Christie’s Photographs Auction Results 2021

After a slew of photography auctions from Sotheby’s, a Photographs auction from Christie’s took place on Wednesday. The sale brought together 154 lots from some of the best known photographers over the 19th and 20th centuries including Henri Cartier-Bresson, Horst P. Horst, Richard Avedon, Irving Penn and Hiroshi Sugimoto. The auction took place in New York and resulted in a sales total of $4,776,125 .

The auction broke numerous records and set the record for the first major auction house to auction a Non-Fungible Token (NFT) in a photography auction. The NFT lot in question was a collection of work by Justin Aversano which included an NFT for his Bahareh & Farzaneh print, as well as 100 physical chromogenic prints. The lot was expected to fetch $100,000 to $150,000 but far outperformed all expectations by selling for $1,110,000, making it the first NFT to sell at a photography auction, the most expensive lot at the auction and Christie’s most expensive photography lot of the year.

The second most expensive lot was Ansel Adams’ Moonrise, Hernandez, New Mexico, 1941 which had an estimate of $500,000-$700,000 and achieved a hammer price of $930,000 – $230,000 more than its top estimate. The image was one of two for sale at this auction, the second of which sold for $50,000. This is a clear example of the valuation formula in action. The expensive print was a mural-sized photograph printed in the late 1960s compared with the cheaper print, which was less than half the size and printed in the mid-to-late 1970s. The $930,000 is the most this image has ever achieved at auction, making it a world record for the photo.

Coming in third was this year’s most expensive photograph by a woman; Child with a toy hand grenade in Central Park, N.Y.C., 1962 by Diane Arbus, which had an original estimate of $500,000-$700,000 and sold for $625,000.

This was a very successful auction for Christie’s, not only for its world record photography NFT sale, but for selling three of the year’s top ten most expensive photography lots. It also achieved a 115% hammer price above initial estimates, meaning that lots largely outperformed their estimates.

Browse all the lots from this auction at Christie’s website here.

image by Jonathan Talbert