Two photographs each by Laura Gilpin, Robert Mapplethorpe, Andre Kertesz, Man Ray, Brassai, and Richard Avedon, three by Edward Weston, four by Irving Penn and also from Alfred Stieglitz, five from Ruth Bernhard, and a whopping twelve and fourteen prints from Henri Cartier-Bresson and Ansel Adams respectively.  That’s the creme de la creme in a gigantic 240 lot auction of photographs tomorrow, 6th April at Sotheby’s.

Let’s start off with a surprise.  Fifty albumen postcard-size prints of the West from the 1880s by Carleton E. Watkins at merely $10,000-$15,000?  This might be the bet of the evening for an investor cum art collector.

The first few lots are female figures by Ruth Bernhard.  Bernhard’s powerful studies of the female form are such that they may bring to mind classical statues of Greek goddesses; witness Bride.  The impression of statutary is accentuated by two devices: the clever lighting and the low angle Bernhard has shot from; her lens is at about the height of the model’s thigh.

The potent expressionistic qualities of black-and-white are brought home in an unusual low-key landscape in which the eye is led back from the near-black foreground via the lines of the roadway as it – the eye – is naturally drawn to the white structure in the background.  A painterly masterpiece by Paul Strand.

A very different kind of landscape is Ansel Adams’s At Timberline.  The bleak ‘music’ of this nature study comes about from ‘contrapuntal’ curves and jags – the curves of the limbs and more obvious jags of the twigs.  Worth mentioning are the tones and the crop – see how the tip of the tree touches the top edge of the frame and how it ‘rises’ from the bottom edge.

The potency of forms and the drama of nature one usually expects in an Ansel Adams image are on showy display in Clearing Winter Storm.  Smell the cool mist, smell the moist earth . . . .  Equally potent and equally dramatic, albeit a human drama, is The Steerage.  This arresting image of the flotsam and jetsam of humanity is a photogravure on vellum measuring 13 1/8 by 10 3/8 inches – and estimated at $10,000-$15,000.  Is that an error?  Or is Christmas (very) early?

‘Synecdoche’ is a word that describes a type of phrase; a particular kind of figure of speech.  Lot 67 by Minor White is a photographic (and high-contrast and gorgeous) synecdoche – a pylon rises out from the heavens . . .

From the West Coast to the East Coast, New York City.  Just how did Margaret Bourke-White shoot this aeroplane from on high, so perfectly aligned with Manhattan’s grid and the diagonal of the frame?

The name Harold Edgerton may not ring a bell but check out Lot 75 and the photographs will ring one . . . this auction has it all, from Photography’s ‘Old Masters’ to Photography’s ‘Beat Generation’!

Thurman Rotan’s Daily News Building can only be described as ‘Art Deco Kaleidoscope’.  Pity that this pre-Photoshop marvel is available only in a dinky 4 3/8 x 8 5/8 inches; it would make for a smashing poster.

Dreamy, soft-hued, colour closes out our mini-survey; this hypnotic Nature Study by Eliot Porter is an impressionistic meditation on nature.  It’s one of a set of three; view the third for a body of water in two lushly saturated and near-complementary hues.  This lot is anything but dinky; the items are poster-sized at 36½ x 30 inches.

One cannot cover even the highlights of an auction of this magnitude in a blog post; any lover of photography will find it a pleasure to browse through the e-catalogue.  Check out W. Eugene Smith’s sensitive human impressions, Yousuf Karsh’s intimate portraits, and Ormond Gigli’s go-go girls, for instance, and remember that this auction includes scads of Henri Cartier-Bresson’s finest photographs.

Visit our BPro blog to read about another auction of photographs at Sotheby’s.

 

 

Tags: ansel adams, art deco, Eliot Porter, Margaret Bourke-White, paul strand, Ruth Bernhard, sotheby's