Top 10 Photography Lots at Auction in 2010

Top 10 Photography Lots at Auction in 2010

According to our statistics on 71 different auctions around the world in 2010 (covering both focused Photography sales and the photography buried in Contemporary Art and other compilation sales), these were the top 10 photography lots in terms of overall selling price this year. Unlike last year, when no works crossed the $1 million dollar mark in public secondary market transactions, 8 out of the top 10 lots this year broke that threshold (3 actually crossed $2 million dollars). Our top lot last year (Gilbert & George, The Moon, 1978), would have been good for a tie for 10th place this year (last year's list can be found here).

While some might persuasively argue that certain artists do not fall under the label of "photography", all of the works that have been included in this list are made up of photographic prints. Prices all include the buyer's premium and have been converted to dollars/rounded to the nearest dollar where appropriate (1 Euro = 1.31 Dollars; 1 Pound = 1.55 Dollars, both exchange rates slightly lower than last year; varying quality reproductions via the respective houses).
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1.) $2770500: Lot 14, Cindy Sherman, Untitled #153, 1985, at Phillips de Pury & Company, Carte Blanche, November 8th

JM Colberg - Conversations about Photobooks: Erik Kessels

If you happen to come across a photobook showing you images of chicken filets and images from furniture ads, it’s like you’re looking at one of Erik Kessels’ products. Apart from owning and operating an ad agency (make sure to reload that site several times) and various other activities, Erik runs KesselsKramer Publishing, which is responsible for gems such as the In Almost Every Picture or Useful Photography series. To find out more about the ideas behind the work, I sat down with Erik on a sunny late-November morning in Amsterdam to ask some questions.

DLK - Top Photography Shows of 2010

Top Photography Shows of 2010

As 2010 draws to a close, the time has come to single out those gallery and museum shows of photography that were the best of the year. In many ways, such a choosing and list making has a delicate element of photographic re-evaluation - what looked good then is perhaps less amazing now and vice versa. With the benefit of 20/20 hindsight, we can now see the past year's photography shows not as discrete individual units rated on their own merits in a certain place and time, but as passing moments placed on a larger scale of relative worth, part of the entire continuum of art history. Which of these shows (or artists) will matter in ten or fifty years, and which others will have faded into obscurity before we ring in the New Year? After a total of 153 in-depth photography reviews this year (and countless others visited and tactfully omitted), I certainly have some opinions on these questions.

LUC DELAHAYE: "Michael Fried on Luc Delahaye" (2006)

Biljana Yrhovac wounded by a shell, Bosnia, 1992

By Michael Fried, Artforum, March 1, 2006

The photograph, framed without margins and behind Plexiglas, is just under four and a half feet high by nearly nine and a half feet wide. Its title is A Lunch at the Belvedere, and it depicts an actual event that took place at the Hotel Belvedere in Davos, Switzerland, during the World Economic Forum of 2004. The lunch was hosted by Pervez Musharraf, president of Pakistan, whose guest of honor was the famous American financier-philanthropist George Soros.

Imagens da República :: Workshops e Conferências :: Inscrição Gratuita

http://imagensdarepublica.ipt.pt/

Interview with Todd Hido || Ahorn Magazine

Interview with: Todd Hido

 

© Todd Hido, 1951, 1997 from "Houses at Night"
1. Shooting a specific image often means to complete a complex process after a deep investigation. The photographer is supposed to find the subject following too many signs. Those signs are often inside us, many of them come from our past. How is it possible to recognize those signs? Is it possible to explain how every feeling, every memory, can be put together in one single image?
A firstly let me start out by saying that I completely agree that the signs you are looking for, many of them do come from your past. But no, I don't think that's possible to put it all together in one single image. If it were then this would not be a lifelong pursuit?
A body of work does not even do it sometimes.
I have noticed that within my own practice that often adding a genre, or another way of taking pictures, often adds an extra layer that complicates things more deeply. I believe that all those signs from your past and all those feelings and memories certainly come together, often subconsciously, and form some kind of a fragmented narrative. Often you're telling your own story but you may not even know it.
One of my most valuable bits of feedback for me came from an art therapist that I did an independent study with when I was in graduate school. He taught me that I was on the right track with my subject matter and gave me the confidence to pursue it. What a gift that was in retrospect. He looked at the beginning of my houses at night, the beginning of my foreclosed home pictures, and the beginning of my portraits—all back in 1995 when I had just two or three of each, and he told me that I was right in the midst of telling the story of my life and that my photographs clearly represented that.

Alec Soth :: Talk at Walker Art Center :: 2010

Alec Soth :: Talk at Walker Art Center :: 2005

Sleeping by the Mississipi - Alec Soth

Alec Soth from mn original on Vimeo.

Nadav Kander: Yangtze - The Long River

Nadav Kander: "Yangtze — The Long River" from Jim Casper on Vimeo.