NEW YORK, N.Y.- On October 16th, 2007, as part of its two days of Photographs auctions, Sotheby’s will feature a single-owner sale of Photographs from the Collection of Nancy Richardson, a highly focused offering of images by some of the most innovative photographers of the 20th century (est. $1.4/2.1 million). An experienced collector in the fields of 18th- and 19th-century art and objects, Nancy Richardson turned her attention to photography in the 1990s, choosing images with an impeccable eye for quality. "The Nancy Richardson collection is among the most sophisticated groups of photographs we have had the pleasure to handle," says Christopher Mahoney, the specialist in charge of the sale. "Each of her pictures relates, in its own way, to the major currents of art running through the 20th century."

Highlighting the Richardson sale is a unique photomontage by the pioneering modernist, Herbert Bayer, Metamorphosis (est. $250/350,000). Made in 1936 by the Bauhaus-trained Bayer, this work is composed of several photographic elements artfully combined into a cohesive whole with the aid of Bayer's expert handwork and airbrushing. Metamorphosis is one of a very small group of extant original Bayer montages from which all subsequent generations of prints of the image have been made.

Another sale highlight is Pierre Dubreuil’s Le Premier Round (est. $150/250,000), one of only two prints of this image known to exist. In this image, in which a young boxer's unblemished face is framed by two boxing gloves, Dubreuil expertly combines the seemingly disparate conventions of camera-club Pictorialism – with its emphasis on narrative and sentimentality – and modernist ideas of composition. Prints by Dubreuil are rare, as the repository of most of his life's work was destroyed during World War II.

Ms. Richardson built an important collection of work by photographers associated with the Institute of Design in Chicago, including Harry Callahan, Aaron Siskind, Frederick Sommer, and Arthur Siegel. Founded by pioneering modernist L�szl� Moholy-Nagy as the New Bauhaus, the ID became an important training ground for American photographers. Of particular note is Ms. Richardson’s collection of early exhibition prints by Aaron Siskind, who taught at the school from 1951 until 1971. In the 1940s, Siskind was part of the circle of artists that would later become known as the Abstract Expressionists, and counted among his friends Franz Kline, Barnett Newman, and Willem de Kooning.

Siskind's large, abstract photographs bear a formal resemblance to their work while remaining wholly original and adventurously photographic. Three of the Siskind photographs in the collection were shown in the late 1940s and early 1950s at the Egan Gallery in New York City, one of the few galleries at the time to show Abstract Expressionist work. These include Ironwork, New York City (Single Vertical Bar) (est. $20/30,000), Ironwork, New York City (Two Vertical Bars) (est. $23/30,000), and Gloucester 3 (est. $20/30,000). His Kentucky 15 (est. $20/30,000) was exhibited at The Museum of Modern Art in 1952.

Another ID teacher who figures prominently in the Richardson Collection is Harry Callahan. Included are several important early abstractions: Chicago (Wall with Paint Drips) (est. $30/50,000), Grasses, Wisconsin ($20/30,000), and the visually frenetic Port Huron, Michigan (est. 20/30,000). The early sequential triptych Highland Park, Michigan (est. $30/50,000), the multiple exposure Eleanor, Chicago (est. $10,000-15,000), and Eleanor, Lake Michigan (est. $10/15,000), demonstrate the impressive breadth of this highly creative photographer's work.

Frederick Sommer, one of the 20th century's most imaginative and experimental photographers, is represented in the Richardson Collection by a wide variety of work, including a rare early print of the unsettling Negative #68 (est. $50/70,000), in which the photographer created a face from chicken parts, one of only three known prints of this image extant. Also in this vein is Eight Young Roosters (est. $20/30,000). Sommer offerings also include his haunting portrait of a young girl entitled Livia (est. $40/60,000), the collagistic Valise d'Adam (est. $12/18,000), his horizonless Arizona Landscape ($20/30,000), a rare Nude Study of Lee Nevin (est. 20/30,000), and two images made without a camera: an early print of his 1949 Found Negative (est. $15/25,000), and Smoke on Glass ($15/25,000) Nancy Richardson also collected the work of Czech photographer Josef Sudek in some depth, and the sale features a number of his masterful pigment prints, including Still Life with Glass, Leaf, and Flowers (est. $25/35,000), and Pear on a Crooked Plate (est. $25/35,000). The sale also includes work by a diverse range of photographers including Edward Weston, Walker Evans, Robert Frank, Lee Friedlander, Andy Warhol, Lucas Samaras, Eug�ne Atget, Andr� Kert�sz, Adam Fuss, and others.

A graduate of Stanford University, and a student at the San Francisco Art Institute, Nancy Richardson came to New York City in 1967, where she worked as a writer for the Christian Science Monitor and the Daily News. From the early 1970s until 1992, she was a writer and editor at Cond� Nast Publications, where she worked on House and Garden, Vogue, and Glamour magazines. She is currently organizing an exhibition of her own large-scale photographs of New York cityscapes that will be shown in the new Cesar Pelli-designed U.S. Eastern District Courthouse in Brooklyn, New York, from October to January 2008.