While most of the attention was on Sotheby's Met/Gilman Sale, Christie's normal February auction pulled in some very solid results, selling $1,959,840 and 86.9% of the lots offered. It was, however, a rather boring affair if you were present, because so many bids were made by commission or by phone. The work in the sale was also highly erratic in terms of condition.

I will only focus on those lots around or over $20,000, including buyer's premiums. Most lots that broke over that mark made it into Christie's Top Ten list.

Two phone bidders battled it out on lot 15, Edward Curtis' "Tapa". An American collector got the lot for over 2-1/2 times the low estimate at $28,800. That mark put the lot into a tie for tenth place in the sale.

Two different commission bidders, both American collectors, picked up lots 27 and 28, Ansel Adams' "Aspens" and "Mt. Williamson" for $31,200 and $30,000. Lot 27 was tied for sixth with two other lots and lot 26 got ninth place in the Top Ten.

Another commission bidder snagged lot 55, Brett Weston's "Fifteen Photographs" portfolio for just above the low estimate at $19,200.

I battled a European bidder on the phone for lot 83, Peter Beard's "Portraits, London/Paris/Nairobi, Collected at Hog Ranch". The phone got it for what turned out to be a very reasonable $48,000 (still mid-range). I had not realized the upward pressure on everything Frances Bacon that was the result of the previous week's London auction. The lot was the third most expensive of the auction.

Collector Robert Infarinato picked up the Robert Doisneau portfolio "Selected Images" for the mid-range bid of $31,200. The key image La Braiser, or the Kiss, was damaged during the viewing at Christie's. It was still an excellent buy, as Doisneau images continue to climb. Infarinato was fortunately aware of the problem and probably got a better deal on the group because of it. The lot made it into a three-way tie for sixth place in this auction. By the way, I felt that other Doisneau images (lots 94, 96) that Christie's said were 1950s vintage appeared to be later prints from about the late 1960s. They sold that way too.

Lot 103, Alfred Eisenstaedt's "Lumberyard in Seattle, WA", was scooped up by Berlin dealer Ute Hartjen of Camera Works for nearly triple the estimate at $22,800, but this was apparently a unique vintage print, according to some knowledgeable sources, although it was not noted as such by Christie's.

London dealer Michael Hoppen picked up lot 143, Jacques-Henri Lartigue's "ACF Grand Prix", for $19,200, which was double the low estimate.

Irving Penn did pretty well. Dealer Ute Hartjen picked up lot 155, Penn's "Anais Nin" for over double the low estimate at $18,000. San Francisco dealer Jeffrey Fraenkel then picked up the next lot, Penn's "Truman Capote" for triple the low estimate at $21,600.

Hartjen then came back on lot 169, Richard Avedon's "Renee, the New Look of Dior", but she had to nearly double the high estimate to get it for $18,000. She then battled a persistent European collector bidding on the phone for the cover lot, Penn's "Vogue Beauty Head with Eyes Closed (Front View)". Estimated at only $10,000-15,000, the lot soared to $66,000, finally being sold to the European collector on the phone. It tied for the top lot of the sale.

Lot 200, a group of 80 large-format Curtis photogravures sold to a commission bidder for under the low estimate at only $20,400, which was really an excellent price.

Irving Penn continued to do well. Ute Hartjen took lot 250, "Deep Sea Diver" at its high estimate for $18,000. Then she took Penn's "3 Cretan Women" (lot 251) and "Bouchers" (lot 252) for $28,800 and $33,600, both nearly double the high estimate. The price on lot 252 was good enough for fifth place overall and lot 253's price placed it in a three-way tie for last place on the Top Ten list. A phone bidder mopped up the last Penn lot (254, "Cleaning Women") for well over the high estimate at $21,600.

Helmut Newton's sexist images sold to two different phones for nearly double their high estimates. An American collector picked up Newton's "Woman Being Filmed" (lot 263) for $28,800, which put the lot in a three-way for 10th place. Then the next lot, "Study on Voyeurism II", sold for $31,200, which put it in a three-way for sixth place overall.

Still another phone picked up lot 267, a Frederick Sommer's image, for about double the low estimate at $18,000.

Always the dependable Ansel Adams, his images not only helped open the sale, but they also helped close it on a high note. Lot 272, Adams' "Winter Sunrise, Sierra Nevada from Lone Pine, CA" bought a winning bid over the high estimate from a man in the back of the room. The $45,600 bid put the lot into fourth place. A commission bidder, who was an American collector, snagged Adam's "Moonrise, Hernandez, NM" (lot 274) for $66,000--just over the high estimate and good enough for a piece of first place in the Top Ten.
 

(The following notes concerning Diane Arbus Estate prints came to us recently from Jeffrey Fraenkel. Fraenkel is president of Fraenkel Gallery in San Francisco, a long-time member of AIPAD and the ADAA, and is regarded as one of the top Arbus experts in the field.)

By Jeffrey Fraenkel

In response to comments in recent E-Photo Newsletters, please allow me to correct several misperceptions that may exist about posthumous prints, otherwise known as Estate prints, of photographs by Diane Arbus.

Since Arbus's death in 1971, only one person--Neil Selkirk--has made prints from her negatives. All of Selkirk's prints have been made on the same humble enlarger Arbus herself used (illustrated on p. 272 of "Diane Arbus Revelations", the monograph accompanying the retrospective organized by the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art in 2003). The process by which Selkirk came to make these prints, and the arduous decisions that went into their making, are thoroughly detailed in his essay "In the Darkroom" (pp. 266-275 of "Revelations"). Selkirk's fine essay is an essential bit of reading for anyone interested in Arbus's work.

Unlike many other posthumous prints that float around the photography market, Neil Selkirk's prints are highly esteemed by museums and private collectors. As early as one year after the artist's death, more than one-third of MoMA's landmark 1972 Arbus retrospective was comprised of prints by Selkirk. Thirty years later, in the retrospective organized by SFMOMA, more than forty percent of the photographs were Selkirk prints. This exhibition has been seen at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Victoria and Albert Museum, and the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, among several other important institutions.

All legitimate Selkirk prints carry Estate stamps and the signature of Doon Arbus (as Executor of the Estate) on the verso. A few of the earliest Selkirk prints have an Estate label with no edition number verso, though by the mid-1970s all Estate prints carried an edition number such as "3/75," indicating a potential edition of 75. (The few early prints that had already been sold were taken into account in these editions.) It is important to note that the edition number does not indicate that 75 prints actually exist. In most cases, the number is far less; sometimes as few as five prints exist from the "edition of 75." Even though most Arbus Estate prints do not exist as complete editions of 75, at this point it seems unlikely that further Estate prints will be made.

The exceptions to the "editions of 75" are the ten images Arbus chose for her portfolio "A Box of Ten Photographs". As is well known, Arbus intended for this portfolio to exist as an edition of 50, but printed (and found buyers for) only a handful of portfolios during her lifetime. Neil Selkirk completed the printing of the portfolio, and these prints carry an edition number of 50 on the verso.

Despite the edition numbers of 75 or 50, the market has come to realize that numerous Arbus images are difficult to find. As a serious observer of the photography market since 1977, I can attest that Arbus collectors tend to hold on to their prints with greater tenacity than other works in their collections. Hundreds of Neil Selkirk's beautiful prints have found their way into museum collections where they are likely to remain. These facts, coupled with the lasting relevance of Arbus's work, are among the key factors that have contributed to the steadily increasing value of Neil Selkirk's prints at auction over the last two decades.
 

I will be traveling to New York City April 20-26 for the upcoming Spring photography auctions there. If you would like me to bring specific prints to see while I am in New York City or would like me to preview and/or bid for items at auction there, please call me now. While I leave April 20th, auction previews and bids can be made about two or three days before the actual auction itself by either calling my Asst. Director Marthe Smith at 1-215-822-5662 or me directly (after April 20) on my mobile at 1-215-518-6962. I usually only use my mobile while traveling so do not call it earlier than April 20th.

My company Vintage Works, Ltd.'s auction services are charged at 5% of the successful hammer price against a minimum of $125 in the United States ($250 minimum in Europe). The minimum includes items that you are unsuccessful for or those that we warn you off of. The minimum is the same for one item or five items per auction. In other words, it is only $250 total (not per lot) to check out up to five auction lots (for more than five lots, please call). Usually, if you want us to actually bid for you, you will have to fax your details to the auction house with a signed authorization for us to do this. That is one of the reasons why it is best not to wait until the last few days. We never accept competing bids for the same lot and will only accept one client per lot to avoid any conflicts.

I will also be going to the Paris and London photography auctions coming up in May, so you may wish to call me about those auctions soon as well.
 

Please visit the Special Spring Clearance sale on I Photo Central, which is brought to you by our photography dealers. These items are available at special sale prices (from 20 to over 60% off the regular list price) for only a limited time, from now until only June 21st. Many of the items regular list prices were reduced earlier by over 20%, so the actual net reductions may be well over 40% to 80% in many instances. These are all final prices, so no other discounts apply. Shipping/insurance may also be added. After June 21st prices will revert on these items to the original list price.

There are some great deals, so check them out soon at: http://www.iphotocentral.com/sale/sale.php .

If you want to do further sorts on the sale list, you can go to the Search Images page at http://www.iphotocentral.com/search/search.php and put SpringClearanceSale2 into the key word field. Then you can also use the other search fields, such as price range, country, etc. When you have all your choices made, simply hit the Search button (not the Show All Images button). When you put in the key word, you must have the capital letters in properly and no space between the words or the number "1". Also make sure you do not have any extra space after the key word. This way if you are bargain hunting, you can put in a range from $1 to $500, or if you want to focus on the top end, just put in a range from $1,000 (or $2,500 or $5,000) to No Limit.

Here is a list of some of the important photographers from the 19th-century currently on sale: Baldus, Beaucorps, Bresolin, Rev. Bridges, Atget, Berthier, Bertsch, Bourne, Braun, Cameron, Charnay, Clifford, Constant, Cuvelier, Daguerreotypes, De Clercq, Devaria, Disderi, Eakins, Emerson, Evans, Fenton, Frenet, Frith, Hammerschmidt, Hugo, Jackson, Rev. C. Jones, Langlois, Laurent, Le Secq, Loppe, Lotze, Lummis, MacPherson, Mailand, Marconi, Marville, Maxwell Lyte, Miot, Moulin, Dr. Murray, Muybridge, Naya, Negre, Pluschow, Ponti, Quinet, Robertson & Beato, Rumine, Salzmann, Savage, Simelli, Sommer, Spackman, Terris, Tripe, Vacquerie, Vallou de Villeneuve, Von Gloeden, Watkins and Whitehurst.

The 20th-century photographers in the sale include: Abbott, Albin-Guillot, Bellon, Berko, Berman, Bing, Blanc et Demilly, Bovis, Brassai, Bravo (both Lola and Manuel), Bubley, Cartier-Bresson, Coburn, Curtis, De Dienes, Demachy, Dieuzaide, Doisneau, Drtikol, Erwitt, Fassbender, Feininger, Funke, Garduno, Genthe, Gibson, Guidalevitch, Haas, Halsman, Herve, Hine, Hoff, Hurley, Imboden, Iooss, Iturbide, Izis, Johnston, Kertesz, Kessels, Kinszki, Klein, Kollar, Krull, Lange, Laughlin, Lauschmann, Leifer, Man Ray, Mantz, Masclet, McDarrah, Meyerowitz, Misonne, Modotti, Monsen, Moon, Mortensen, NASA, Newman, Puyo, Reichmann, Rene-Jacques, Riboud, Rittase, Rossler, Rothstein, Rubinstein, Ruzicka, Schall, Seeley, Siegel, Siskind, Smith, Steichen, Steiner, Stettner, Stouman, Strand, Sudek, Sudre, Suschitzky, Tolstoi, Tuefferd, Van Vechten, Webb, Welpott, Weston (Brett, Edward and Neil), White and Wyman.
 

By Matt Damsker

IN CHARACTER: ACTORS ACTING. DIRECTED AND PHOTOGRAPHED BY
HOWARD SCHATZ. FOREWORD BY ROGER EBERT.
264 pages; 125 color and black-and-white plates. ISBN No. 0-8212-2907-9; 2006, Bulfinch Press, Time Warner Book Group, 1271 Avenue of the Americas, New York, NY 10020; $50 (U.S.), $67 (Can.). http://www.bulfinchpress.com .

The consummate, confidant pro, Howard Schatz takes the coffee-table tome to a new level with this latest concept in celebrity portraiture--not purpled celebrity, a la Britney-Paris-Lindsey, but the well-earned fame of working actors, veteran faces we've seen countless times. Schatz asks each to play a series of emotions ("You are a father watching your baby daughter take her first step," for example, or, "You are a district attorney whose star witness has just perjured himself") and captures the result in often extreme, cinematic, always affectionate close-up. It amounts to 260 pages of mugging, perhaps, but these are master muggers, and just a glimpse of Scott Glen's weathered face affecting the gaze of "the dark-horse challenger in an international chess final," or Edie Falco wrapping her everywoman features around a version of "a little girl telling your mother that your twin brother said a dirty word," is to be wonderfully amused and entertained.

And these are great faces, to a one, from Falco to Don Cheadle and Richard Dreyfuss to Amanda Plummer and Melissa Leo, to Martin Landau, James Earl Jones, Ellen Burstyn, Hal Holbrook, Natasha Richardson, Rosie Perez, Alan Cumming, and too many others to name--indeed, this book dreams the list called Laundry, dense with participation and gamuts run, with "acts" arranged to depict Comedy, Anger, Suspicion, Flirtation, Tragedy, and so forth. The execution is immaculate, but the whole project will strike some eyes as elaborate shtick, a frothy novelty lacking the gravitas of such previous Schatz volumes as "Pool Light," with it underwater imagery, or the flower portraiture of "Botanica." Still, Schatz and his players deliver human vitality and performative intelligence on a grand scale, and that counts for a lot. Roger Ebert's foreword gushes a bit, but also makes good points about the intimacies achieved here, and the nature of the actor's craft: "There is something curiously intimate about what actors do on these pages. As a reader, I began to feel like the mirror in their dressing room. I wasn't looking at them. They were looking at themselves."


IMPRESSIONIST CAMERA: PICTORIAL PHOTOGRAPHY IN EUROPE, 1888-1918.
Published on the occasion of the exhibit of the same name at the Saint Louis Art Museum, St. Louis, MO, continuing through May 14. Merrell Publishers Ltd., 81 Southwark St., London SE1 0HX; 49 West 24th St., 8th Fl., New York, NY 10010. ISBN No. 1-85894-331-0 (hardcover); 0-89178-088-2 (softcover); 344 pages. $49.95 softcover; http://www.merrellpublishers.com .

If there's an irony to photography's pictorial (or, Aesthetic) movement, it's in the notion that making photography look like painting and drawing brings it closer to fine art legitimacy, when, ultimately, it reduces it to mimicry. Still, the three decades of Pictorialism chronicled in this display and accompanying catalogue resulted in countless beautiful images, and more 140 of them are displayed here. Organized by the Musee des Beaux-Arts de Rennes, France, this is the first comprehensive exhibit of Europe's pictorialist treasures--from Austria and Britain to France, the Netherlands, Italy, Spain, Russia, and beyond, with 15 scholarly essays included in this book to chart the origins and influence of the movement, along with illuminating studies of technique.

Pictorialism, as Saint Louis Art Director Brent R. Benjamin notes in his Foreword, was one of the first truly international artistic movements, spreading quickly from Europe to America and Asia. From the great and simple nocturnal reverie of Pierre Dubreuil's "Ferris Wheel in the Tuileries Gardens"--with its street-light globes the sole bright notes in a study of shape and shadow--to the autochrome soft-focus of John C. Warburg's "The Japanese Parasol" (autochrome was the first industrial process for color photography, invented by the Lumiere brothers in 1903), this is photography at its most self-consciously evocative, and it conveys a haunting, haunted sense of wonder on the part of these pioneering artists.

Indeed, if one didn't know that many of these images were the result of hand-worked, gum bichromate exposures on fine papers, it would be hard to call them photographs, especially when confronted with something like Georg Einbeck's 1897 print of a mother breast-feeding a baby, with its etched texture and, especially, the classical features of the mother; it's as if Rembrandt were behind the camera. And the outdoor studies of Theodor and Oskar Hofmeister, of boats on a Dutch canal, are masterworks of subtle coloration and tonality coupled with superb composition. If anything, Pictorialism's greatest works are its least phantasmagoric. Constant Puyo's images of spectral women in misty landscapes are lovely, dark, and deep, but the heightened naturalism of other photos--such as Adriaan Boer's "Winter Landscape," with snow lining the thin trees like brushstrokes of white paint--makes a stronger impression. In these images, and despite all the artifice of Pictorial inspiration, it's the real world that shines through--and, as later generations of photographers would show us, that's more than enough.


WITNESS: 52 YEARS OF POINTING LENSES AT LIFE.
Photos by Jurgen Schadeberg. 2004; 141pages; 120 plates. ISBN No. 1-86919-067X.
VOICES FROM THE LAND.
Photos by Jurgen Schadeberg. 2005. 165 pages; 155 plates. ISBN No. 1-86919-105-6.
Both volumes published by Protea Book House, PO Box 35100, Menlo Park, 0102, Pretoria, South Africa. Email: protea@intekcom.co.za .

These are the two most recent volumes of works by the peripatetic Jurgen Schadeberg, who, though born in Berlin in 1931, established his reputation after the Second World War and well outside of Germany, immigrating to South Africa in 1950. There, he led the photo staff of the country's leading magazine of the 50s and 60s, "Drum", and developed a reputation as a South African Eisentstadt; more importantly, he helped affirm the black experience under apartheid, with everything from street photography to images of Nelson Mandela and other heroes of the African National Congress. With "Drum" banned in the mid-60s, Schadeberg freelanced all over Europe and America, and taught at the New School in New York and even briefly in Hamburg. By 1984 he returned to South Africa, a major figure among photojournalists.

Of the two volumes, "Witness" best represents the pop-cultural Schadeberg whose camera embraces worlds of humanity and personality on an almost Shakespearean level--there's hardly a photo here that lacks for expressive depth, from a 1952 shot of a young Mandela in his law office to a 1994 image of a wizened Mandela revisiting his prison cell on Robben Island. In both cases, the rueful wisdom of the South African leader is iconically captured. In between these watershed images, of course, are just about everything else--gamblers and jazz musicians in Johannesburg and Sophiatown, the old and young faces of London in the 60s and 70s, the gritty life of Glasgow, Tyrol villagers, even the Berlin Wall. The theatrical lighting and full-frame detail of Schadeberg's "Drum" portraiture certainly evokes Eisenstadt's great Life magazine images, but Schadeberg seems most fully engaged on the fly--grabbing the richly textured, often random, visual information of markets and snowbanks, or celebrities like Nureyev and Jagger in casual moments. In every case, his lens finds people being themselves, and they interest us.

"Voices from the Land" is altogether different, a much more solemn documentation of struggle--in this case, it's the hardscrabble reality of South Africa's rural farm laborers, who toil in a difficult, sun-baked environment without ownership. Indeed, the book's running commentary details the conflicts that make these workers' lives so tough; their allegations of abuse and attack by farmers are legion, while many of them face eviction from their own ancestral lands. Schadeberg brings his camera to bear on the worn, weary faces of these survivors, many of them living in shacks yet soldiering on with great dignity.

There are white faces as well, among them farmers who acknowledge the tensions and symbolize the troubled inequality of this earthbound culture. Schadeberg's camera doesn't judge, of course, but it sees clearly and affirms powerfully for us that apartheid still exists.


BILLBOARDS, NEW YORK.
Photographs by Wouter Deruytter. Essay by Vicky Goldberg. 48 pages; 30 plates. ISBN No. 90-9019763-X. Published by the Chelsea Art Museum, Home of the Miotte Foundation, 556 West 22nd St., New York, NY 10011. http://www.chelseaartmuseum.org .

Belgian photographer Wouter Deruytter makes Manhattan his home, and this is his homage to the unique surreality of the City's street life, as New Yorkers make their ant-like way beneath the giant billboards that silently scream Fashion! Sex! Buy!

Deruytter's camera captures the taken-for-granted immenseness of these commercial Olympians--the models and celebrities who would seem to dominate and disparage the averageness of everyone else--but the unforced irony of these images is that so little attention is paid to the giants by the Lilliputian masses. It makes for a nice assertion of real life, lived really, as a couple kisses, or old folks scurry, beneath the hot gaze of a Calvin Klein underwear model, or Jennifer Lopez for Louis Vuitton, or, for that matter, an enormous beauty shot of an Asprey wristwatch, filling the frame like some metaphor of mortality while the tiny pedestrians below it strut and fret their hour on life's stage.

These black-and-white photographs are mostly noonday compositions, resulting in a heightened chiaroscuro that lends an all-purpose duality to things, or, as Vicky Goldberg's acerbic essay notes, "a drama of continuous contrasts: big and small, important and insignificant, light and dark, in focus and out, young and old, slim and fat, sleek and dumpy, chic and workaday, throbbing with passion or sunk in daily preoccupations, richly pampered vs. poor and tattered…"

Often, they remind us how unshockable we can be in the face of such market-driven eroticism as the Calvin Klein ads that feature barely clothed models with their mouths and hands all over each other--all in a day's walk to work. This little book (which accompanied last year's exhibition of the same name at the Chelsea Art Museum) will stand the test of time as Deruytter's affectionate and sharply observant hymn to the contrasts of his adopted city.

Matt Damsker is an author and critic, who has written about photography and the arts for the Los Angeles Times, Hartford Courant, Philadelphia Bulletin, Rolling Stone magazine and other publications. His book, "Rock Voices", was published in 1981 by St. Martin's Press. His essay in the book, "Marcus Doyle: Night Vision" was published this past November.

(Book publishers, authors and photography galleries/dealers may send review copies to us at: I Photo Central, 258 Inverness Circle, Chalfont, PA 18914. We do not guarantee that we will review all books or catalogues that we receive.)