Title: PHOTOGRAPHS & PHOTOGRAPHIC LITERATURE
Date: October 22, 2009
Time: 1:30 PM
Exhibition: Sat., October 17, 10-4
Mon., October 19, 10-6
Tues., October 20, 10-6
Wed., October 21, 10-6
Thurs., October 22, 10-noon
Contact Person: Daile Kalpan
dkaplan@swanngalleries.com

Swann Galleries’ October 22 auction of Photographs & Photographic Literature featured impressive works ranging from the earliest days of photography through images by modern masters, and including many items of interest to collectors of historic Americana.

Top lots included:

Eadweard Muybridge’s seminal Animal Locomotion series, 1887, which sold for $81,000 (top)

Eddie Adams's Saigon (General Nguyen Ngoc Loan executing a Viet Cong prisoner Nguyen Van Lém), silver print, a gift to Adams’s son, with letter of provenance, 1968, printed 1980s, which sold for $43,200 (second illustration)

A suite of 29 cabinet cards of Native Americans published by the U.S. Geological Survey of the Territories with images by Alexander Gardner, C.M. Bell, W.H. Jackson, Vannerson, and others, albumen prints, circa 1870s, which sold for $26,400 (third illustration)

Bert Stern's poignant mural-sized chromogenic print of Marilyn Monroe from “The Last Sitting,” 1962, printed 1990, which sold for $24,000 (fourth illustration)

Horst P. Horst's Mainbocher Corset, Paris, silver print, 1939, printed 1990s, which sold for $21,600 (bottom).