AUCTION 333 – Photographs from important european collections

EMILIO PRINI (Stresa, 1943 - Roma, 2016)
Untitled 1970 ca.


Original vintage B/W Photographs printed on paper
Cm 30.6 x 23.9
Wooden frame with VM130 Glass, cm 43 x 36 x 4
Emilio Prini pencil signature and Alfio Di Bella photographer stamp on verso
Certificate of authenticity from Timotea Austoni Prini Archive
Original Provenance: Pio Monti Gallery, Rome
This work was exhibited at MACRO Museum Rome on the occasion of the retrospective "E Prini" october 2023/march 2024

CLAUDIO ABATE (Roma, 1943 - Roma, 2017)
Mario Merz (Un segno nel foro di Cesare) 2003


Lambda print mounted on forex by the artist
Cm 150 x 120
Signed, titled and editioned on the mount on verso
Edition 2/7
Framed (black wood) size cm 155 x 125 x 5,5
Original provenance: the artist, Rome, Italy


“...In his long career, that started so early and led him to identify so closely with the world of art, Claudio Abate has contributed, and continues to contribute, to establish the idea of the photographer as someone beyond notions of neutrality and whose declared partiality is plain to all. Since the beginning of his career as a photographer, he has always chosen to observe the most extreme sites of the avant-Garde, without ever settling within the cosy embrace to follow the authoritative trajectories of established art. Without doubt, Abate has engaged in a creative role as photographer, in a theater of bias, choosing a kind of short-circuit, as it were, made possible only by his own intuition and dialogue with the artist. Abate proposes a more personal quest, unfettered by preconceived judgment and anchored instead by a sense of solidarity with the artist and close observation of the work to be photographed...”



Achille Bonito Oliva



© 2007 Photology Editions
Claudio Abate Fotografo Installation & performance art

LUIGI GHIRRI (Scandiano, 1943 - Roncocesi, 1992)
Rotterdam 1973


Vintage color print
Cm 30 x 20
Framed (white with plexi) cm 55 x 45
Signed on recto on the mount
Original provenance: Collection Fabio Castelli, Milano

LUIGI GHIRRI (Scandiano, 1943 - Roncocesi, 1992)
Kodachrome Reggio Emilia 1973


Vintage color print
Cm 20 x 30
Framed (white wood with plexi) size cm 45 x 55
Signed on recto on the mount
Original provenance: Collection Fabio Castelli, Milano

MICHAEL EASTMAN (1947 - )
Horses #296 2000


Pigment printing
Cm. 62,5 x 91,5
N. 2/23
Signed bottom right, titled and number bottom left
Original provenance: Private collection

WILLIAM EGGLESTON (Memphis, Tennessee, 1939 - )
Untitled (Man with cigarette) 1985 ca.


Chromogenic print
Cm 50.8 x 33.7
Signed in ink on verso
1985 ca.
Perfect condition
Provenance: Purchased from the artist in the 1980s
Acquired by the current owner at Sotheby's

This 1980s photograph by William Eggleston captures a man with a cigarette in a spontaneous yet meticulously composed pose. A pioneer of color photography, Eggleston is known for his masterful use of natural light and saturated colors. In the 1980s, his style became even more refined, combining a cinematic aesthetic with a documentary approach that transforms everyday scenes into images with a strong visual and emotional impact.

WILLIAM EGGLESTON (Memphis, Tennessee, 1939 - )
Untitled 1970


Vintage color print
Cm 36 x 28
Framed (black wood with plexi) size cm 52 x 42
Signed on recto
Original provenance: Auction, New York

MARTIN PARR (Epsom, 1952 - )
Life’s a beach Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, 2007


Pigment Print, printed 2016
Cm 50 × 75
Framed (white wood with plexi) size cm 84 x 102
Edition 4/10
Signed on verso
With a Certificate of authenticity
Original Provenance: Rocket Gallery, London

MARTIN PARR (Epsom, 1952 - )
Think of England Eastbourne, England, 1995-99


Pigment print, printed 2016
Cm 75 x 50
Framed (white wood with plexi) size cm 102 x 84
Edition 5/10
Original provenance: Rocket Gallery, London

HENRI CARTIER-BRESSON (Chanteloup-en-Brie, 1908 - Montjustin, 2004)
Rudnik 1956


Gelatin silver print
Cm 50 x 40
Framed (white wood + plexi) size cm 72x57
Signed and blind stamped on recto
Original provenance: Collection Nicolò Szenberg, Milano

HENRI CARTIER-BRESSON (Chanteloup-en-Brie, 1908 - Montjustin, 2004)
On the banks of the Marne 1938


Gelatin silver print (printed 80’s)
Cm 30 x 40
Signed in ink and blind stamped on recto
Framed (dark grey wood with plexi) size cm 42 x 52 x 2,5
Original provenance: Eric Franck, London UK



“There is nothing in the world that does not have its decisive moment, and the masterpiece of good conduct is to recognize and seize the moment. If you miss it in the revolution of states, you run the risk of not finding it again or not perceiving it”



Henri Cartier-Bresson


© 2006 Photology Editions
Translated from: Pierre Assouline “Henri Cartier-Bresson
- Biografia di uno sguardo”

HENRI CARTIER-BRESSON (Chanteloup-en-Brie, 1908 - Montjustin, 2004)
Que St Bernard 1932


Gelatin silver print (printed 70’s)
Cm 30 x 40
Framed (dark grey wood with plexi) size cm 42 x 52 x 2,5
Signed and blind stamped on recto
Original provenance: Eric Franck, London UK

MINOR WHITE (Minneapolis, Minnesota, 1908 - Boston, Massachussetts, 1976)
Twisted tree 1951


Vintage gelatin silver print mounted on archival cardboard by the artist
Cm 23 x 15,5
Signed on recto of the mount
Framed (cherry concave wood + plexi) size cm 60 x 49 x 4
With a gallery certified invoice
Original provenance: Joseph Bellows Gallery, La Jolla USA


Michael Hoffman is right on track when he says that if you want to understand Minor White and his work you have to know, what it means to be an essentially religious man.
It doesn’t mean for example that he followed a precise set of beliefs even if he did that as well during the las dozen years of his life, or so. The thing is that he always lived his life and the world in terms of a basic, often conscious distinction between sacred and profane.
For a man like thac, tlte darli world of body, work, rocks and friends, the world of rainbows, homes, love, photographs and food. Essentially, the profane world of change only becomes unquestionably real if the eternal sacred One becomes manifest.
No religion offers the experience of God, which is by definition ineffable and deeply subjective. It can only show one of the possible ways. Profane man can seek what to believe in religion, religious man asks how to believe. His is simply seeking a language, nothing more or less, a language that reflects his experience of the sacred and the profane, a method by which to organise his thoughts and life so that he can keep in contact with what is real.


James Baker Hall


© 2000 Photology Editions
100 to 2000 the century of Photoart

JACQUES-HENRI LARTIGUE (Courbevoie, 1894 - Nizza, 1986)
Grand Prix Delage 1912


Gelatin silver print (printed 70’s)
Cm 30 x 40
Signed on recto in ink
Framed (grey wood with plexi) size cm 43 x 53 x 3,5
Original provenance: Association des amis de JHL, Paris France


Jacques-Henri Lartigue was born at Courbevoie on June 13, 1894. When he was six, he tools his first photographs using his father’s camera. He also started the diary which he would keep writing all his life. He was interested in movement and whatever was new. First, he photographed his early childhood experiences like the family at play and then later he passed to flying and the “lovely ladies” in the Bois de Boulogne” and what was going on in the streets and in sports events. An amateur who was interested in just about everything, he tried out all the photographic techniques that were available. On June 26, 1912, he took one of his most famous photos, “The Delage automobile at the ACF Grand Prix”. Jacques-Henri Lartigue wanted to capture a picture of the racing drivers going at top speed so he positioned himself halfway down a straight stretch of the road. As the car roared by, he spun on his feet and cliclced the shutter. The exposure time was too long though, and the car disappeared out of the viewfinder. The result was a twice-distorted picture: the spectators at the race lean over while the wheels of the car are deformed. A combination of technique, luck and especially the photographer’s instinct brought about an immortal picture which catches the very essence of speed. An indefatigable collector, Jacques Henri Lartigue took thousands of photographs that he classified and bound in albums. He became famous by accident. In 1963, when be was 69 years old, his work became known through an exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art in New Yorlt. Three years later, encouraged by Richard Avedon, he published Instants de ma Vie, and consequently became world famous. He died in Nice on the 12 September, 1986, leaving behind an important record of the 20th Century.


Martine d’Astier


© 2000 Photology
Editions 100 to 2000 the century of Photoart

LUIGI GHIRRI (Scandiano, 1943 - Roncocesi, 1992)
Campagna Emiliana” (from the series Strada provinciale delle anime) 1989


(Diptych), 2 Vintage color prints (printed by Arrigo Ghi)
Cm 20 x 27 (hi) and cm 20 x 26 (low)
Both unique works
Both with a certificate of authenticity signed by Paola Ghirri in 2006
Framed (natural wood with plexi) size cm 106 x 69 x 5
Original provenance: Galleria Massimo Minini, Brescia Italy



Those art critics and curators, who have been explaining and analysing the photographic work by Luigi Ghirri, agree on the same stylistic feature: the concept of the “central line” which often appears in his images. Starting from his serie “Fotografie del periodo iniziale” dated 1970 and “Kodachrome” (1970-1978), we find some primordial traces of it, like in “Reggio Emilia” 1973 (street lights) in which Ghirri almost timidly does not centralize the lines of a neoclassical palace (too easy), but let the viewer imagine it through the closed shutters of the windows which form vertical crosses in the center of the facade. Even in the ashtray with the effigy of a dancer (1971), a central shadow line pops up in the back of her straight body, dressed up in red and white. Keeping browsing exhibition catalogues, we find same kind of works in other series such as “Colazione sull’erba” (1972-1974) (in detail the photograph titled “Modena” 1973) in which a white partition of a building, cuts in half a poetic decoration with birds on one side and a climbing plant on the other. In Atlante (1973), photographs of geographical maps are perfectly divided in the center by a meridian. In “Vedute” (1971-1979), in a picture taken at Ile-de-France Rousse (1976) and in one titled “Versailles” 1977, a trellis and a pillar cut in half both landscapes with blu skies and clouds. 
In “Identikit” (1976-1979), images of libraries taken in Modena highlight in the central part of the images the most favorite book by Ghirri, “A music record guide” and “Duchamp invisibile” by Calvesi. In “Still Life” (1975-1979), shot in Modena as well, some old master paintings are photographed with central lines of shadows and holes. Up to the final image of Luigi Ghirri, before his sudden death on 14 February 1992: an irrigation channel set at the center, fading to infinity in the foggy countryside of Pianura Padana, titled “Roncocesi”, January 1992.
The dyptich by Ghirri we selected for Photology 30, is a late work by the Italian photographer, which seems the epitome of the “central line” concept. Luigi Ghirri stopped in the middle of a peripheral road and created two different images. In our imagination we can barely hear his wise thinking while setting up his camera: “I can shoot the dashed central line dividing the carragieways or I can move few steps away on the street side and shoot the line which defines the board of the countryside from the paved road”. A magical conceptual performance made by his brain more than by his eyes.


Davide Faccioli

ROBERT DOISNEAU (Gentilly, 1912 - Montrouge, 1994)
Le baiser de l’Hotel de Ville Paris 1950


Gelatin silver print (printed 70’s)
Cm 30 x 40
Signed on recto in ink
Framed (dark blunt wood with plexi) size cm 49 x 59 x 1
Original provenance: Christie’s, New York USA


It has become one of Robert Doisneau’s most famous photographs. A world wide success reproduced on postcards, posters, and even on counterpanes and cushion covers. And yet, for a long time, this picture, one of a series taken for an article in time on the lovers of Paris was not one of his most popular photographs. The Eighties nostalgia for the Fifties, blended its romanticism and lust for life with a yearning for a Paris that no longer existed and the feeling of “l’amour, toujours l’amour”. It escapes being a cliché, standing out from the bleak photographs of today because of the way it makes us believe we can grab a tiny moment where place and time have no meaning and which only the lovers of this world have right to. This couple, a powerful symbol of passionate love is so convincing that many people have, in good faith, believed it was themselves.
Legal suits followed as some people realised they could make some money out of it putting the French slander laws to work. Doisneau was forced to confess that he had paid two actors pose for it. The scene of ideal happiness was fake. At which point, some people felt impelled to take Doisneau to task for the artificiality of the work despite its seeming so real and spontaneous. The somewhat contrived controversy fallacious photographic truth goes beyond the moment when the apparently real and the truly real meet. We have one question to ask, one that also holds true for all the images created by Eugene Smith. Would we be better off without this icon? As I’m not particularly keen on masochism, I don’t want to get in my pleasure’s way...


Christian Caujolle


© 2000 Photology Editions
100 to 2000 the century of Photoart

WILLIAM EGGLESTON (Memphis, Tennessee, 1939 - )
Untitled 1974


Pigment print
Cm 60x75
Framed (white wood with plexi) size cm 70x92
Signed on verso
Original provenance: Cheim and Read Gallery, New York

BERENICE ABBOTT ( Springfield, Ohio, 1898 - Monson, Maine, 1991)
New York at night 1932


Gelatin silver print (printed 70’s) mounted on archival cardboard by the artist
Cm 56 x 45
Signed on recto of archival board
Framed (aluminium with plexi) size cm 92 x 77 x 2,5
Original provenance: G Ray Hawkins Gallery, Los Angeles USA



Photographing this New York, the American metropolis emerging into the twentieth century as the symbol of modem urbanism, became the “Fantastic Passion” for Berenice Abbott. Berenice Abbott’s lucid images of New York City remain an authoritative bridge linking the City’s physical ascendancy with its historic and human dimensions. As with many of her contemporaries, Abbott understood the novelty of her subject: a city analogous to a mythical phoenix, raising out of its nineteenth-century physical forms and the human ashes of financial collapse into a new, astonishing world that was both promising and harsh. In his impressive 1953 survey, The Columbia Historical Portrait of New York John A. Kounwenhoven wrote: “In the early thirties, partly as a result of technical improvements in photography and partly as a consequence of the sobering effects of the Great Depression, there were basic changes in man’s vision of the city. The soft focus which had lent charm to the affectionate camera studies of the “pictorial photographers” was discarded for the sharper “documentary” vision which inquired more bluntly inot the significance of urban forms...Berenice Abbott abandoned portraiture and began to make the magnificent series of documentary photographs which make up her camera portrait of “Changing New York” in which the city’s contrasts of wealth and poverty, new and old, and all its stubbornly insistent incongruities are interpreted with uncompromising respect for fact.”



Robert R. MacDonald



© 2000 Photology Editions
100 to 2000 the century of Photoart

GREGORY CREWDSON (Brooklyn, New York, 1962 - )
Untitled (Yankee septic Emergency) 1998


Vintage C-print
Cm 120 x 150
Edition 8/10
Signed on verso on gallery label
Framed (black wood with plexi) size cm 135 x 160 x 2
Original provenance: Emily Tsingou Gallery, London UK


“...More than merely stills from never-before shot films, the traces of Crewdson’s universe are cinematic precisely because they play with time in the way cinema does: with both time and dream. We look at this world and it’s a place we know: we may not like it, nor wish to recognize it, it may make us uncomfortable and squeamish, be over-laden with sinister overtones and unnaturally still but it has an exoticism that is profoundly familiar. The deal that cinema makes with time - capturing, tricking, annexing, faking -this is a deal Crewdson makes with our memories and fantasies.
His is a world our unconsciousness has occupied, a dream we have been visited by, a fantasy we have entertained, even peripherally, under the flicker of an eyelid. It is the domain below, the space under the stairs, the shadows beneath the roses where Crewdson takes us to. Here is uncertainty, hesitation, the gulp, the hanging in the balance the space between possibilities, the hiatus before...”


Tilda Swinton


© 2008 Photology Editions
Gregory Crewdson Dream House

BILL BRANDT (Amburgo, 1904 - Londra, 1983)
Nude 1952


Early gelatin silver print (printed 60’s) mounted on archival cardboard by the artist
Cm 34 x 29
Signed on recto of archival board
Framed (dark wood and golden frieze + plexi) size cm 69 x 55 x 3
Original provenance: Phillips, New York USA


The face is recognisable as that of a woman, although the blackness - it seems too black and too isolating to be mere shadow - pares the face down to key forms. The nipple indicates a breast in the lower right hand corner. The band of white which crosses and recrosses the frame of the photograph, creating new shapes and new angles as it does so, is just recognisable as an arm. Like a draughtsman of consummate skill, Brandt sketches in his subject with a minimum of effort. And yet there are enough mid-tones to indicate the modelling of the breast and of the mouth. Because we are not shown the left hand it is possible not only to imagine the woman resting her head gently against it, but also to imagine the fingers holding a mask in the form of a face.
Nor do the possible readings end there. Because the elements of face, breast and arm are only loosely associated against a black background, it is possible to see the face detached and floating free in the void - a rising moon with a face like those in children’s storybooks, gazing dolefully down out of a night sky. This photograph is one of the most compact and yet complex that Brandt has produced, and is extraordinary in that it can carry all these meanings simultaneously.


Michael Hiley


© 2000 Photology
Editions 100 to 2000 the century of Photoart

JOEL-PETER WITKIN (Brooklyn, New York, 1939 - )
Still life Marseilles 1992


Vintage gelatin silver print
Cm 78 x 100
Signed, titled and editioned on verso
Edition 10/12
Framed (black wood) size cm 107 x 120 x 3,5
Original provenance: Pace McGill Gallery, New York USA


Our voyeurism is excited by the severed head. A severed head is a conclusive proof that its owner is irrevocably dead; and in Western cultural history, a severed head probably means a judicial punishment however misplaced, witness Salome’s John the Baptist, Judith’s Holofernes, Elizabeth’s Mary Queen of Scott, Charles I, Oliver Cromwell, Danton, Louis XVI and Marie Antoiette. Charles I was reunited, body and head, in his coffin, whilst the decaying corpse of his enemy, Cromwell, was decapitated and the head exhibited on Tower Bridge and then blackened with soot in a chimney for a hundred years until it was politically safe to exhibit it as a trophy. This could be Cromwell’s head - his features held in a tight smiling grimace, his brain-pan sectioned to examine his revolutionary politics, out of which flowers the lilies of early democracy - my subjectivity on fire here - but that’s the way it goes with Witkin - hints of turgid History revisited and distressed for a surprised viewer to smile, grimace and shudder all at the same time.
My local severed head interest is with the case of a certain heroine of Boccaccio and of Keats who put her lover’s head in a pot to furnish a basil plant with nitrogenous energy.
But Within knows that there are so many, and so much older, examples. Crevalcore painted my favourite - a Saint Catherine of Alexandria, complete with lachrymose open eyes and evidence of two hacks of the axe.
And there is often painted severed head of the Gorgon which is strong precedent here through the example of Caravaggio’s portrait of the same, for here also are Caravaggio’s signature fruit and flowers presented on a shallow table in a shallow space against black. The black and whiteness of the image perhaps gives its subject matter a neutral documentary air and helps to suggest a surreal piquancy of a death on a bourgeois sideboard in the shadow of an afternoon sitting-room.
We should not be alarmed. Witkin’s normal vocabulary of distressed surface and damaged patina - as though the print had been left to rot on a highway hard shoulder, or in an undertaker’s dustbin, is here absent - this photograph of a decapitated loved one has come to us safely from the pages of a family album - first cousin Albert, whose body is where it should be in the family tomb, but whose head, via an innocent- enough post mortem investigation, is with us now. May he rest in peace - “Would you like a grape?” .


Peter Greenaway


© 2000 Photology Editions
100 to 2000 the century of Photoart

PETER BEARD (New York, 1938 - Montauk, 2020)
Cheetah Cubs at Mweiga near Nyiri Kenya, 1968


Gelatin silver print
Cm 18 x 24
Signed and inscribed by the artist on recto
Framed (dark wood) size cm 51,5 x 61,5
Original provenance: Time is always now, New York USA


“Peter Beard – gentleman, socialite, artist, photographer, Lothario, prophet, playboy and fan of recreational drugs – is the last of the adventurers.” That’s how British newspaper The Observer once described Beard, who was as famous for his highly publicized social exploits as he was for his daring wildlife photography.
Born in New York City in 1938, the heir to railroad and tobacco fortunes, Beard, became best known for his mixed media pieces, which incorporate photos, diaries, leaves, newspaper clippings and even blood, both human and animal. For several years Beard worked as a fashion photographer, often capturing images for Vogue and Elle. But, overwhelmingly, his work was about conservation and documentation of the natural world, specifically East Africa.
Beard’s photo essays of the African safari brought him widespread acclaim, from naturalists and art collectors alike. He was also known for his famous friends (Andy Warhol, Truman Capote, Francis Bacon, Salvador Dali) and love interests (Cheryl Tiegs, Candice Bergen, Lee Radziwill) – and for his hard-partying nights at Studio 54.

ROBERT MAPPLETHORPE (New York, 1946 - Boston, 1989)
Tarantula 1988 printed in 2005


Gelatin silver print
Cm 48 x 48
Limited edition n.3 di 10
Printed on verso “The Estate of Robert Mapplethorpe”
Original provenance: Alison Jacques Gallery, Londra

Robert Mapplethorpe’s distinctive feature is definitely
perfection; a necessary condition for every shot, pursued and
achieved in the great variety of subjects, from classically elegant
nudes to sensual still lifes, from strong sadomasochistic images to the most tender
portraits.
Mapplethorpe transforms the reality that surrounds him into images,
in search of a formal rigor that will then find full
fulfilment in the self-portraits and in the series of nudes.
“I seek the perfection of form. I do it with portraits, I do it
with flowers. There is no difference from one subject to another”