DALLAS, TX.- More than a century of photographic innovation comes into focus Oct. 1-2 in Heritage’s Photographs Signature® Auction, an expansive sale of more than 600 lots by over 200 photographers. Ranging from early modernism and landmark photojournalism to fashion, celebrity portraiture and monumental contemporary work, the auction offers both museum-caliber rarities and accessible opportunities for collectors.
Leading the auction is Peter Beard’s Kenya Tusker, for The End of the Game, June 1960, an extensively inscribed mixed-media work on canvas. The largest print of this celebrated image to appear at auction, it combines Beard’s imposing portrait of an elephant with handwritten observations drawing a provocative parallel between the survival crises facing elephants and humans as expanding populations compete for finite land and resources.
“Few auctions demonstrate the extraordinary breadth of photography quite like this one,” says Nigel Russell, Heritage’s Vice President and Director of Photographs. “It moves effortlessly from the experimental vision of Stieglitz and Steichen to the humanist documentary tradition of Lange, Smith and Cartier-Bresson, then forward to the commanding scale of contemporary photography. Peter Beard’s Kenya Tusker embodies that range especially well: It is at once a photograph, a singular handmade object and an urgent environmental statement.”
Among the auction’s early photographic landmarks is Alfred Stieglitz’s The Steerage, his defining 1907 image of passengers aboard a transatlantic steamship. This exceptionally rare, large-format photogravure was printed on Japanese tissue in 1915 for the deluxe edition of Stieglitz’s influential publication 291. Just eight copies of the deluxe edition were sold, and Stieglitz later destroyed most of the remaining examples.
Edward Steichen’s Chéruit Gown, Marion Morehouse (Mrs. E.E. Cummings), for Vogue, from 1927, dates from the height of the photographer’s transformative work in fashion. The rare vintage print, which has appeared at auction only twice before, captures model and actress Marion Morehouse in an elegant study that helped establish a modern visual language for fashion photography.
The sale also includes two towering landscapes by Ansel Adams: Winter Sunrise, Sierra Nevada, from Lone Pine, California and Mount Williamson from Manzanar. The former anchors a distinguished group of 73 photographs from the Collection of Milton Esterow, the celebrated investigative journalist and longtime owner and editor-in-chief of ARTnews. The selection encompasses early Paris photographs by Brassaï, 14 works by André Kertész and classic images by Manuel Álvarez Bravo, Harry Callahan, Steichen, Roman Vishniac, Robert Doisneau and Henri Cartier-Bresson.
An exceptional concentration of Harold Edgerton’s pioneering stop-motion photography also comes from the Esterow Collection. Edgerton is represented throughout the auction by 13 lots, including his iconic Milk Drop Coronet and Bullet Through a Light Bulb, along with multi-flash studies of athletes, baton twirlers and objects in motion.
Documentary photography and photojournalism form another major pillar of the auction. W. Eugene Smith’s Tomoko Uemura in Her Bath is among the defining images of 20th-century photojournalism. First published in LIFE in 1972, Smith’s portrait of a mother bathing her daughter, who was severely disabled by industrial mercury poisoning in Minamata, Japan, brought international attention to the victims of Minamata disease and their struggle for justice. Smith’s Walk to Paradise Garden also appears among 25 lots by the photographer.
Additional documentary highlights include Dorothea Lange’s Migrant Mother and a broad selection of her Depression-era studies; Walker Evans’ portraits of Alabama tenant farmers Floyd and Allie Mae Burroughs; Robert Frank’s Spain and Wales; and works by Sebastião Salgado, Marion Post Wolcott, Arthur Rothstein, Bruce Davidson, Leonard Freed, Elliott Erwitt and Vishniac. International street photography is represented by Brassaï, Kertész, Doisneau, Willy Ronis and Ilse Bing, alongside works by Álvarez Bravo, Hiroshi Sugimoto, Josef Sudek and Nobuyoshi Araki.
Fashion, portraiture and popular culture contribute another compelling dimension. Twenty-one photographs by Horst P. Horst join works by Richard Avedon, George Hoyningen-Huene, Lillian Bassman, Man Ray, Irving Penn, Helmut Newton, Norman Parkinson, Philippe Halsman and Albert Watson.
Among them is Avedon’s stark 1969 portrait of Andy Warhol, made the year after Valerie Solanas nearly killed the artist in a shooting. Warhol lifts his leather jacket to expose the extensive surgical scars across his torso, transforming a portrait of the celebrated architect of Pop Art into a deeply vulnerable meditation on celebrity, survival and mortality.
Other familiar faces include Marilyn Monroe, Marlene Dietrich, Coco Chanel, Josephine Baker, Winston Churchill, Albert Einstein, the Beatles, Jimi Hendrix and the Rolling Stones. Contemporary photography is represented by large-scale works from Terry O’Neill, David Yarrow, Nick Brandt, Michel Ghatan, Edward Burtynsky, Ruud van Empel and Joel Sternfeld.
The Esterow Collection returns to the spotlight Oct. 6, when Heritage presents Soviet Photography from the Collection of Milton Esterow, an online-only auction of 66 lots. The tightly focused collection includes rare works by Max Alpert, Mark Markov-Grinberg, Yevgeny Khaldei, Yakov Khalip, Ivan Shagin and Georgy Zelma. Esterow began pursuing Soviet photography after traveling to Moscow and Leningrad in 1990 for ARTnews, finding in its stark, graphic images a convergence of his artistic interests and journalistic sensibilities. Nearly all the photographs were acquired over three decades from noted New York dealer Howard Schickler, a specialist in Soviet photography and propaganda design.
“This is a remarkably personal collection that reflects Milton Esterow’s eye as both an editor and a collector,” says Laura Paterson, Heritage’s Consignment Director of Photographs. “He recognized the formal beauty of these images, but he also understood them as records of Russian life and of history unfolding. Together, they offer collectors of photography and military history an unusually vivid view of a turbulent and consequential era.”
Heritage’s Photographs Signature® Auction takes place Oct. 1-2, followed by the online-only Soviet Photography from the Collection of Milton Esterow auction Oct. 6.
