Photography Collection

Apr 24, 2007

How to check the authenticity of photographs

David Rudd explains how to judge the authenticity of photographs and how they are identified. Some good hints for buyers who want to get sure about a picture they are interested in at an auction or in a gallery. It's really getting philosophically. An important theory of truth in the middle age said truth is the analogy of an assertion and the facts. So the description of a photo should be approved by the material as a vintage, a modern print or as printed later. David Rudd explains how to examine a picture by the aid of a microscope or a strong magnifier "to distinguish a photograph from a photomechanical print". You'll also find some information about historic photographic processes.

Apr 20, 2007

Video: Photographs from the Private Collection of Margaret W. Weston

Denise Bethel, Director of Sotheby's Photographs Department, presents some photographs of the Private Collection of Margaret W. Weston in this video. These photos are sold in an auction on Wednesday and Thursday, 25 and 26 April at Sotheby's, New York, 1334 York Avenue at 72nd St., New York 10021. The exhibition of the photos has started yesterday. For more information call 212 894 1149. Absentee Bids: 212 606 7414.

Two free tickets for the ViennaFair

Two readers of Photography Collection now can win free tickets with Artprice for the ViennaFair which takes place from the 26th to the 29th April in the capital of Austria. Please send us a mail with your given name and the surname as well as your address. The senders of the first both mails can fetch the tickets at the entrance of the fair. There they are deposited for you.

Life's last issue

President's Park, South Dakota

This is the cover of the last issue of Life on America's Hidden Treasures - 21 places you have to see to believe. As we reported this is not the first end of Life in its history and we hope it won't be the last.

Apr 19, 2007

Olaf Otto Becker - Under the Nordic Lights

The Stephen Cohen Gallery in Los Angeles is going to exhibit Olaf Otto Becker - Nordic Lights, the artist's color photographs of Iceland, from April 26 to June 9. Olaf Otto Becker was born in Travemunde, a seaside resort in Germany, in 1959. He began as a painter trained in the 19^th Century Romantic style, but turned to photography, earning a degree from the University of Applied Sciences for Design in Augsburg and subsequently, to the study of philosophy at the Ludwig?Maximilians?University in Munich.
Becker photographs in color, always at night. The long exposures and northern night’s flat light allows the artist to produce images of haunting beauty in deeply saturated colors. A bright green in the Nordic sun turns into a deep verdant green in a Becker photograph. The atmosphere is palpable. Led by intuition, Becker is drawn to primeval images of land and water that resonate subconsciously. He will photograph and re-photograph a site until perfect. In four years, he has covered more than 11,000 miles of Icelandic terrain and made only one hundred color 8 x 10 negatives. The images that result are diverse, ranging from precipitous waterfalls and endless expanses of sea to gravel construction sites and concrete dams. Carefully constructed, yet never artificial, it is here that he brings the viewer to a place of deep contemplation where time stands still.
Becker has exhibited widely in solo and group exhibitions in Europe and his book, Under the Nordic Light, was short-listed for the renowned 2006 Rencontres D’Arles Book Award. He has a forthcoming book of images of Greenland to be published by Hatje Cantz and is scheduled to exhibit his Icelandic work at the Museum of Photography in Reykjavik in 2007.
An opening reception for Becker will be held on Thursday, April 26, 2007 from 7 to 9 p.m, at the Stephen Cohen Gallery located at 7358 Beverly Boulevard in Los Angeles. The gallery is open Tuesday through Saturday from 11 a.m. to 6 p.m., and by appointment.

Morgan Library & Museum acquired portraits by Irving Penn

The Morgan Library & Museum in New York has started to incorparate photographs in its 20th-century collections. So the institution has acquired 67 portraits of artists, writers and musicians by Irving Penn. “These are all figures who are represented in our collection,” said Charles E. Pierce Jr., director of the Morgan. He doesn't want to form a comprehensive photography collection, which he said would be not only expensive but also unnecessary in one of the US-capitals of photography collections at institutions like the Metropolitan Museum or the Museum of Modern Art.
Irving Penn has donated 35 of the portraits, the rest has been purchased directly from him. The photographs shall be exhibited e.g. together with literary manuscripts or other objects that fit them. “There are lots of interdisciplinary opportunities,” Pierce said. The Morgan plans an exhibition of the photographs for early 2008.

Apr 16, 2007

The End of an Era of Photo Journalism

Margaret Bourke-White took the photo of the first cover of Life. It shows the Ford Peck Dam at the Missouri river, Montana.

The list of photographers for Life magazine reads like the Who’s Who of international photo journalism: Robert Capa, Margaret Bourke-White, photographer for the above story, Alfred Eisenstaedt, Gordon Parks and Henri Huet. Alas, the platform for photographers such as these will cease to exist in the future. Because of dwindling advertising revenues the 20^th April edition will be the last one, according to the publishers Time Inc. However, the Internet portal will remain online and the Netzeitung reports further that the huge photo archive will be available for free downloads from the Internet. This is not the first closure in the history of Life magazine. 1972 was the end for the first time for the initial weekly publication, six years later Life re-emerged on the market as a monthly newspaper supplement. In 2000 followed the second closure with a relaunch four years later. With competition from Parade with a circulation of 32 million in 400 newspapers and from USA Weekend with 23 million in 612 newspapers, Life, with today only 13 million in 103 newspapers, can’t keep up. However, according to Mediaweek all three publications have incurred losses during the first quarter.

Life was founded in 1936 by publisher Henry Luce; the first edition contained five photographs by Alfred Eisenstaedt and cost 10 cents, as shown on the Cover above. At that time the USA suffered from the aftermath of an economic crisis and the 1929 stock market crash. Mass unemployment and poverty gripped the country. Hence the Cover photograph of 1936 tells an entire story on its own. A story of hope, because 11 000 men worked on the Ford-Peck-Dam, completed in 1940. 11 000 Americans and immigrants were thus able to feed their families and themselves whereas itinerant workers in the West of the USA went hungry and despaired in make-shift camps because they could not find any work. It was the end for them and their families, when they had to sell their car in order to have money to survive. To walk to the next job was not only too far but also dangerous in the heat of Texas or Arizona. This misery was also documented by Margaret Bourke-White.

In Germany meanwhile the National Socialists had seized power and Europe was poised on the brink of the 2^nd World War. During that time, within four months, the circulation of Life on the other side of the Atlantic jumped from 380000 to more than a million. And soon the magazine was internationally renowned for showing its readers unadorned pictures of what war is like. Without any kind of sensationalism, propaganda or aesthetics to glorify heroes and dictators. There were plenty of photographers offering such pictures on both sides of the Atlantic and more than enough newspapers and magazines that printed them. And then there were artists like Leni Riefenstahl who, with precisely that aesthetic, paved the way for war. But as a war correspondent the brutal battles between armed forces and civilians horrified her and she refused to supply pictures. However, the experience did not herald her break with the regime. Meanwhile, Margaret Bourke-White, the first female war correspondent sent Life her pictures from Russia, North Africa and Italy. On 7^th October 1942, after the landing of the Allies in Italy, Robert Capa witnessed the explosion of a time-fused bomb inside the post office in Naples. Some 100 people, soldiers of the 82^nd US- Airborne Division and civilians, died. Capa photographed the catastrophe for Life; however he made his name not because of the battles in Italy, but for D-Day, the allied invasion of Normandy.

In order to document the allied attack of the Normandy beaches, Capa, together with soldiers from E-Company of the 16^th Regiment, 1^st US-Infantry Division, boarded a landing craft in the early hours of 6^th June 1944. It was a Tuesday. He was holding onto the stern of the rolling craft, behind the soldiers who waited for the bow ramps to be lowered and to storm the beaches. They did not reach the appointed attack sector of Omaha beach as planned, but landed off the 2.2 kilometers long beach Easy Red. When the coxswain lowered the bow ramps they saw steel defences towering out of the water and a beach disappearing into the smoke of explosions. The infantry soldiers waded through water up to their hips and took cover behind the defences while the German soldiers’ MG-bullets ricocheted off the steel girders and sprayed the surf around them. Capa started to photograph still standing on the open bow ramp. The coxswain, wanting to turn the boat round as quickly as possible and believing him to hesitate, kicked him out. “The water was cold and the beach more than 90 meters away”, remembers the photographer later. “German fire peppered the water around me and I hurried to reach one of the steel defences.” For a few minutes he shared the cover with a soldier. “He took the water protection off his rifle and without taking aim, fired into the smoke on the beach. However, his firing encouraged him to wade on and so left the cover behind the steel defence to me.”

Capa now felt safe enough to photograph the other soldiers who, like himself, had taken cover behind the steel defences. Wading to a disabled US-tank, he continuously clicked his two Contax-II-cameras. “I lived through a never before known terror and my whole body shook while all the time looking around me”. Throughout he repeated a sentence he had picked up during the Spanish Civil War: “Es und cosa muy seria.” This is serious business. To Robert Capa it seemed an eternity before he spied a landing craft in the surf. “I did neither think nor decide; I simply stood up and ran for it.” Racing for the boat he held his cameras high to protect them from water. He had shot three films and took 106 pictures. On reaching England, he boarded the first train for London in order to have the photos developed. John Morris, photo editor at Life, had already waited impatiently for the material since Tuesday 6^th June. It needed to go rapidly through British censorship and on to New York. The following evening, from a port on the Channel, came the hoped for phone call: Capa’s photographs would be in London within one or two hours. Around 21 hours a courier delivered a total of four miniature and six medium format films to the offices of Life. Dennis Banks, the young laboratory assistant developed them and suddenly raced up the stairs to John Morris. “They are ruined, ruined! Robert Capa’s films are all ruined!” In the hectic he had closed the door to the drying room, where he had hung the films. The negatives could only dry properly with the door left slightly open; otherwise the air would be too stuffy. The surface of the films was damaged. John Morris looked at them, three rolls were unusable, only on the fourth were eleven usable pictures. At 3.30 on Thursday morning Morris, with the pictures, raced his Austin through London’s deserted streets to the censor’s office where first of all he had to wait. The pictures needed to be handed over to a courier by 9 o’clock in order to arrive on time in Life’s New York head office. But Morris did not leave the Ministry of Information until 8.45. Again he raced through London, this time to Grosvenor Square. He sprinted the last 40 meters to the courier service and entered their office just as the delegated assistant was about to close the transport bag destined for the USA. “Wait!” Morris shouted. On Saturday evening, shortly after going to press, the publishers of Life cabled London: TODAY WAS ONE OF THE GREAT PICTURE DAYS IN LIFE’S OFFICE, WHEN CAPA’S BEACHLANDING AND OTHER SHOTS ARRIVED. On 19^th June 1944 eight photos by Robert Capa were published in the magazine. The captions stated that the pictures were slightly out of focus, because Capa’s hands had trembled from excitement. Capa denied this and accused the London laboratory of Life to have ruined his films. 1945 saw peace again in Europe and nine years later Capa once again visited a war theatre for Life, this time Korea. But this was his last assignment; he was mortally wounded when stepping on a mine. After the end of the Korean War other themes played a part in Life: In the 60’s many pictures of film stars, the Kennedy family, the Landing on the Moon were printed. Only during the Vietnam War did the magazine again show unadorned pictures of military conflicts, this time in South East Asia. The reporting by Life helped to bring about anti-war protests in the USA. The big times of the magazine however were soon to be over. Diminishing circulation saw the first closure of the magazine in 1972. From 1978 onwards it was again published monthly, but till today it has never again reached the circulation numbers it enjoyed during the heyday of photo journalism.

We thank Debra Richman and Jennifer Zwadzinski of Life for their support for this article. They also supplied the first cover of the magazine. Thanks to Elfie Griffiths for the translation.

Apr 14, 2007

Museum of Fine Arts gets $2.5 million for Herb Ritts gallery

Herb Ritts, Stephanie, Cindy, Christy, Tatjana, Naomi, Hollywood 1989
Photograph, gelatin silver print. Image/Sheet/Mount: 101.6 x 114.3 cm (40 x 45 in.), Museum of Fine Arts, Boston

The Museum of Fine Arts (MFA) in Boston has received a $2.5 million donation in honor of Herb Ritts and 189 photographies of the artist. After the celebrity photographer had died in 2002 the Herb Ritts Foundation has been established to support museums which exhibit his works. The MFA plans to create a photography gallery in his honor, which will be a part of the new wing, opening in 2010. The MFA already held a major restrospective of Ritt's works in 1996.
He was a fashion photographer who concentrated on black-and-white-photography and portraits in the style of classical greek sculpture. Throughout the 1980's and 1990's he worked for magazines like Harper's Bazaar, Rolling Stone, Vanity Fair and Vogue on portraits of famous people and artistic photos of models. He photographed Ronald Reagan, physicist Stephen Hawking and the Dalai Lama. Some critics said at the time of the MFA's Ritts Show, which attracted more than 250,000 visitors , it was closer to popular culture than fine arts.
The gift to the MFA is the largest ever by the Herb Ritts Foundation, which focuses as well on supporting HIV/AIDS research.

Apr 7, 2007

Sotheby's offers photographs from the private collection of Margaret Weston

The auction will be held on 25 and 26 April at Sotheby's, New York. The sale is comprised of works that Maggi Weston - as she is known to her wide circle of clients and friends - has kept for herself from the thousands of photographs she has handled over the years; the 140 lots in the auction span both the 19th and 20th centuries, and include a range of artists, styles, and periods. The sale is especially rich in works by California photographers: the top lot in the sale is a rare platinum print of Edward Weston’s mysterious The Ascent of Attic Angles from 1921, one of two known prints of the image extant (pictured above, est. $700,000/1 million). This highly important Edward Weston photograph, a key piece in his transition from Pictorialism to Modernism, is estimated at $700,000 to $1,000,000.
Highlights from the sale, which is expected to bring $5.6/8.4 million will travel to Los Angeles, San Francisco and Tokyo in advance of the New York exhibition and sale.

Margaret W. Weston

Maggi Weston established the Weston Gallery in Carmel, California, in 1975, when galleries selling photographs were still an anomaly in the art world at large, and regularly-scheduled auctions of photographs had barely begun. In over three decades as a dealer, taste-maker, and gallery owner, Maggi Weston has both created and influenced the markets for numerous photographers, especially the 20th-century masters Edward Weston, Ansel Adams, and Paul Strand; the 19th-century American landscape photographer Carleton Watkins; a range of 19th-century European photographers, such as William Henry Fox Talbot, Julia Margaret Cameron, Gustave Le Gray, and Edouard Baldus; and originators of European Modernism such as André Kertész and Man Ray. She has helped to build a number of major collections, including the now-dispersed corporate collection of photographs belonging to 7-Eleven, Inc., of Dallas, Texas, and the exceptional private collection of Marjorie and Leonard Vernon of Los Angeles. Known for her superb eye and her high standards of individual print quality and condition, Maggi Weston has educated a whole generation of buyers of photography. Along with a handful of other pioneering fine art photography dealers - among them the New York gallerist Lee Witkin and the legendary Harry Lunn - Weston has played a crucial role in the creation of today’s exploding market for photographs.
Maggi Weston was born in England and raised in England and South Africa. She came to the United States in 1956, and around 1960 met Cole Weston, one of photographer Edward Weston’s four sons, in Monterey, California. They married in 1963, and it was during her decade of marriage to Cole Weston that she was first introduced to photography. The landscape for fine art photographs was vastly different then from now. When Edward Weston died in 1958, photographs were worth very little. After Maggi and Cole Weston were divorced in 1974, Maggi faced the future as a single mother, in an area with limited prospects. It was her friendship with Ansel Adams, another Monterey Peninsula resident, which inspired her to take the bold step of establishing the Weston Gallery in Carmel in 1975; it was Adams who gave the Gallery its first exhibition, a one-man show of his own images, which launched Maggi’s gallerist career. Contrary to what one might assume, Maggi Weston was 2
never, through her marriage to Cole Weston, the recipient of a trove of valuable photographs by Edward Weston and others. Instead, Maggi began her gallery stock with images from Ansel Adams and other local California photographers, such as Wynn Bullock and Imogen Cunningham.

The Sale

Highlighting the sale is a rare platinum print of Edward Weston’s mysterious The Ascent of Attic Angles from 1921, one of two known prints of the image extant, the other held by the Smithsonian (pictured on page 1, est. $700,000/1 million). This highly important Edward Weston photograph and was purchased by Maggi Weston at a Sotheby’s auction in 1979. Another magnificent Edward Weston is The White Iris (Tina Modotti), from 1921, also a platinum print, estimated at $400/600,000 (pictured here); like The Ascent of Attic Angles, The White Iris is believed to be one of only two prints of the image extant, the other in the collection of the Center for Creative Photography, Tucson. Among other Edward Westons in the sale are fine prints of two of his classic Oceano dune studies from 1936, each estimated at $150/250,000.
Ansel Adams is represented in the sale by 17 photographs, the largest number of lots by one photographer in the auction. Maggi Weston’s close friendship with Adams inspired her to collect the finest and rarest examples of his work from the time of their first meeting through the present. Among the featured Adams lots are a large early print of his famous 1958 Aspens, New Mexico (horizontal format) (est. $60/90,000); a print of the beautiful Rose and Driftwood, San Francisco, 1932 (est. $40/60,000); the iconic Moonrise, Hernandez, from 1941(est. $50/70,000); and one of the scarcest of all early Adams Yosemite views, Seven Gables, 1929 (est. $20/30,000). Important images from other California photographers who banded together to form the famous ‘Group f.64’ include an early print of Imogen Cunningham’s Amphitheater No. 2, 1920s, an abstracted study of the outdoor amphitheater at Mills College (pictured here, est. $200/300,000); Alma Lavenson’s 1931 Glass Circles (est. $40/60,000); and Brett Weston’s Hand and Ear, 1930 (est. $25/35,000) and his well-known Ford Trimotor from 1935 (est. $50/80,000).
Outstanding among the 19th-century photographs in Maggi Weston’s collection are three works by Carleton Watkins, one of the first photographers to venture into the wilds of Yosemite with a camera. Watkins’s mammoth-plate photographs of California and Oregon were considered in his own time, as now, supreme achievements of landscape photography. Especially fine is the Weston Collection print of The Garrison, Columbia River, 1867 (pictured here, est. $200/300,000), one of 50 prints from the celebrated album of Oregon views purchased by Weston in a legendary sale at Swann Galleries in 1979; and two earlier views of Yosemite, River View from the Valley, Cathedral Rocks, 1865-66 (est. $80/120,000) and Outline View of the Half Dome, Yosemite Valley, 1861 (est. $70/100,000).
European modernism is represented by a group of diverse images, the most important of which is Man Ray’s 1930 Noire et Blanche (Kiki with Mask), the now-iconic image that was originally published in French Vogue (est. $200/300,000); this print was included in the recent show of Surrealist photography at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. André Kertész’s Vert Galant on a Wintry Day, 1929, a study of Paris in the snow (est. $80/120,000), was recently exhibited in the major Kertész retrospective organized by the National Gallery of Art, Washington, D. C., and was used as the frontispiece to the catalogue that accompanied the show. The Still Life (Trieste), circa 1930 (est. $30/50,000), by the Italian Futurist Wanda Wulz, is one of the few extant prints by this elusive artist to ever appear at auction. Other European modernists in the collection include Josef Sudek, Ilse Bing, Werner Mantz, Anton Stankowski, and Jaromir Funke.
Very early in her days as the owner of the Weston Gallery, Maggi Weston began to travel to the photographs auctions in London, where she fell in love with 19th-century European photography, a passion that remains with her today. Her private collection is rich in masterworks of French and English 19th-century photography, including, among others, five superb Gustave Le Grays, among them the Route de Chailly, 1850 (est. $60/90,000) and two harbor scenes (each est. $50/80,000); three very early salt prints by William Henry Fox Talbot, the inventor of the negative/positive process, including his Oxford High Street, 1843 (est. $50/80,000); Julia Margaret Cameron’s Portrait of Mrs. Duckworth, the mother of Virginia Woolf, from 1875 (est. $50/70,000); and works by Anna Atkins, Edouard Baldus, Louis Robert, Linnaeus Tripe, and others.
More contemporary photographers included in the collection are Robert Frank, Richard Avedon, Irving Penn, William Wegman, Joel-Peter Witkin, Vik Muniz, Andres Serrano, Adam Fuss, and McDermott & McGough.
Finally, there are a number of key photographers in the collection that are represented by only one or two choice pieces, individual pictures selected by Maggi Weston from the photographers’ respective oeuvres, because of their beauty, their rarity, or their remarkable impact. Among these are an unusual platinum landscape by Frederick Evans, Crepiscule au Printemps, circa 1905 (est. $60/90,000); a rare Eugène Atget, Étang de Corot, Ville d’Avray, 1900-10 (est. $60/90,000); an exuberant Margaret Bourke-White, Trumpets (Organ Pipes), 1930 (pictured here, est. $70/100,000); a sensuous Nude, circa 1925, by Frantisek Drtikol (est. $60/90,000); Paul Strand’s beautiful waxed platinum study of Boat Houses, Wolf River, Gaspé, 1936 (est. $200/300,000); Baron Adolph de Meyer’s Advertisement for Elizabeth Arden, 1920s (est. $50/80,000); and Margrethe Mather’s Portrait of Edward Weston, 1921 (est. $250/350,000), believed to be unique.