10 Photographs That Bring Museum Exhibitions Into Your Home

Diane Arbus, 'Fire Eater at a Carnival, Palisades Park, N. J.' Estimate $7,000–10,000.

Best known for her 1960s images of people on the fringe of society, Diane Arbus once said, “Freaks was a thing I photographed a lot…. There’s a quality of legend about freaks. Like a person in a fairy tale who stops you and demands that you answer a riddle. Most people go through life dreading they’ll have a traumatic experience. Freaks were born with their trauma. They’ve already passed their test in life. They’re aristocrats.” Arbus’s early photographs from the late 1950s are the subject of diane arbus: in the beginning , a traveling exhibition and new monograph.

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Hiro, Mick Jagger. Estimate $5,000–7,000.

Prior to the release of their 1976 chart-topper 'Black and Blue,' the Rolling Stones flew to Sanibel Island, Florida, to be photographed by the Japanese fashion photographer, Hiro. This portrait of a young Mick Jagger is from that sitting. Opening in London and traveling to New York City, Chicago and Sydney, Exhibitionism: The Rolling Stones presents a spectacular immersive music experience unlike any other exhibition.

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Irving Penn, 'Playing Card.' Estimate $40,000–60,000.

Beginning in the early 1960s, Irving Penn devoted himself to mastering platinum printing. 'Playing Card' and 'Marchand de Concombres, Paris' illustrate Penn’s unparalleled command of this process, with their rich tonal range, from delicate highlights to sooty blacks, and their subtlety and luminosity. Surveying a nearly 70 year prolific career, The Metropolitan Museum of Art will present the photographer’s first major retrospective since his death in 2009 with Irving Penn: Centennial .

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Edward Weston, Shells. Estimate $150,000–250,000.

When Edward Weston returned to California after his sojourn in Mexico, he devoted himself first to the female form and then, in March 1927, to a series of photographs of shells. Weston found the surface detail and tonal quality in Shells deeply inspiring, and experimented with different compositions, depth of field, exposure times (sometimes lasting up to four and a half hours) and shell configurations. Long celebrated for his defining Modernist photographs of the 1930s and 1940s, the current exhibition of Edward Weston: Portrait of the Young Man as an Artist at the Monterey Museum of Art presents Weston’s earliest work beginning with his amateur snapshots.

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Walker Evans, Gothic Gate Cottage, Poughkeepsie, New York. Estimate $15,000–25,000.

Gothic Gate Cottage, Poughkeepsie, New York was included in Walker Evans’s American Photographs, published in 1938 by The Museum of Modern Art on occasion of the exhibition of the same name. American Photographs is a definitive pictorial survey of the nation in the wake of the Great Depression. Walker Evans at the Centre Pompidou, Paris, is the photographer’s first major retrospective in France.

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Lewis Baltz, 'Tract House #24.' Estimate $30,000–50,000.

Of his exhibition presentation, Lewis Baltz said, “It was important to me to play a double game. That is to say, these photographs were images, and I wanted them to have a second existence as objects. Because a photograph is an object, but a certain kind of object – not the same kind of an object as a painting or a sculpture or, say, a Maserati, but it’s a certain kind of object. And I was interested in stressing its particular objecthood.” The current exhibition at Fundación MAPFRE is both the first retrospective of the photographer’s work in Spain and internationally since his death in 2009.

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Alma Lavenson, Self-Portrait. Estimate $7,000–10,000.

Alma Lavenson’s Self-Portrait is featured in the current exhibition catalogue for The Radical Eye: Photographs from the Sir Elton John Collection , now on view at Tate Modern in London. John, who began buying in the 1980s, has amassed one of the most significant private collections with over 8,000 photographs to date.

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Robert Mapplethorpe, Selected Images from the 'X' Portfolio. Estimate $20,000–30,000.

The monumental retrospective Robert Mapplethorpe: The Perfect Medium , several new monographs and an HBO documentary – Mapplethorpe: Look at the Pictures – has brought new attention to one of the most important photographers of the 20th century. Mapplethorpe’s 'X' Portfolio is comprised of some of the photographer’s most celebrated boundary-pushing images.

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Stephen Shore, 'Uncommon Places.' Estimate $5,000–7,000.

This fall, The Museum of Modern Art in New York will present a major retrospective on Stephen Shore’s photographs. Although Shore has worked with various mediums of photography, he is widely acclaimed for his saturated colour photographs of the American landscape. Originally published in 1982, Shore’s 'Uncommon Places' is a landmark in the history of colour photography and photographic literature.

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Bishin Jumonji, Untitled 1. Estimate $5,000–7,000.

Provoke: Photography in Japan between Protest and Performance, 1960-1975 is the first exhibition dedicated to the famous but short-lived Japanese magazine. The images illustrated in its pages were rough, grainy and blurred, and most of the photographers were politically engaged. Works by Japanese photographers Bishin Jumonji , Daido Moriyama and Kikuji Kawada , among others, are featured in Sotheby’s auction.

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