PHOTOGRAPHS
ONLINE AUCTION
8-15 OCTOBER 2014

This season, Christie’s Online Auction of Photographs will present a stunning group of works by renowned photographers from the 8-16 October. The stellar roll call of artists includes Edward Burtynsky, Candida Hofer, Nan Goldin, William Wegman, David Lachapelle, Nobuyoshi Araki, Helmut Newton, Irving Penn, Horst P. Horst and Mario Testino. This sale provides discerning collectors with a fantastic opportunity to purchase rare and striking works in exceptional condition, by a range of outstanding photographers. Comprising 46 lots with estimates ranging from £800 to £12,000, the sale is expected to realize in the region of £200,000.

HIGHLIGHTS

One of the main sale highlights is a work by internationally renowned photographer David Lachapelle, who is recognized for his exceptional talent in combining a unique hyper-realistic aesthetic with profound social messages. Lachapelle has photographed hundreds of celebrities including Amanda Lepore in Addicted to Diamonds, who are always depicted provocatively, usually in full or partial nudity.

Another sale highlight is a large scale piece by Canadian photographer Edward Burtynsky. Globally recognized for his large-format color photographs which play out the contradictions in our dependence on nature to provide materials for our consumption, his works express concern for the health of the planet which is suffering by our success. Burtynsky’s environmental photographs act as metaphors to the predicament of our modern existence; they search for a dialogue between attraction and repulsion, seduction and fear. He searches for places that are outside of our normal experience, quarries and refineries as seen in Oil Spill #11 depicting the Gulf of Mexico, scarred by oil. The transfixing clarity of detail in this image renders a hauntingly beautiful depiction of the devastation that industry has brought to the natural world.

Growing up in Boston during the 1960s, Nan Goldin has captured exceptionally personal, spontaneous and sensual photographs of her family, friends, and lovers. In 1979 she presented her first slideshow in a New York nightclub, and her richly colored, snapshot like photographs were soon heralded as a groundbreaking contribution to fine art photography. Her work Untitled from ‘Variety Series #7 is a prime example of her photographic ‘snap-shot’ style. Goldin herself has commented on her photographic style and philosophy, saying, 'My work originally came from the snapshot aesthetic. Snapshots are taken out of love and to remember people, places, and shared times. They're about creating a history by recording a history.'

CONTEMPORARY PHOTOGRAPHY

The contemporary section of the sale presents works by David Maisel, Loretta Lux, Marcus Lyon and Candida Höfer.

Loretta Lux’s remarkable portraits use children as a metaphor for innocence and lost paradise. Using a combination of photography, painting and digital manipulation, she creates fairy-tale like otherness. Each image, such as The Red Ball, consistently composed of a solitary child, is meticulously ordered and manipulated to generate detailed explorations of the nature of childhood and the process of self-discovery.

Candida Höfer's work attempts to capture the 'psychology' of social architecture by focusing on empty interiors and social spaces. Her images are either taken front on or seek a diagonal in their composition, in Deutsches Hygine Museum Dresden III.

Marcus Lyon’s large-format photographs sit within a visionary canon of photographic practice, drawing formal and conceptual influence from artists such as Ed Ruscha, the Bechers and Andreas Gursky. His work Trabants is marked by a formal abstraction; here, the constant reproduction of the image builds a kaleidoscopic arrangement of vibrating colour fields. The repetition of the Trabant affectionately associates it with a time past and makes reference to the renaissance of nostalgic desire for the certainties of the communist era.

FASHION PHOTOGRAPHY

This Photographs auction also brings together a number of important fashion photographs, including work spanning the entirety of the 20th century from Horst P. Horst to Mario Testino and Miles Aldridge. Horst P. Horst was one of the towering figures of 20th century fashion photography. Moving to Paris in 1930, he was quickly drawn into the world of fashion photography. He photographed over 150 covers for French and American Vogue and it was his experimentations with radical composition, double exposures, and other avant-garde techniques that produced some of the most iconic fashion images the magazine ever used. One fine example of such photography is V.O.G.U.E.

Women and colour are lie at the heart of Aldridge’s photography. Often presenting his subjects in a dreamlike state of contemplation, the blank expressions illuminate a deeper sense of disturbance and neurosis. In Homeworks #4 blood tomatoes roll around upon a blue and white table cloth; sugar spills over as egg yolk oozes. Beneath the surface of pretty colours, there is a darker anxiety at play. Influenced by filmmakers such as David Lynch and Federico Fellini, these multi-layered images have earned Aldridge a reputation as a leading contemporary fashion-photographer.