Spring Photo Auction Results

Man Ray's "Rayograph" from 1926 sold for $296,000 at Phillips de Pury & Company's April 26 auction in New York.

It was another wild week at the New York auction houses, complete with record-setting high prices for vintage photographic works and bargain-basement prices for lesser-known contemporary artists.

During its Photographs auction April 24-25, Christie's reset its own world record for Irving Penn with the $352,000 sale of his "Harlequin Dress." The auction house also set a new world auction record for William Klein with the $144,000 closing price for his "Smoke and Veil, Paris, 1958."

The auction netted $7.4 million over the two-day period.

Christie's did less well with the first offerings from the Refco Contemporary Photography Collection. Refco Inc., a bankrupt futures trader, has been forced to sell off its assets to pay creditors.

Christie's April 24 sale of 182 lots from the Refco collection brought in $1.9 million, above the high estimate of $1.4 million. But according to a  Bloomberg.com article, "the auction was a bottom-fishers' bonanza," with no reserve prices for the pieces and several cases of backwards bidding.

One image by Gary, Indiana-based artist Kay Rosen that had a presale high estimate of $9,000 sold for $250. (Could the bargain price be due to Mel Gibson's fall from public favor? The image, titled "The Pen Is Mightier,'' shows Gibson playing Hamlet from Franco Zeffirelli's 1990 film.)
According to Bloomberg's Lindsay Pollock and Philip Boroff, the winning bidder for the Rosen image -- Long Island City artist Juvenal Reis – also snapped up some bargain Robert Mapplethorpe Polaroids for $2,640.

The highest bid from the Refco sale -- $96,000 -- came for Joel Sternfeld's 1978 image of smashed pumpkins lying in front of a country farm stand.

Some of the more impressive and potentially valuable images in the Refco collection -- compiled over the past three decades with a particular emphasis on conceptual and intellectual photography -- will be auctioned off May 5 and May 10 at Christie's. Included in those sales will be images by Thomas Ruff, Andreas Gursky, Cindy Sherman, Matthew Barney, and Richard Avedon, among others.

Over at Phillips de Pury & Company, the auction house's April 26 Photographs sale in New York fetched a whopping $296,000 for Man Ray's 1926 "Rayograph," a photogram composed from a concentric line of rope that gives off hypnotic vibes. (For more on Man Ray's Rayographs, see this  Phillips entry.)

Phillips also topped the $200,000 mark with Tina Modotti's 1929 image "Hands of the Puppeteer," which netted $216,000. Several bids surpasses the pre-sale high estimates, including William Eggleston's 1970 images "Near Minter City and Glendora, Mississippi," $69,600; Lewis Hine's 1908 image "Girl working in a Carolina Cotton Mill," $90,000; and Thomas Ruff's 1992 image of a starry night sky, $78,000.

Two images in the sale prominently featured American flags: Robert Frank's "Hoboken, N.J." image of two women looking out their windows, which surpasses its high estimate with a $96,000 closing bid, and Mapplethorpe's 1987 image of the sun shining through the flag, which nearly doubled its high estimate with a closing price of $100,800.

For contemporary artists, a good judge of value could be seen at Phillips' inaugural benefit auction of photographs for Blind Spot Magazine (download  auction results PDF). Most of the images sold at the low end of pre-sale estimates. The largest bid -- $30,000 – came from Clifford Ross' large-scale "Study for Mountain VIII, 2006." Images by Martin Parr, Stephen Shore, Justin Kurland, Nicholas Nixon, Roni Horn, David Hilliard, Lee Friedlander and Mitch Epstein were had for $5,000 or less.