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• Issue #236
• Article

Saul Leiter's atmospheric chromogenic print Waiter, Paris, 1959, sold for $25,000 over the high estimate of $9,000

Swann Auction Galleries' recent October sale of "Art & Storytelling: Art & Photobooks" combined works spanning the lifetime of the medium into an auction intended to "highlight the interrelationships between fine art, documentary and vernacular photographs," according to Daile Kaplan, Vice President and Director of Photographs & Photobooks at Swann Galleries.

She added, "We're successfully building a new, broader market of crossover and emerging collectors who enjoy discovering the ways in which art tells a story."

The auction had a reasonable 72% sell-through rate by lot and brought in a total of $1,476,675, just a bit under the low estimate for the whole sale.

Interest in vernacular photography was so high that the opening bid for many works exceeded the high estimate. One of the sale's biggest surprises was a circa 1915 salesman's album for the Eberhard Faber Pencil Company, containing 86 hand-colored silver prints of pencils, erasers and marketing displays, which sold for $10,625 to the Rijksmuseum, above a high estimate of $2,500. Documentary and photojournalism works were included in this category, with Margaret Bourke-White's silver print Gold Miners Nos. 1139 and 5122, 1950, for a Life magazine story about apartheid in South Africa, reaching $17,500, and bought by a collector.

The highlight of the sale was a scarce 1862-72 album of 67 photographs depicting South Asia and China credited to John Thomson, which sold for $45,000 to a photo dealer.

One image in the 1862-72 album of 67 photographs depicting South Asia and China credited to John Thomson, which sold for $45,000

Other notable photo books included Volume X from Edwards S. Curtis's seminal work, The North American Indian, 1915, and the deluxe limited edition of Ansel Adams's Yosemite and the Range of Light, 1979 ($12,500 and $20,000, respectively). Other Curtis work did even better. A dealer bought lot 7 a group of four portraits from The North American Indian in platinum prints, circa 1907, for $23,750. A collector bought lots 2 and 5, Curtis orotones (Flathead Camp on the Jocko and The Potter, Hopi) each for $20,000 all in.

A later-printed Alfred Eisenstaedt, Marilyn Monroe sold to a collector for a whopping $16,900. A large but late-printed André Kertész, Chez Mondrian, sold to a collector for $16,250. And Edward Ruscha, 13 photobooks by Ruscha, 11 first editions, 5 signed, various dates, also sold for $16,250 to an institution.

Several long-standing auction records were broken for important works, including the complete BAM Photography Portfolio I, 2000, with photographs by Richard Avedon, Nan Goldin, Annie Leibovitz, Richard Prince, Cindy Sherman and others, which sold for $26,250 to a collector.

A new record was also established for Saul Leiter, whose atmospheric chromogenic print Waiter, Paris, 1959, sold for $25,000, above a high estimate of $9,000 to a dealer.

Another highlight was a 1981 printing of Roy DeCarava's Dancers, 1956, which nearly doubled its estimate, selling to a collector for $37,500. The dramatic work depicts a darkened Harlem dance hall, where one imagines the subject of Horst P. Horst's 1987 silver print, Round the Clock III, New York, would feel right at home ($15,600, a record for the work in a silver print and sold to a collector). Iconic works by Diane Arbus, Robert Frank, Ormond Gigli and Irving Penn were also met with head-to-head bidding.