50 Masterworks to Celebrate 50 Years of Sotheby’s Photographs

T his April, Sotheby’s Photographs department marks its Golden Jubilee with a tightly-curated auction showcasing fifty iconic images by the medium’s most influential artists. The two-part sale in New York and London encompasses nearly 200 years of global photographic history, including superb examples by 19th century practitioners such as William Henry Fox Talbot, Carleton Watkins, Gustave Le Gray, and Peter Henry Emerson; prints by pioneering women artists Anne Brigman, Imogen Cunningham, and Lee Miller; modernist works by František Drtikol, Erwin Blumenfeld, and Edward Weston; exceptional post-war images by Robert Frank, Roy DeCarava, and Lee Friedlander; fashion photographs by Richard Avedon, Irving Penn, and Peter Lindbergh; and contemporary masterworks by Sebastião Salgado, Richard Misrach, Nobuyoshi Araki, and Chris Levine, among many others. Each of the fifty photographs demonstrates – in its own way and for its own time period – a significant achievement in the history of the medium.