Private Collections Salon & Sale

August 19 - September 22, 2023
  • This yearly event, with material that rivals a large auction house sale, is a highlight for the gallery and has...
    This yearly event, with material that rivals a large auction house sale, is a highlight for the gallery and has gained a strong following over the last eight years. Curator Malia Schramm has been with the gallery since 1999 and specializes in secondary market consignments and sales.
     
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  • 'In addition to the evolution of the medium of photography over the last 200 years, there has been an undeniable...

    Irving Penn, Black & White Fashion (with Handbag), 1950

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    "In addition to the evolution of the medium of photography over the last 200 years, there has been an undeniable recent shift in its acceptance as fine art. Once dismissed as a mere technical invention devoid of artistic value, photography now rivals other fine art and has become one of the most desired mediums for collecting. Our over 30-year commitment to the medium of photography has given us the unique privilege of working with some of the most extraordinary, artists, artist estates, colleagues, collectors, and collections. The offerings in this exhibition come from private collections old and new and span over much of the history of photography. It is an honor to be entrusted with the stewardship of artworks from one collection to another.” 

     

    - Malia Schramm, Curator and Director of Secondary Markets
     
     
  • Ansel Adams Clearing Winter Storm, Yosemite National Park, California, 1944 “Clearing Winter Storm” is one of Adams’ best-known photographs. “It...

    Ansel Adams

    Clearing Winter Storm, Yosemite National Park, California, 1944
     

    “Clearing Winter Storm” is one of Adams’ best-known photographs. “It came about on a December day…. I had been at this location countless times over many years, but only once did I encounter just such a combination of visual elements.” Capturing an iconic image in a rapidly changing and fluid situation like this one requires skill, intuition, and a bit of luck. Adams, also a talented pianist, orchestrated everything in this exceptional picture except for the weather. All of the elements, from the careful placement of his large format camera to his zone-system understanding of light, exposure, and skill in the darkroom (negative development, paper choice, developer choice, dodging and burning) came into play to achieve his final visualization of the scene.

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  • Sally Mann Georgia Untitled (Dodd's Farm), 1996

    Sally Mann

    Georgia Untitled (Dodd's Farm), 1996

     
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  • Richard Avedon, Suzy Parker and Robin Tattersall, Evening Dress by Griffe, Folies Bergere, Paris, 1957

    Richard Avedon

    Suzy Parker and Robin Tattersall, Evening Dress by Griffe, Folies Bergere, Paris, 1957
    From the very beginning of Richard Avedon's career, starting at Harper's Bazaar and later at Vogue, he boldly defied the conventions of editorial photography. His work in the realm of fashion garnered admiration for its effortless exuberance, while his portraits were lauded for their concise eloquence. "I am always stimulated by people," Avedon has said, "almost never by ideas." This sentiment is indeed evident in his portraits, whether they capture renowned film stars or ordinary individuals. Avedon's primary challenge lay in encapsulating the very essence of his subjects. Avedon perceived the act of crafting and producing photographs akin to a performance akin to literature and drama, resulting in portraits that are at once profoundly lucid and enigmatically inscrutable.
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  • Robert Rauschenberg From the Bleacher Series: Captiva Beach House, 1991 This unique work is part of Robert Rauschenberg’s Bleacher series...

    Robert Rauschenberg

    From the Bleacher Series: Captiva Beach House, 1991

     
    This unique work is part of Robert Rauschenberg’s Bleacher series (1988-91). The Bleachers are a group of manipulated, large-format black-and-white Polaroid photographs mounted on aluminum. 
     
    Robert Rauschenberg's work with large-scale Polaroids marked a significant departure from his earlier artistic endeavors and showcased his innovative spirit in embracing new technologies within the realm of visual arts. Collaborating with the renowned Polaroid Corporation, Rauschenberg explored the creative possibilities offered by instant photography on a larger scale. He used the large format Polaroid to create new as well as to recreate old images taken from the 1950s through the 1980s. He then layered the Polaroid prints with a brushed-on print coater, used to prevent the image from fading, with uneven and emphatic gestural strokes. To enhance the fading of the areas of the print where the coater had not been brushed on, Rauschenberg subsequently exposed the prints to bleach, sun, and high-pressure water before mounting them to metal supports.
     
    One of the notable aspects of Rauschenberg's large-scale Polaroids is their dynamic and layered compositions. The juxtaposition of various visual elements, both photographic and non-photographic, imbued his works with a sense of depth and multidimensionality. This blending of mediums challenged traditional distinctions between photography, painting, and collage, reflecting Rauschenberg's longstanding interest in blurring artistic boundaries. This piece was exhibited in the Robert Rauschenberg Retrospective at the Guggenheim Museum in 1997.
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  • Katy Grannan, Alexis, Rokabe Farm, Rhinebecck, NY , 2003

    Katy Grannan

    Alexis, Rokabe Farm, Rhinebecck, NY , 2003

    Katy Grannan, inspired by Robert Frank’s indelible photographs in The Americans, is a 1999 graduate from the Yale University photography MFA program taught by Gregory Crewdson. Her graduating class, known affectionately and disparagingly as the ‘The Yale Girls’ includes acclaimed female photographers Justine Kurland, Dana Hoey, Katy Grannan, and Malerie Marder. Together they achieved early recognition after taking part in the 1999 group show ‘Another Girl, Another Planet,’ which anticipated photography’s fascination with the female gaze.

     

    Alexis, Rokabe Farm, Rhinebecck, NY, 2003 is from Grannan’s series entitled Morning Call. The project began in and around Allentown, PA, a well-documented area by Walker Evans, and soon spread to surrounding areas in the northeast. Casting her subjects through newspaper advertisements, Grannan made intimate portraits of strangers and their interiors. She employed a documentary style while creating a subjective description of the complex psychological landscape of her sitters and the dynamic between the artist and her subject. Grannan worked for years throughout the northeast and produced several different series in addition to Morning Call including Poughkeepsie Journal, Sugar Camp Road, and Mystic Lake, each referring to a local newspaper source or secluded location. 

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  • Lalla Essaydi, Harem #10, 2009

    Lalla Essaydi

    Harem #10, 2009

    Lalla Essaydi grew up in Morocco, raised her family in Saudi Arabia, relocated to France, and finally the United States. She has a profound firsthand perspective into cross-cultural identity politics. Essaydi’s, Harem, series is an exploration of cultural identity and female representation. The series was created in response from 19th-centuray Orientalist paintings, which often depicted women in a stereotypical and exoticized manner within the confines of the harem. The harem was a private and secluded space where women lived in Middle Eastern and North African societies. These paintings were typically created by Western male artists who had limited understanding of the cultures they depicted, leading to misrepresentation of the lives of these women. In this body of work, Essaydi challenges these narratives and represents the harem space as a platform for female empowerment, where women are active participants rather than passive objects of desire. Her photographs feature real women, sometimes including herself, dressed in traditional flowing and formless garments and posed in lavish yet isolating interiors adorned with Arabic calligraphy. Essaydi’s use of Arabic calligraphy written across women’s bodies is a common thread throughout her work. She states, “By reclaiming the rich tradition of calligraphy and interweaving it with the traditionally female art of henna, I have been able to express, and yet, in another sense, dissolve the contradictions I have encountered in my culture: between hierarchy and fluidity, between public and private space, between the richness and the confining aspects of Islamic traditions.”

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  • Tina Barney, The Master, 2001

    Tina Barney

    The Master, 2001
    Tina Barney is an acclaimed American photographer renowned for her intimate portraits of her family, friends, and their affluent social circles. Her distinctive approach involves capturing her subjects in their natural environments, using a large-format camera to allow for rich detail and a focus on intricate nuances. Her work has received widespread critical acclaim for its ability to capture both the vulnerability and the privilege inherent in her subjects' lives.
     
    The Master, 2001 is from Barney's The Europeans series. Produced between 1996 and 2004, The Europeans is a significant body of work within her photographic oeuvre. It marks a departure from Barney's earlier portraits of her American family and friends. In The Europeans, Barney turned her lens towards the lives of wealthy European aristocrats, capturing their daily routines, relationships, and surroundings with her signature style. The series is characterized by its exploration of the complexities of European upper-class culture, offering a glimpse into a world of privilege, tradition, and subtleties of human interaction.
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  • Vivian Maier, Canada, n.d.

    Vivian Maier

    Canada, n.d.

    Vivian Maier was born in New York City in 1926 but it was Chicago where she lived for most of her adult life. She was a private and introverted person who worked as a professional nanny and caregiver for more than 40 years during which she took more than 150,000 photographs. With no formal training, Maier voraciously captured what she saw in the city streets, finding connections and multiple meanings, portraying amusement in the irony of life. Photographer Joel Meyerowitz writes about her, “you can see in her photographs that she was a quick study of human behavior, of the unfolding moment, the flash of a gesture, or the mood of a facial expression- brief events that turned the quotidian life of the street into a revelation...”  Maier’s work was never shown until the contents of a storage unit where she kept many negatives, prints, and personal objects was defaulted on and auctioned off in 2007, just a few years before her death in 2009. Chicago historian, John Maloof, was one of the buyers of Maier’s negatives and possessions and has since been integral to the promotion and celebration of her photographic work. Maloof was the first to bring her work to the public and promote it. He succeeded with an Oscar-nominated documentary in 2014, Finding Vivian Maier, and a consistent run of gallery shows and media coverage in the years since.

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  • Trine Søndergaard, Guldnakke #1, 2012

    Trine Søndergaard

    Guldnakke #1, 2012

    Trine Søndergaard is a Danish photography-based visual artist known for works marked by a precision and a sensibility that co-exist with an investigation of the medium of photography, its boundaries and what constitutes an image. Layered with meaning and quiet emotion, her works are highly acclaimed for their visual intensification of our perception of reality. For her series Guldnakke — meaning, “golden neck,” Søndergaard photographed contemporary young women wearing 19th century bonnets. The headgear is made of ornate gold embroidery, the women’s faces are turned away, and the photographs thus focus on an item of clothing that was once a status symbol for women in more affluent peasant communities. Gold symbolizes prosperity, wealth and even divinity. The young women posing have chosen their own clothing, uniting past with present. In these large-scale portraits, the striking contrast between the 21st century clothing of the subjects and their anachronistic head coverings suggests a conflation of time.

     

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  • Joel Meyerowitz, Roseville Cottages, Truro, Massachusetts, 1976

    Joel Meyerowitz

    Roseville Cottages, Truro, Massachusetts, 1976

    Cape Light, is a series of photographs Joel Meyerowitz made while he spent several summers in Cape Cod, Massachusetts. For this series he left the streets of New York City and took time to reconsider what photography meant to him. As a Bronx-born street photographer, he moved away from the spontaneity of the city life, leaving behind his 35mm camera for an 8x10 inch view camera, a completely different landscape, and a slower way of working. The photographs from Cape Light hold a timeless, nostalgic quality to them. They are characterized by the masterful use of light and color, capturing the change in light from dawn to dusk in a quiet beach town. Meyerowitz states, “For the first time in my life I slowed down, took a deep breath, and watched the slow, incremental movements of light and shadow cross a sandbar in the ebbing tide, or grassy hill ripple in sea-blown wind. It reminded me of Edward Hopper who said, “What I wanted to do was to paint sunlight on the side of a house.” How strange it was to find myself softening and entering into moments of communication with such numinous and evanescent things.”

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  • Roy DeCarava, 5 Men, 1964

    Roy DeCarava

    5 Men, 1964
    Roy DeCarava, born on December 9, 1919, was a distinguished American photographer renowned for his evocative and introspective images that captured the nuanced lives of African Americans in and around Harlem, NY. Originally trained in painting and printmaking, DeCarava's photography skillfully navigated themes of race, identity, and social issues.
     
    A master of light and shadow, he used his camera to poetically portray authentic experiences of African Americans, often focusing on scenes of everyday life, urban landscapes, jazz musicians, and intimate portraits. His work not only highlighted the struggles and resilience of his subjects but also emphasized their dignity and humanity. In 1952 he was the first African American photographer to receive the honor of a Guggenheim fellowship.
     
    5 Men, 1964 was taken during a memorial service in Harlem for the children killed in the 1964 church bombing in Birmingham, AL. 
     
    “The motivation at that moment was my political understanding of the treatment of black people and their response to injustice…I wasn’t at the bombing, I wasn’t in the church, but I knew what it was, and I wanted to make a picture that dealt with it. The [five] men were coming out of the church with faces so serious and so intense, and the image was made.”
     
    -        Roy DeCarava
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  • Gordon Parks At Segregated Drinking Fountain, Mobile, Alabama (37.009), 1956

    Gordon Parks

    At Segregated Drinking Fountain, Mobile, Alabama (37.009), 1956

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  • Eudora Welty, Chopping in the Fields, 1935

    Eudora Welty

    Chopping in the Fields, 1935
    " During the 1930’s Eudora Welty traveled throughout the state of Mississippi as a publicist for the Works Progress Administration. This was the time that she had begun writing fiction in earnest. Miss Welty’s travels for the WPA gave her the opportunity to take hundreds of photographs and, in her words, “to see widely and at close hand and really for the first time the nature of the place I’d been born into.” The Mississippi images that caught her eye as a photographer were images that settled into her being and became a source of her art. The juxtaposition of Welty’s photographs and fiction offers in itself a rare insight to the process of creation. The photographs record the visual impression at the moment of the camera click; the image is transformed into the world through the alchemy of her unique vision and genius."
    - Eudora Welty: Twenty Photographs, Palaemon Press Limited 
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  • Alfred Stieglitz The Steerage, 1907 SOLD Alfred Stieglitz was a pioneering American photographer, art promoter, and gallery owner, whose contributions...

    Alfred Stieglitz

    The Steerage, 1907

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    Alfred Stieglitz was a pioneering American photographer, art promoter, and gallery owner, whose contributions to the world of photography and modern art were transformative. Born on January 1, 1864, in Hoboken, NJ his lifelong dedication to championing photography, played a crucial role in elevating the medium to the status of the respected art form that it is today.

     

    This iconic image by Stieglitz, titled, The Steerage represents a fundamental shift in his thinking away from his previous painterly pictorialist conception of photography. It was taken in June of 1907 aboard a passenger ship on a trip to Europe with his wife. Its strong composition, clarity linearity, and tonality have led some to call it his first Modernist photograph.

     

    Stieglitz wandered off from his first-class section of the boat into its lowest class “steerage” area. He was held “spellbound” by the scene he encountered – not only by its obvious humanity, but even more so by what he called “a picture of shapes."

     

    “You may call this a crowd of immigrants,” Stieglitz himself wrote about The Steerage, “but to me it is a study in mathematical lines, in balance, in a pattern of light and shade.”

     

    The photograph was first published as a photogravure in the October 1911 issue of his magazine Camera Work. It was also exhibited publicly in 1913 at a show of Stieglitz’s photographs at his 291 gallery. The large format photogravure exhibited here was originally loosely inlaid and included in his art journal 291 published in 1915.

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  • Henri Cartier-Bresson, Behind the Gare Saint-Lazare, 1932

    Henri Cartier-Bresson

    Behind the Gare Saint-Lazare, 1932

    Henri Cartier-Bresson’s Behind the Gare Saint-Lazare, 1932 is one of the most iconic photographs taken by the renowned French photographer Henri Cartier-Bresson. Taken early in his career in 1932, it has become a symbol of his pioneering approach to photography, often referred to as the "decisive moment." Celebrated for its composition and timing, Behind the Gare Saint-Lazare, is a testament to Cartier-Bresson's uncanny ability to capture fleeting moments of everyday life that convey a deeper meaning and significance.

     

    Henri Cartier-Bresson was famously skeptical about cropping his photographs in printing. He believed the cropping should happen in the camera. Ironically, Behind St. Lazare was cropped in printing. It was shot through a fence and the part of the fence appears on the left side of the negative. With a few exceptions most of his prints are printed full frame without any cropping.

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  • Gail Albert Halaban My Neighbors, Flower District, Chelsea, 2021 SOLD Gail Albert Halaban is a New York-based, contemporary photographer celebrated...

    Gail Albert Halaban

    My Neighbors, Flower District, Chelsea, 2021

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    Gail Albert Halaban is a New York-based, contemporary photographer celebrated for her compelling and visually engaging large-scale images that explore themes of privacy, voyeurism, and human relationships in urban environments. 

     

    My Neighbors, Flower District, Chelsea, 2021, recently the cover of New York Magazine is from her acclaimed Out My Window series. The project began in 2007 when Albert Halaban moved to New York City from Los Angeles. To combat feelings of isolation and foster new connections, she started using her camera to interact with the people and architecture by photographing the interiors of New York City apartments from across the street. Despite appearing candid, each image is a result of a collaboration with her subjects. Both photographer and sitter participate in the making of the image, including the location, time of day, and the sitter’s activity.

     

    Her photographs offer a window into the lives of her subjects while also inviting viewers to reflect on their own experiences of urban living and human connection.

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  • Included within our Private Collection Salon & Sale exhibition we are spotlighting an Atlanta collection. This southern woman’s trove reflects...
    Included within our Private Collection Salon & Sale exhibition we are spotlighting an Atlanta collection. This southern woman’s trove reflects her passion for life lived and compassion for the world around her. The collection includes a unique mix of work by Atlanta-based artists, 20th-century American icons, and cutting-edge international photographers. The entire collection was built over time in close collaboration and a trusted friendship with the gallery owner, Anna Skillman. After enriching the walls and spirit of the collector’s private home for many years the collection has now come full circle. We are honored to be entrusted with deaccessioning the work and equally thrilled to be able to share this offering with you.
  • Adam Fuss, From The Series "My Ghost", 2000

    Adam Fuss

    From The Series "My Ghost", 2000
    British-born photographer Adam Fuss (b. 1961), now based in New York, is best known for his experimentation with early photographic processes and cameraless techniques in pursuit of metaphoric, ephemeral images.
     
    Fuss’s series My Ghost embodies his poetic consideration of the ghostly nature of memory and themes of life, death, and transcendence. The series is comprised of daguerreotypes, photograms, photogravures, text, gelatin silver prints, and platinum prints, and includes recurrent motifs of smoke, christening dresses, birds, human bodies, and butterflies. Using light and chemistry to explore the outer reaches of vision, Fuss’s poetic and spiritual work aims not to reproduce the seen but to discover the unseen.
     
    In this work by Fuss, he has revived the laborious daguerreotype technique, one of the earliest photographic processes developed by Louis Daguerre in 1839.
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  • Roger Ballen, Puppy on table, 2000

    Roger Ballen

    Puppy on table, 2000
    Puppy on table, 2000 is from Roger Ballen’s Shadow Chamber series. Ballen is one of the most influential and important photographic artists of the 21st century. His strange and extreme works confront the viewer and challenge them to come with him on a journey into their own minds as he explores the deeper recesses of his own. By blurring the boundaries between documentary photography and art forms such as painting, theatre, and sculpture, his work challenges the ways in which we perceive the ‘reality’ of photography. Since the beginning of Ballen’s artistic career, the animal has been an important symbol in his work. Ballen’s work can be found in almost every major museum including the High Museum of Art, the Getty Museum, and MoMA.
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