Auction: Important Photographs from the Collection of Dr. Anthony Terrana, April 2 and 3, 2013 @Phillips New York

Phillips begins the 2013 Spring auction season for photography with a two session, single owner sale drawn from the collection of Dr. Anthony Terrana. It's a broad selection, covering both well known names and more recent contemporary work, with a strong group of 20th century icons from the likes of Stieglitz, Kertesz, Frank, Arbus, Weston, and Moholy-Nagy at its core. All in, there are a total of 165 photographs on offer, with a total High estimate of $5400000. As a side note, while flipping through the catalog, I noticed a repeated pattern - an impressive 76 of the available lots came into Terrana's collection via the Robert Klein Gallery.

Here's the statistical breakdown:

Total Low Lots (high estimate up to and including $10000): 78
Total Low Estimate (sum of high estimates of Low lots): $533000

Total Mid Lots (high estimate between $10000 and $50000): 64
Total Mid Estimate: $1452000

Total High Lots (high estimate above $50000): 23
Total High Estimate: $3415000

The top lot by High estimate is tied between lot 12, Alfred Stieglitz, Georgia O'Keeffe, 1919 (image at right, top, via Phillips), and lot 19, Irving Penn, Harlequin Dress (Lisa Fonssagrives-Penn), 1950, both estimated at $300000-500000.

Here's the list of photographers represented by three or more lots in the sale (with the number of lots in parentheses):

Robert Frank (4)
Sally Mann (4)
Henri Cartier-Bresson (3)
Pieter Hugo (3)
Abelardo Morell (3)
Vik Muniz (3)
Edward Steichen (3)
Alfred Stieglitz (3)

Other works of interest include lot 22, Paul Strand, Venice, Italy, 1911, estimated at $180000-220000 (image at right middle, via Phillips), and lot 21, Charles Sheeler, Chartres-Flying Buttresses at the Crossing, 1929, estimated at $50000-70000 (image at right, bottom, via Phillips).

The complete lot by lot catalog can be found here.

Important Photographs from the Collection of Dr. Anthony Terrana
April 2nd and 3rd

Phillips
450 Park Avenue
New York, NY 10022

Julie Blackmon: Line-Up @Mann

JTF (just the facts): A total of 13 color photographs, framed in white with no mats, and hung in the single room gallery space (with a small dividing wall). All of the works are archival pigment prints. The images on view come in three physical sizes with corresponding edition sizes: 22x29 in editions of 25, 32x42 in editions of 10, and 40x53 in editions of 5. There are 2 of the smallest size, 6 of the middle size, and 5 of the largest size in the show. All of the works were made between 2008 and 2010. (Installation shots at right.)

Comments/Context: Since our home has a couple of young kids running wild inside, Julie Blackmon's stylized images of the loosely controlled chaos of childhood seem all too familiar. With a touch of humor and an eye for situations that border on the realistically absurd, her pictures are digitally staged vignettes that at once seem both wildly artificial and surprisingly and ironically plausible.

.

My favorite picture in the show is High Dive, where a gaggle of mismatched and unmonitored children fire straggly dolls off the second floor deck of a suburban house toward a blue plastic wading pool, while the parents sit outside on the lawn and drink wine in the twilight, generally oblivious to the action going on nearby. An appropriate assortment of abandoned clothing and shoes is strewn across the landscape. It captures both the imagination of summertime childhood play as well as the stress release of communal parenting. I can entirely imagine the scene devolving into tears (likely from a now remorseful or angry doll owner), or perhaps a back-handed shout of "No Injuries!" from one or another of the otherwise happily distracted parents.

Blackmon's pictures both pare down and exaggerate typical family-life scenes, making them almost perfect caricatures of the reality they portray. A girl practices her violin while her brother plugs his ears, a boy climbs the built-in shelving of the library, and kids scatter in the street as a parent loads the trunk of a car. Carefully placed props (a scooter, a half-eaten doughnut, a pile of confetti, a bunch of tinker toys, a Godzilla action figure) make the stories more enigmatically complex, referring to other related but unmentioned narratives that have already played out at some time in the recent past. Or maybe they're just the discarded remnants of everyday, messy life with kids.

While the overt staginess of these pictures can be a bit distracting, their mixing of obvious unreality with telling glimpses of underlying truth is what makes these pictures work. We've certainly experienced variations on this kind of surreal, random weirdness; perhaps lacking the candy-colors, shiny floors, and perfect lighting, but close enough to have resonance and create knowing chuckles. Blackmon references the Dutch Renaissance painter Jan Steen in her artist statement, and the images do have a constructed, painterly feel, drawn from memory and recreated using the powerful tools of digital photography.

.

Overall, I came away more impressed with these pictures than I expected to be. In the best of the works, Blackmon's imaginary craziness is a subtle mirror of our own lives, simultaneously mocking and sympathetic. The terrified baby launched into the air by his father is both oddly ridiculous and eerily reminiscent of things we have all done.
.

Collector's POV: The works in the show are priced by size and place in the edition. The 22x29 images are priced at $2800 or $3600; the 32x42 images are priced at $3800, $4200 or $5000, and the 40x53 images are $6900 or $8500. Blackmon's work has only recently started to trickle into the secondary markets, so no robust pricing history is really available. As such, gallery retail is likely the only option for interested collectors at this point. Blackmon is also represented by Catherine Edelman in Chicago (here), Robert Klein in Boston (here), Fahey/Klein in Los Angeles (here), Photo-Eye in Santa Fe (here), and Gail Gibson in Seattle (here).
.

Rating: * (one star) GOOD (rating system described here)

Transit Hub:

• Artist site (here)
• Reviews: New Yorker (here), Photo Booth (here), Boston Globe (here)

Julie Blackmon: Line-Up

Through October 23rd

Robert Mann Gallery
210 Eleventh Avenue
New York, NY 10001

Book: Stanley Greenberg, Invisible New York

JTF (just the facts): Published in 1998 by Johns Hopkins University Press (here). Subtitled The Hidden Infrastructure of the City. 100 pages, with 53 black and white images. Includes essays by Thomas Garver and the artist, as well as detailed plate by plate discussions of the locations and their histories. The images were taken between 1990 and 1997. (Cover shot at right, via artist website.)

Comments/Context: I was first introduced to Stanley Greenberg's work in the back room of Tom Gitterman's gallery a year or two ago, where a couple of the prints were hanging near the office area. Since then, I've been meaning to buy this book, so I could dig a little deeper on the work and see a larger number of images from the series.

Greenberg's images chronicle the civic works and underworld utilities of New York, the often overlooked and hidden underbelly of non-places that keeps the city running. His subjects are bridge anchorings and construction shafts, electricity tunnels and water reservoirs, missile silos and rail yards, most of which have a throwback look of disrepair and decay. His compositions are full of intersecting found geometries (girders, trusses, turbines and the like) and long receding views down dimly lit, unpeopled, industrial tunnels. I think his densely packed interior scenes are the most successful.

To my eye, the work bears some relationship to both that of the Bechers and of Ray Mortenson. While Greenberg's images are far warmer and more human that the rigorous typologies of the Bechers, I think they both share a conceptual desire to respectfully document vanishing (and important) vernacular architectural forms. The connection to Mortenson (and in particular to his images of the South Bronx) comes of course in the focus on decay and abandonment; both photographers effectively use their images to point out what happens when buildings fall into disuse and decline. I also see some more tenuous connections to the 1920s industrial work of Albert Renger-Patzsch, especially in Greenberg's outdoor scenes.

All in, this is a solid book of unexpected photographs, well worth adding to your library.

Collector’s POV: Stanley Greenberg is represented in Gitterman Gallery in New York (here), Robert Klein Gallery in Boston (here), and Richard Levy Gallery in Albuquerque (here). Prints from this series are 28x36, in editions of 10. They are priced at $5000 each. No secondary market for Greenberg's work has developed as yet, so gallery retail is the only option at the moment. While these works would normally fit perfectly into our city/industrial genre, once again we are constrained by size; these prints are just too big to fit easily into our display space without some tricky maneuvering. While the larger size certainly makes the images more dramatic, we'd need to see them printed 11x14 or so to make them work for us.

Transit Hub:

• Artist website (here)
• BLDGBLOG review (here)
• At SLAC (here)

Book: Readymades: American Roadside Artifacts, Photographs by Jeff Brouws

JTF (just the facts): Published in 2003 by Chronicle Books (here). 272 pages, with 274 black and white and color photographs (some duplicates). With essays by Diana Gaston, Jeff Brouws, D.J. Waldie, Luc Sante, M. Mark, Phil Patton, Joel Jensen, Mark Frauenfelder, Bruce Caron, Wendy Burton, and Alan Rapp. (Cover shot at right, via Chronicle Books website.)

The book is divided into 11 separate sections, each centered on a single subject matter type. These include:

Freshly Painted Houses
Language in the Landscape
Abandoned Drive-Ins
Farm Forms
Partially Painted Pickup Trucks
Twentysix Abandoned Gasoline Stations
Freight Cars
Signs
Trailers
Bowling
Storage Units

Comments/Context: If you took Walker Evans' love of the American vernacular and threw it into a mixer with the rigorous conceptual ideas of Bernd and Hilla Becher and added a splash of the spirit of the open road, what might emerge is the work of Jeff Brouws. In many ways, Brouws is a collector (just like some of us), cataloging fragments of increasingly obsolete American culture, making careful inventories of the worn, distressed and left behind.

This small, thick book gathers together nearly a dozen photographic projects, where Brouws has selected a single resonant American subject (beat-up partially painted pickup trucks, or railway freight cars, or bowling alleys) and then traveled the country finding multiple examples of this specific form. His images are generally straight-on "portraits" of these places or things, carefully laid out with clarity and order (although somewhat less meticulously rigid and repetitive than the Bechers). The prints are then displayed as typologies, thereby accenting the theme and variation effect found when a number of images of the same subject are brought together on one wall (or page). The result is a visual inventory of American small town culture, an anthropology of the quirks of our American personality which are slowly being lost to the homogenizing forces of global change.

The best of these groups are those that accent the individuality and eccentricities of the subjects: the garishly painted houses that seem overflowing with optimism, the lovingly dilapidated side panels of the work horse trucks, the simplicity of empty drive-ins, and the innovations in graphic design found in paint and neon across the land. I also enjoyed the systematic surveying of abandoned gas stations, as an homage to Ed Ruscha's Twentysix Gasoline Stations.

In paging through this book, I found myself wanting more of the projects I found most interesting, and would have willingly given up several of the less successful subjects (Farm Forms and Storage Units were my least favorite) to make room for more depth on a few. That said, the diversity of common subjects creates a broader picture of the peculiar landscape of the American back roads, thereby telling a more complex and whimsical story of vernacular America.

Collector's POV: Jeff Brouws is represented by Robert Mann Gallery in New York (here), Robert Koch Gallery in San Francisco (here), and Robert Klein Gallery in Boston (here). Surprisingly, there have been very few examples of Brouws' work in the secondary markets, so interested collectors will need to follow up with the appropriate retail galleries. For our particular collection, a selection/grid of gasoline stations, sign elements or colorful houses would likely be the best fit.

Transit Hub:

• Artist site (here)
• Interview: Conscientious, 2007 (here)
• Approaching Nowhere (here)
• NY Times review, 2003 (here)
• PBS Photo Essay, 2003 (here)

Book: Slide Show, The Color Photographs of Helen Levitt

JTF (just the facts): Published in 2005 by powerHouse Books (here). 120 pages, with 110 color images. Includes a foreword by John Szarkowski.

Comments/Context: I don't think it was until we moved back to New York that I really started to resonate with Helen Levitt's work. Her 1930s and 1940s black and white images of children in the streets, while undoubtedly well crafted, somehow didn't grab my attention; I was more drawn to the architectural transformations documented by Berenice Abbott from the same period.

But it is her color work from the 1960s and 1970s that has made me change my mind a bit on Levitt's rightful place in the history books. How's this for a statement: of the great black and white photographers working prior to the 1950s, Levitt was the most successful at embracing color photography and making a superlative body of color work in her later career. The only other "old school" photographers I can come up with who made the transition to decent color work are Harry Callahan (his later dye transfers), Andre Kertesz (Polaroids) and Walker Evans (Polaroids). If I've missed some glaring great example, leave it in the comments, but I think the statement stands - Levitt did something that almost no one else did.

The images in this book perfectly capture the feeling of New York in the summer (no wonder her work is often labeled "social realism"). Virtually all the pictures are of people, not straight on portraits, but people in the context of their lives: on street corners, with pets, near parked cars, sitting on stoops, smoking, waiting, taking a break. Her compositions often capture the world slightly off-kilter, with spontaneous secondary stories playing out on the periphery, just like they do in real life. On first glance, these images look like snapshots; upon further review, they turn out to be tiny vignettes of everyday life, somehow optimistic amidst generally poor living conditions and plenty of old age. Her use of color isn't self-conscious; she doesn't use super-saturated attention grabbing color. Instead, color is used as just one of many tools that can make a picture resolve into something interesting, the hood or a car, or a dress, or a door frame suddenly providing a visual contrast. And even though there are a few dated fashions and hairstyles, these pictures have a timeless quality to them, as though you could step into the street in parts of New York in August and see these exact same stories playing out all over again.
.
Collector's POV: Levitt's vintage silver prints from the 1930s and 1940s come up at auction from time to time, ranging in price from $10000 to $60000. Later prints from these same negatives are typically priced between $2000 and $6000. Her dye transfer prints have been much more scarce: only a handful of prints (some vintage, some printed in the 1990s) at auction in the past five years, selling for between $2000 and $12000. Levitt is represented by Laurence Miller Gallery (here) in New York, Fraenkel Gallery (here) in San Francisco, and Robert Klein Gallery (here) in Boston. While these images don't neatly fit into our city/industrial genre (too many people), they are growing on me over time, so perhaps there will be a place in our collection for one or more of these prints at some point in the future.

Transit Hub:

• NY Times obituary (here)
• Interviews: NPR 2002 (here) and WNYC 2001 (here)
• James Agee's forward to A Way of Seeing (here)
• Crosstown (here)
• Helen Levitt - In the street @FOAM, Oct 2008-Jan 2009 (here, in Dutch)