi (1965)."

Related: Long Road to Freedom, Steve Schpairo and Jerome Smith

             Santa Fe, Rétrospective Bill Eppridge

            Raw File:  “Hard-Boiled Photog Blends the Old With the New"

67 Years after Liberation, Bourke-White Print of Buchenwald Sells for Over $115,000

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"Sotheby's Photographs sale brought $3.8 million and achieved strong prices
for the masters of 20th-century photography, including Ansel Adams,
Margaret Bourke-White, Edward Steichen and Robert Mapplethorpe."

Sotheby's Photographs Sale
April 3, 2012
LOT 74: MARGARET BOURKE-WHITE, 1904-1971


THE LIVING DEAD AT BUCHENWALD
large-format, ferrotyped, mounted, annotations in ink on the reverse, framed, 1945 (Portrait
of  Myself, pp. 268-9; Callahan, pp. 152-153; Goldberg, pl. 45; Retrospective, p. 93; Best of
Life, p. 20)
15 5/8 by 19 3/8 in. (39.7 by 49.3 cm.)

ESTIMATE 30,000-50,000 USD
Sold: 116,500 USD

Related: April in History: The Liberation of Buchenwald
             
              Modern print information available here

AN AIPAD THANK YOU!

Thank you to all of the extraordinary photographers who we are so privileged to represent - you made us look good at the 2012 AIPAD Photography Show! And thank you to all of our clients, collectors, friends, and new acquaintances for making this show so very memorable. We hope you may have an opportunity to visit us in Santa Fe before next year's AIPAD Show!

AIPAD: Day Three

The Park Avenue Armory was packed with photography enthusiasts today! We were so honored to welcome Nina Berman, Bill Eppridge, Lynn Goldsmith,  Stephen Wilkes, among many other renowned photographers to our booth.

Sunday, April 1 is the final day of the 2012 AIPAD Photography Show, 11 - 6. Please visit us in booth #419 and say hello!

AIPAD 2012: DAY TWO

Today we were very honored to welcome in our booth Deena Schutzer, daughter of the late Paul Schutzer, Grey Villet's widow Barbara Villet (selections of  Grey's photo essay of Richard and Mildred Loving are on exhibit); Ida Wyman, and Stephen Wilkes.

The AIPAD Photography Show was featured in numerous reviews and articles today, including the New York Times, MSNBC Photo Blog, The DLK Collection ("A startling Nina Berman of a veiled woman with her diploma is on the outside wall" at Monroe Gallery).

The Show continues tomorrow 11 - 7 (Bill Eppridge,   Stephen Wilkes, and many other photographers will be in our booth), and Sunday 11 - 6. We look forward to welcoming you at Booth #419!

AIPAD in The New York Times

Via The New York Times:


"In the post-everything era, whose advent coincided with the rise of digitization in photography, it has often seemed, paradoxically, as if nothing new can be done. The negative consequence of this is that contemporary photographs can look a lot like vintage ones; the positive outcome is that new and intriguing connections are often made between past and present. Luckily, there are many examples of the latter at the AIPAD Photography Show New York."

Full artice here.

AIPAD DAY 1

From this

to this and more

 Please visit us in Booth #419, at the AIPAD Photography Show through Sunday.

Related: Elizabeth Avedon: AIPAD 2012, New York City

REVIEW - VIVIAN MAIER: DISCOVERD

Vivian Maier, January, 1953, New York

Gelatin silver print, 16” x 20”, © Maloof Collection

THE Magazine
April, 2012

Vivian Maier: Discovered

Monroe Gallery of Photography

112 Don Gaspar Avenue, Santa Fe

It’s not likely that Vivian Maier ever read pragmatist philosopher John Dewey’s classic 1934 text on art and aesthetics. It is certain that John Dewey never saw a photograph by Maier, whose work was virtually unknown until 2007. Yet the street photography of Vivian Maier could be a contemporary case study for Dewey’s grounding of art’s genesis in ordinary experience.

Dewey’s Art as Experience is slow going, weighed down after seven decades by its now-archaic style and language. Well worth the read, though: Its lasting contribution to discourse about art are Dewey’s fundamental insights about the nature of experience and the location of the art object within culture rooted inoncrete experience. He’s at his best—and most relevant for today—in Chapter 3, “Having an Experience.”

He asserts that the way we often experience things is largely inchoate, marked by an initial engagement that is rarely completed, turned aside by “distraction and dispersion” (multi-tasking) and by “external interruptions or … internal lethargy” (read cellphone, FacebookArt as Experience is slow going, weighed down after seven decades by its now-archaic style language. Well worth the read, though: Its lasting contribution to discourse about art are Dewey’s fundamental insights about the nature of experience and the location of the art object within culture rooted in concrete experience. He’s at his best—and most relevant for today—in Chapter 3, “Having an Experience.” He asserts that the way we often experience things is largely inchoate, marked by an initial engagement that is rarely completed, turned aside by “distraction and dispersion” (multi-tasking) and by external interruptions 0r … internal lethargy” (read cellphone, Facebook Twitter). Our continuous but “streaming” interaction with or environment rarely yields “an experience…[that] runs its course to fulfillment. … integrated within and demarcated in the general stream … from other experiences.” Dewey cites examples: a task done well, a problem solved, a game played through, a good meal, a personal encounter—any interaction that “is so rounded but that its close is a consummation and not a cessation. … It is an experience.”

Dewey’s notion of an experience—most often a common interaction—is key to art’s critical role in our lives: It constantly redirects our focus to the vital import of “ordinary” experience. Arguably, it is the most salient function of photography. Case in point: Vivian Maier, whose gelatin silver prints are featured at Monroe Gallery through April 22. Vivian Maier (1926-2009), born in the Bronx, worked as a nanny in Chicago in the 1950s and 1960s. Returning to New York City, she would pass her whole life as a caregiver, supported in the poverty of her old age by three of the children she had nannied in her early years. All she left behind was a storage locker stuffed with memorabilia. Unclaimed and delinquent in payment, the locker contents—placed in a Chicago auction house in 2007—were found to contain some 100,000 negatives, mostly in undeveloped rolls, taken by Maier over five decades. The negatives developed thus far reveal powerfully understated work by a major urban photographer of the last half of the twentieth century.

A first, cursory look reveals the consistent depth of her work and the unerring eye with which she imbued formal and narrative import across a wide range of subjects. Maier’s sense of place is especially evident in her shots of New York City—for example, in scenes that evoke paintings by the Ash Can School: the street façade in September 28, 1959, 108th St. East, New York recalling Edward Hopper’s 1930 Early Sunday Morning, or the John Sloan rooftop view of the dining couple framed in the window of the second-floor Chop Suey restaurant (Untitled, 1953). The latter photo’s choice of an unusual vantage to underscore human exchange occurs again in New York, NY, April 1953, another restaurant shot, taken from a railing directly above a young woman and a man in army uniform holding hands across a table—a private moment whose intimacy is breached innocently by the camera’s lens and ominously by the date of the print, taken some three months before the end of the Korean War.

Maier’s shots of human encounters are more than matched by her views of urban locales, where an epic sense of place vies with their sheer artistry as formal studies. An aerial view of a steel pylon dwarfing two pedestrians nearby (Untitled, no date); a worm’s eye view of a huge warehouse whose towering wall is stenciled with an “X” formed by the crossed shadows of two adjacent steel girders from an elevated train line (Unknown, September 1956); in Undated, Chicago, the dramatic recession to a distant vanishing point, beyond its pinhole portal at the far side, of a skyscraper’s colossal portico whose soaring Promethean columns are mocked by their incorporeal shadows strewn across its retreating marble corridor; in Untitled, 1955, a promenade high above the East River overlooking a massive Romanesque building enveloped in mist hosts a family of sightseers menaced by the looming bulk of a sharply foreshortened lifeboat suspended overhead, pointing far beyond and below them to a fog-laden inlet between the docks—a brilliant, blade-runner composition in black and white.

Finally, there are the crowd shots like 1954 New York in which Maier’s extraordinary eye for the ordinary mediates a benign balance between the monumental and the intimate, achieved in each instance by her attention to that rare, fleeting composition where the human subject exerts a dual role as formal agent and narrative device.

—Richard Tobin

AIPAD OPENS

Thank you to all our friends who joined us at tonight's opening of the 2012 AIPAD Photography Show. We were honored to have renowned photographers Bill Eppridge, John Loengard, Stephen Wilkes, Ida Wyman, and many others in attendance.

The Show continues daily 11 - 7 through Sunday, full details here. We look forward to welcoming you to booth #419