The Most Expensive Photograph of The Year

2018 has been a steady year for sales of photography at auction, with roughly 25 photography-specific auctions hosted by the three major auction houses; Christie’s, Phillips and Sotheby’s, but will its performance go down as a stellar year for photography? 

As photography’s popularity as a commodity has increased over the last two decades, we have come to expect higher hammer prices such as last year’s Noire et Blanche by Man Ray, a black and white print which sold for just over $3 million, making it a world auction record for the artist but also the most expensive print to sell at auction that year. In fact, four sales broke the $1 million mark last year – two by Man Ray, a large-scale work by living artists Gilbert and George, selling for $1.1 million and a $1 million print by Andreas Gursky. 

In many regards 2017 was a very successful year for photography sales, but how does 2018 compare? 

There were a number of successes this year including the breaking of many artist records for photographers such as Ishiuchi Miyako, Rudolf Koppitz and Robert Capa. However, perhaps most tellingly, there were no sales this year that broke the $1 million mark, though a May auction from Phillips London came close with the sale of Helmut Newton’s Panoramic Nude with Gun, Villa d’este, Como, a black and white portrait which saw a hammer price of $981,884 – less than $20,000 shy of the million dollar mark, and listed as the 37th most expensive photograph to sell at auction.

The black and white photograph was unique in a number of ways, perhaps adding to its value. The print was unusually shaped – a 59 inch by 19 inch long slither in a slim black bespoke frame, in addition, it is the only known edition of the print – an unpublished variant. Perhaps its pedigree as a rare print is the reason the print far exceeded its initial estimate of £250,000-£350,000, but as expensive photographs go this sale was a far cry from the $4.3million paid for Andreas Gursky’s Rhine II – still the most expensive photograph to sell at auction, a record which was set back in 2011. Could this record be broken in 2019? 

Make sense of this year’s photography auctions with the upcoming Photography at Auction Digest, a compilation of all 25 photography-specific auctions, data analysis, the definitive top 50 Most Expensive Photographs Sold at Auction, industry news and more. Order your ebook here from Amazon, or get your paperback edition here.

image by pepi-stojanovski