Andreas Gursky Rhein II (1999) $4,338,500 November 8, 2011 Christie's New York.
Rhein II is a photograph made by German visual artist Andreas Gursky in 1999. In 2011, a print was auctioned for $4.3 million (then £2.7m), making it the most expensive photograph ever sold.
The photograph was produced as the second (and largest) of a set of six depicting the River Rhine. In the image, the Rhine flows horizontally across the field of view, between green fields, under an overcast sky.
Extraneous details such as dog-walkers and a factory building were removed by the artist via digital editing. Justifying this manipulation of the image, Gursky said "Paradoxically, this view of the Rhine cannot be obtained in situ, a fictitious construction was required to provide an accurate image of a modern river." Gursky produced a very large chromogeniccolour print of the photograph, mounted it onto acrylic glass, and then placed it in a frame. The image itself measures 73 by 143 inches (190 cm × 360 cm), while the frame measures 81 by 151 inches (210 cm × 380 cm).
The print was originally acquired by the Galerie Monika Sprüth in Cologne, and subsequently bought by an anonymous German collector. The collector sold the print by auction at Christie's New York on 8 November 2011, who estimated it would fetch a price of $2.5–3.5m. It actually sold for $4,338,500 (then about £2.7m); the identity of the buyer has not been revealed.
The work has been described by arts writer Florence Waters in The Daily Telegraph as a "vibrant, beautiful and memorable – I should say unforgettable – contemporary twist on [...] the romantic landscape" and by journalist Maev Kennedy in The Guardian as "a sludgy image of the grey Rhine under grey skies".
Untitled #96
Cindy Sherman Untitled #96 (1981) $3,890,500 May 2011 Christie's New York.
A seventh print of Untitled #96sold for $2.88 million at Christie's in May 2012.
Self-portrait of the author wearing teenager clothes, taken in 1981. Christie’s, who auctioned it , noted in the presentation: “Who is this girl?Is she scheming to find true love ,or the brokenhearted victim of a failed love affair?”. The intrigue obviously worked.
Jeff Wall Dead Troops Talk
(A vision after an ambush of a Red Army patrol, near Moqor, Afghanistan, winter 1986)
Jeff Wall Dead Troops Talk (A vision after an ambush of a Red Army patrol, near Moqor, Afghanistan, winter 1986)(1992) $3,666,500 May 8, 2012 Christie's New York.
It is a montage made in 1992, a vision after an ambush of a Red Army patrol ,near Moqor, Afghanistan, winter 1986, according to the author. It seems like quite an impressive piece of work, given the fact that it’s a montage made in the early ‘90s. Wall also published a number o f successful albums, including the well reviewed Complete Edition.
99 Cent II Diptychon
The artwork 99 Cent II Diptychon from 2001 is a two-part photograph made by Andreas Gursky probably in 1999, as the work is sometimes called "99 cent.1999".
The work depicts an interior of a supermarket with numerous aisles depicting goods resulting in a colorful work. The work is digitally altered to reduce perspective. The photograph is a chromogenic color print orc-print. It is a two-part work, also called a diptych. There were 6 sets made and mounted on acrylic glass. The photographs have a size of 207 by 337 centimetres (6.79 ft × 11.06 ft).
Record sale prices
The work became famous as being the most expensive photograph in the world when it was auctioned at Sotheby's on February 7 in 2007 for a price of US$3.34 million. Another auction in New York in May 2006 fetched $2.25 million for a second print, and a third print sold for $2.48 million in November 2006 at a New York gallery. These would be the fourth and sixth-most costly photographs sold, as of 2011. On May 12th 2011 Cindy Sherman's "Untitled #96" from 1981 was sold for $3.89 million.
The Pond—Moonlight
The Pond—Moonlight is a pictorialist photograph by Edward Steichen. The photograph was made in 1904 in Mamaroneck, New York, near the home of his friend, art critic Charles Caffin. The photograph features a forest across a pond, with part of the moon appearing over the horizon in a gap in the trees.The Pond—Moonlight is an early color photograph, predating the first widespread color photography technique (the 1907 autochrome), and was created by manually applying light-sensitive gums.
Only three known versions of the Pond-Moonlight are still in existence and, as a result of the hand-layering of the gums, each is unique. In February 2006, a print of the photograph sold for US $2.9 million, at the time, the highest price ever paid for a photograph at auction. The auction itself is also presented in the part 6 of the BBC documentary "The Genius of Photography". In addition to the auctioned print, the other two versions are held in museum collections. The extraordinary sale price of the print is, in part, attributable to its one-of-a-kind character and to its rarity.
Untitled #153 (1985)
Cindy Sherman Untitled #153 (1985) $2,700,000 November 2010 Phillips de Pury & Co. New York.
Another self portrait of the artist. In the words of Sherman: “you can be terrified and screaming and hiding your eyes, but you’re laughing, the worse it is, because it’s just so over the top and cathartic to confront these things that are really disturbing.”
Billy the Kid (1879–80)
Unknown Billy the Kid (1879–80) tintype portrait $2,300,000 June 2011 Brian Lebel's Old West Show & Auction.
Dmitry Medvedev Tobolsk Kremlin (2009)
Dmitry Medvedev Tobolsk Kremlin (2009) $1,750,000 January 2010 Christmas Yarmarka, Saint Petersburg.
Edward Weston Nude (1925)
Edward Weston Nude (1925) $1,609,000 April 2008 Sotheby's New York auction.
It is one of Weston’s best known nudes, and although estimated at “only” $700 000/1million,it was sold after a heated battle between two bidders for almost double the predicted amount.
Alfred Stieglitz Georgia O'Keeffe (Hands) (1919)
Alfred Stieglitz Georgia O'Keeffe (Hands) (1919) $1,470,000 February 2006 Sotheby's New York auction.
Taken by Stieglitz in 1919 ,the photograph is part more than three hundred photographs of the painter Georgia O’keeffe. Stieglitz used to consider this kind of images to be portraits of individual body parts, rather than a study or an advanced composition.
Georgia O’Keeffe Nude
Georgia O’Keeffe Nude- Alfred Stieglitz - $1,360,000 in 2006
Part of the same series , it was originally estimated at a value of $700,000-1 million. Eight of nine highest prices paid for Stielglitz photographs are images of O’Keeffe.
Untitled(Cowboy)
Untitled(Cowboy)-Richard Prince-$1,248,000-in 2005
Prince’s technique involved mostly re-photographing old pictures that had been previously featured in the New York times. “Cowboy” is a re-photograph of a Sam Abell picture and is the first of its kind to raise over $1 million.
Dovima with elephants
Dovima with elephants- Richard Avedon-$1,151,976 in 2010
Avedon’s iconic photograph of Dovima, one of the most famous American supermodels was originally published in Harper’s Bazaar. There were two photographs from the shoot, this one and another where Dovima’s dress is black. However, the negative from the “white version” mysteriously disappeared and only one print was ever made. Avedon is one of the most influential photographers of the 20 thcentury. His work can be found in numerous photography albums.
Nautilus
Nautilus- Edward Weston-$1,082,500 in 2010
Weston took this picture in 1927 after noticing several paintings in the studio of artist Henrietta Shore, depicting sea shells. Some historians believe that this image, along with others of Chambered Nautiluses, was a turning point in Weston’s career and helped develop him as one of the greatest photographers of the previous century.
Nautilus is a black-and-white photograph taken by Edward Weston in 1927 of a single nautilus shell standing on its end against a dark background. It has been called "one of the most famous photographs ever made" and "a benchmark of modernism in the history of photography."
In February, 1927, Weston visited the studio of local Carmel artist Henrietta Shore and noticed several paintings she had made of sea shells. Only one of these paintings is known to still exist (as of January, 2011), and it shows a stark and solitary nautilus on a dark field, not unlike Weston's resulting photographs. He made it clear in his writings that the paintings had a profound effect on him:"I was awakened to shells by the painting of Henry [Henrietta Shore]. I never saw a Chambered Nautilus before. If I had, my response would have been immediate. If I merely copy Henry's expression, my work will not live. If I am stimulated and work with real ecstasy it will live."
Within a month he began photographing several different large chambered nautiluses, either whole or cut in half to reveal their inner structure. He used his Ansco 8 × 10 Commercial view camera with a Rapid Rectilinear lens stopped down to US256 (equivalent to f/64) . Notations he made about his exposures during this period indicate that the film he used would be rated approximately equivalent to 16 on today's ISO scale.
Due to the technical limitations of the film and the camera he used, he was forced to make extremely long exposures that were easily ruined by vibrations. Weston's son Kim Weston said his father propped up the shell on the end of an oil drum (the arc of the drum can barely be seen in the background of the image), and the thin metal oil drum head was sensitive to the slightest movement. Weston expressed his frustrations in his 'Daybooks:Wednesday, June 15: "Yesterday I tried again: result, movement! The exposure was 4½ hours, so to repeat was no joy, with all the preoccupation of keeping quiet children and cat, ‒ but I went ahead and await development."The next day: "The shells again moved! It must be the heavy trucks that pass jar the building ever so slightly. Anyway, I have quit trying: I can afford no more film."
He recorded that over the next several months he made fourteen negatives of shells. It's not known exactly when he took this particular image, but it had to have been made between April 1 and June 8, 1927, when he recorded in his journal "Last evening I had printed, and am ready to show all shell negatives…".
Nautilus is now recognized as one of Weston's greatest photographs, but all of his images of shells have a greater-than-life quality to them. Weston biographer Ben Maddow has said that what is so remarkable about them "is not in the closeness nor in the monumentality of the forms; or at least, not in these alone. It is instead in the particular light, almost an inward luminescence, that he saw implicit in them before he put them before the lens. Glowing with an interior life . .. one is seeing more than form."
One historian wrote "The nautilus shells proved a turning point in Weston’s career and marked a critical phase in his development as one of the greatest photographers of the 20th century, a pioneering modernist whose stunning simplicity and technical mastery are often imitated but never quite equaled." "
Much has been said about Weston's intentions in photographing shells. He recorded that some of the first people to see them had intensely erotic reactions:Tina Modotti: Edward ‒ nothing in art has affected like these photographs. I cannot look at them very long without feeling exceedingly perturbed, they disturb me not only mentally but physically. There is something so pure and at the same time so perverse about them…, They are mystical and erotic."Diego Rivera (as described by Tina Modotti): "These photographs are biological, beside the aesthetic emotion they disturb me physically, ‒ see my forehead is sweating. Then ‒ 'Is W. very sensual?'"Rene d'Harnoncourt (as described by Tina Modotti): "Without my saying a word he used 'erotic' also. Like me, he expressed the disturbance these prints caused in him. He felt 'weak at the knees'."
At the same time, Weston strongly denied in his writings that he had any thought, much less intention, of recording erotic symbolism:"No! I had no physical thoughts, ‒ never have. I worked with clearer decision of sheer aesthetic form. I knew I was recording from within, my feeling for life as I never has before. Or better, when the negatives were actually developed, I realized what I felt, ‒ for when I worked, I was never more unconscious of what I was doing.No! The Shells are too much a sublimation of all of my works and life to be pigeon-holed. Others must get from them what they bring to them: evidently they do!"
Yet, in another entry about one of his nude images he said "I saw the repeated curves of thigh and calf, ‒ the shin bone, knee and thigh lines forming shapes not unlike great sea shells…"
Weston wrote that he made twenty-eights prints of this image on at least four different types of paper, including a matte Kodak Azo and a semi-gloss Agfa Convira. In a few early versions he extended the bottom margin of the image down to the notches on the film negative. Most prints measure approximately 9½ by 7½ in. (24 by 19 cm.)
On April 13, 2010, a print of this image made by Weston in year it was taken sold for $1,082,500 at an auction in New York. As of January, 2013, it was the fourteenth most expensive photograph ever sold. Weston originally sold it for $10.
Prints of this image are now in the collections of the Center for Creative Photography, the George Eastman House and the Museum of Modern Art.
Lik
One-Peter Lik-$1,000,000 in 2010
Lik is an Australian landscape photographer who is often compared to Ansel Adams.This image, resembling an impressionist painting, was taken on the banks of the Androscoggin River in New Hampshire.There was only one print ever made.
Untangling
Untangling-Jeff Wall- $1,000,000 AUD in 2006
Another skillfully crafted image from what is called one of the “most famous practitioners of staged photography”.Taken in 1994.
Joueur d’Órgue
Joueur d’Órgue-Eugene Atget -$686500 in 2010
Taken on the streets of Paris, around 1898-1899, it is a gelatin silver chloride print originally estimated at $150,500. It ended up selling for more than six times that amount.
Andy Warhol
Andy Warhol- Robert Mapplethorpe -$643,200 in 2006
An unconventional portrait of the famous American pop artist.It as originaly estimated at $300,000. Mapplethorpe has photographed many personalities of the art world in his career and is known for his bold approaches. More of his work is available in printed edition.
Moonrise
Moonrise, Hernandez, New Mexico-Ansel Adams-$609,600 in 2006
Adams is considered to be the founder of modern landscape photography. He took this photo in November of 1941 from a location on U.S. Route 84. It was in very high demand an Ansel personally made over 1300 prints of it. As he was known for neglecting to record specific dates of his images, this one in particular has been listed throughout the years as having been made between 1940-1944. More of Adam’s works can be found in printed albums.
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