But that’s because the collection is being sold by the owners of the Polaroid name that is in bankruptcy. At any rate, the collection will be auctioned by Sotheby’s, June 21 and 22nd 2010 and includes many of the most famous images in photographic history, which is to say there will be a ton of silver prints by Ansel Adams; along with prints by other prestigious photographers.
Excerpt from Sotheby’s PDF
New York, 11 February 2010 –Sotheby’s is to offer Photographs from the Polaroid Collection on 21 and 22 June 2010 in New York. The collection of more than 1,000 works provides unique insight into the influence of Polaroid’s revolutionary technology – which all but eliminated the distance between inspiration and realization – on the history of photography. The collection was begun by Edwin Land, the inventor and founder of Polaroid, and is vast in its breadth and ambition. Works by many of the leading photographers of the second half of the 20th century will be offered, among them Peter Beard, Chuck Close, William Wegman, David Levinthal, Robert Frank, David Hockney, Robert Mapplethorpe and, perhaps most significantly, Ansel Adams, who is represented by over 400 photographs. The collection is estimated to fetch $7.2/11.1 million.
Here’s a link to Sotheby’s page about the polaroid auction.
The main thing for folks who can’t afford to pay a few hundred thousand for a print, is that the collection is available for viewing for one week prior to June 21. It takes up 6 galleries. And since it’s practically around the corner from me, I expect to go as soon as I can knock off a bunch of prints.
now I wish I was in New York to see this wonderful collection
Dave – the “Leave a Reply” tab for the form fields behaves a little erratic and jumps to the next field in the next post, very irritating
Dave – you lucky devil, you get the opportunity to view the collection. Could make for good photo’s.
Hmmm…. not sure about the Leave a Reply problem… Anyone else have it… or can describe. Doesn’t happen to me. The box to leave your reply is already open. Nothing to do but write reply and click submit.
Ty – I doubt if cameras are allowed. But if they are – sure.
I normally use the “tab” key to navigate from one form field to another, that’s when it jumps to the next post…
Ah. I use the mouse. Let me see if I can figure this one out.
Dave, I notice that all the comments are on display now, where as they used to be hidden. Is that related to what Markus is seeing?
It could be. Personally, I like having the comments on display rather than having to click to see them. It feels like more of a community that way. For the WordPress techies out there, I simply included the comments file beneath the post. I probably should at least check first to see if there are comments and then show if present.
Now if a bunch of people say – ugh. I don’t want the comments to always appear like that – I’d change it back. Just one line of code. But as I say – I like the idea.
Plus – I don’t really get where Markus (Markus tell me) where are you tabbing from? When the page comes up the cursor isn’t in any box, but if I do tab, it just takes me to the first input field – which is the response box. If I hit tab again it takes me to the next reply box.
If I’m looking at a single post, it tabs first to reply, and then to the search box.
So – I have to ask: what OS / Browser?
I’m using either Firefox or Safari / OS X.
It’s happening for me to Dave. If I put my cursor in the Leave a Reply Name box and then try to tab to the E-mail box, it actually tabs me to the next post.
I’m at work so, as you know, I’m using IE6. It’s like peering into a time machine…
Thanks for the heads-up Dave. I saw the Ansel Adams exhibit a few years ago when it was traveling around, I’m real excited to see this. I’m thinking about heading in on Sunday.
I’m starting at the “Name” box, hit “tab”, which takes me one screen down to the next post… OSX, Safari 5.0
OK – that one is beyond my comprehension right now. I see what you mean in Safari and take your word for it in IE. But je ne comprend pas… or something along those lines right now.
Rather than trying to figure it out, I spent three hours in the park this morning doing HDR without tripod but looking for garbage cans etc. to set the camera on. I might call this the garbage can series.
Like the displayed comments hack, but wonder if it’s possible to hide the Leave a Reply form from every post…maybe just have a link to it. Just a thought.
Did you end up going, Dave? I went on Saturday and was a bit disappointed, to be honest. While there were a few really nice photographs, including some non-Polaroid photos that were part of the collection, it was saturated with 2nd rate works by Ansel Adams, William Wegman and David Levinthal. (Polaroid donated materials in exchange for works, and some of the photographers offered variants, studies and often just inferior work in return).
I was impressed by a few prints by Lucas Samaras, David Hockney and Luigi Ghirri, but for every one of those there were a half-dozen tiny SX-70 Warhol snapshots that wouldn’t have appeared anywhere except for the artist’s name, or gigantic and boring product shots from Carrie Mae Weems.
I had an exhausting week with printing and packaging and even managing to shoot quite a bit, and this was a lost weekend for me: I think I spent the entire weekend watching NCIS episodes. Now, let me tell you something that I haven’t admitted in public before. When I was at Yosemite, they’ve got an Ansel Adams store / gallery there, and I looked at many prints that as far as I know were printed by Adams. But maybe they were done by assistants. For years I had had an Ansel Adams calendar (from the Ansel Adams estate) on my wall, and used it as a guide for my own darkroom prints in terms of reaching that dynamic range.
The same for some high-quality Adams books. So when I saw actual darkroom prints of his famous work (they were on fiber paper at least) and were signed by him, (this was about 15 years ago), and I was absolutely disappointed by what I saw there. How shocked I was to find that my own darkroom efforts were better (at least in terms of ‘umph’ and tonal range) than what was on display by Adams. Later I had a chance to see an exhibit, I don’t remember where, of his work, and was equally unimpressed. The posters of the same image (again, high-quality posters) were more impressive.
So this was a few years before I got involved with inkjet printing as an artistic media, but it also stuck in my head, the idea that these tiny dots or half-tones could be as good or better than the darkroom print. I have been very impressed with the printing of Weston’s kids; and I thought that Salgado’s 35mm prints (though I don’t know if he does them) were excellent; and W. Klein etc. But I haven’t seen (maybe I’m just missing the original stuff) Adams’ prints that have knocked me out.
What was interesting at the show was the multiple variants and sizes of well-known Adams photos, letting you see printing differences and how those choices affected the print.
“‘GRAND TETONS AND THE SNAKE RIVER’” came in sizes and variants ranging from $7,000 to $450,000 in estimates, and there were two large, identically-sized prints (maybe 40×60″) shown side-by-side that differed in estimate by $50,000. It was fascinating to see the cropping choices and how the darker, more contrasty print was (to my eye) inferior to the lower-contrast version that opened up shadows (and which was priced higher).
Unfortunately there were also badly printed photos, and things like these two dinky 3×3″ Adams SX-70 prints from the 60s that were estimated at upwards of $6,000-$8,000.
http://tinyurl.com/35e4vah
Stupid prices for mediocre photos from a ‘brand’ name.
I was never a big fan of Adams’s, although I thought he was a good photographer. I was much more impressed at Sothebys by the Polaroids and prints by Harry Callahan, but I usually am.
By the way if you haven’t gotten to MoMA to see the Cartier Bresson show go before it ends next Monday. You can see early work he printed himself — and see that he was truthful when he admitted he was a bad printer. A really nice show and a lot of lovely photos.
MoMA has another interesting photography show you can see while there called ‘Pictures by Women’ with a wide variety of work by photographers like Diane Arbus, Nan Goldin, Tina Modotti, Berenice Abbott, Lisette Model, Imogen Cunningham, Helen Levitt and many others. If you don’t like something walk another few yards and you’ll probably see something completely different that you will.