In this post, Keith Dotson’s latest episode of the Fine Art Photography Podcast with full transcript.
Full episode transcript
In this episode, what sold big and what didn’t see at all in the huge October photography auction from Christie’s
Intro
Hey everybody, welcome back to the Fine Art Photography Podcast. My name is Keith Dotson and I am a professional working photographer and in this episode of the Fine Art Photography Podcast, we will analyze the results from the auction house Christie’s big photography auction in New York on October 2, 2024.
The auction was called “An Eye Towards the Real: Photographs from the Collection of Ambassador Trevor Traina.”
Formerly the U.S. Ambassador to Austria, Trevor Traina collected what Christie’s calls “the major threads of photography’s post-war evolution.” Traina said he collects photography “because it feels like the medium of our time. It feels fresh.”
I like to review the auction results to try to understand what is hot in the minds of photography collectors at any given moment. Also, as I have said on the podcast before, the auction sites provide access to exceptionally good reproductions of the photographs.
You can zoom in and see the details very clearly. You can see the various inscriptions and exhibition labels on the back of the frame.
What I noticed from the auction results this years is that many photographs by the late street photographer Garry Winogrand went unsold, even with minimum prices that were relatively low.
Prints by Robert Frank did very well, with his sales ranging from 5 to six figure totals. His signed and dated print of a highway in New Mexico, called “U.S. 285, New Mexico, 1956” sold over estimate for $107,100.
Several prints by the great American photographer Walker Evans sold well below estimates, or went unsold. One print sold for $1500. But these were neither signed nor printed by Walker Evans, which helps explain the lack of interest.
However there was also a signed original Walker Evans print estimated at $20-30,000 that failed to sell.
Several photographs by Alec Soth sold under estimate but still fetched 5-figure sums. But his famous image “Charles, Vasa, Minnesota, 2002,” which was part of his Sleeping by the Mississippi series, sold nearly three times over estimate at $201,600.
It was a big night for color photography. Color work by Stephen Shore and William Eggleston and Gregory Crewdson was very popular.
Eggleston’s iconic photograph of a bare light bulb in a red room, titled “Greenwood, Mississippi (“The Red Ceiling”),1973” was estimated at between $200,000 and 300,000, but went for $302,400, which from what I could tell, was the second highest sale price of the night.
By the way, I told the rather weird and creepy story of this photograph in a previous episode of the podcast — give that a listen if you want to know more.
Two very large color prints by German photographer Thomas Struth also failed to sell. One of them, “El Capitan, Yosemite National Park, 1999,” was estimated at $180,000 – $220,000. It’s a striking print at roughly 6 x 8 feet, taken from a shady parking lot below El Capitan, which glows overhead in the afternoon sun — it’s a stunner with an epic size for an epic subject.
The biggest sale of the night from what I could find, was a photograph called “Dortmund, 2009,” by Andreas Gursky which went under the gavel at more than $352,000.
I’ll close out this topic with a talk about three prints by an odd photographer from the Czech Republic who lived there under the Soviet era regimes, Miroslav Tichý. If you haven’t heard of this guy, check him out sometime.
He died in 2011, but in life he had a reputation as kind of a creepy old hermit and a bit pervy — who covertly made thousands of photographs of young woman in his home town,
He made his own cameras from scratch out of the most rudimentary materials like cardboard boxes and tubes, plastic pipes, and tape. He made his own lenses by sanding and polishing plexiglass. He often matted them with homemade paper mats with pencil decorations around the edges.
He was even arrested several times for hanging around at the public swimming pool making pictures of bikini-clad women.
Anyways, there were three of his prints available for auction: one sold above estimate for $5,670; one sold below estimate for $1500; and one failed to sell at all.
Well that’s all I’ve got for this episode.
I encourage you to go to the Christie’s website for the auction and inspect the photographs yourself – -there’s a lot to learn from the high-resolution scans as well as the prevenance and histories.Thanks for listening.
I’ll talk to you again real soon.
Sources and Links
Christie’s. “An Eye Towards the Real: Photographs from the Collection of Ambassador Trevor Traina“
I have a difficult time with Winogrand’s work. Some I like but most I just pass on. I’ve watched documentaries on him and heard the critical reviews praising his approach and POV, the slanting horizons etc… Maybe his time will come again but if this auction is any indication then maybe his star is fading.