Spring has just about sprung, and Swann Galleries’ resident Americana specialist, and director of the house’s books and manuscripts department, is sharing a selection of lots from the 2023 auction schedule that will put you in the spirit for the season.
The material that passes through Swann on a daily basis ranges in value and interest, sometimes we see an item crop up at auction consistently—a popular print, a highly sought…
On February 10, 2022, we held Fine Photographs: Celebrating 70 Years of Photographs at Swann, not only did the sale mark the 70th anniversary of photography auctions at the house…
A Little Self(ie) Love Whether you love them or hate them, selfies have become a large part of self-representation in contemporary culture. Though the term selfie tends to refer specifically…
“Our market continues to be dynamic and varied. We saw strength in the FSA and other Depression-era photography as well as in other classical material. The bidding was also lively…
Photographs by outstanding American artists headline this auction: Berenice Abbott, Dawoud Bey, Margaret Bourke-White, Harry Callahan, Edward Steichen and Minor White.
Swann’s Thursday, October 17 sale of Classic & Contemporary Photographs featured a broad range of photographic material including works by Edward S. Curtis, Irving Penn, Henri Cartier-Bresson, Dorothea Lange and W. Eugene Smith.
A season of firsts. The 2019 spring auction season at Swann Galleries delivered an impressive range of sales, rife with auction premiers and record prices. We started our season off…
Martín Chambi & Images of South America Lead Classic & Contemporary Photographs at Swann Our sale of Classic & Contemporary Photographs on Thursday, April 18 saw active bidding across all categories with early-twentieth-century photography, Humanist portraits and sublime images of nature…
At Auction April 18 Complete Catalogue Our diverse April auction bridges classical and contemporary visual idioms with important work, including Robert Mapplethorpe’s Lisa Lyon, Dorothea Lange’s emotive Korean Child,…
A Record for Malick Sidibé in Swann Photo SaleVernacular albums of nineteenth-century India bring $30k Our sale of Photographs: Art & Visual Culture on February 21, a curated sale celebrating photographs as physical objects, saw success across the board with contemporary, twentieth-century and…
Our upcoming sale of Photographs: Art & Visual Culture celebrates photographs as objects. Daile Kaplan, the house’s Director of Photographs & Photobooks, shares her appreciation of the tangible in the…
A year of records, debuts and rediscovered works. As we reflect on 2018, we look back at an excellent year of auctions. In April we held our highest-grossing African-American Fine Art…
Brâncusi Breaks $100k at Photographs Auction Records for DeCarava & Sidibé Swann Auction Galleries’ Thursday, October 18 sale of Photographs & Photobooks, which boasted historical and contemporary fine art…
On October 19 our sale of Art & Storytelling: Photographs & Photobooks combined works spanning the lifetime of the medium into an auction intended to “highlight the interrelationships between fine art, documentary and…
Our Photographs & Photobooks department has put together a cheat sheet for identifying some of the more common types of photographs we handle. A cyanotype print is made by…
Edward Ruscha is a pioneer of the American photobook. Between 1962 and 1978 he produced no fewer than sixteen artist’s books, fourteen of which will be offered as a lot in Swann Galleries’…
Swann’s second sale devoted to Vernacular Photography showed the strength of this growing segment of the photo market, with strong results for esoteric material. The top vernacular lot was…
We are delighted to offer a suffragist archive of rare and important photographs documenting “The Liberty Bell Tour, Votes for Women.” The march was organized by Louise Hall and her life-partner Ethel…
Last week Swann Galleries held an auction devoted to Vernacular Photography, which was the first sale of its kind. Two items led the auction–bringing $22,500 each–and they could not…
New discoveries are often made during our auction previews. Sometimes a guest will identify a place depicted in a work of art, or recognize a name in an inscription. One…
Among the highlights of our April 17, 2014 auction of Vernacular Photography is a small archive of photographs and ephemera relating to cross-dressing and gay rights in New York City…
The cyanotype or blueprint process has a poetic quality that embodies a painterly aesthetic and is defined by particular visual characteristics, in this case, a distinctive and rich “prussian blue”…
What is vernacular photography? According to our director of Photographs & Photobooks Daile Kaplan, it is photography taken for the sake of the photograph.
Before the system of identifying individuals by fingerprint was developed, the authorities relied on the distinct, intricate hollows and folds of a person’s ear in order to positively link them…
