Photographs and Photobooks

Forum Auctions’ Photography Department covers 180 years of photographic images from the earliest daguerreotypes and calotypes of the 1840s to cutting edge works by contemporary artists.

Sales of nineteenth century photography include travel and documentary subjects, focusing on India, China, Japan, Australia and the Pacific, as well as the work of such technical and artistic pioneers as Fox Talbot, Le Gray, Julia Margaret Cameron, Muybridge, Emerson and Atget.

European and American avant-garde photographers including Moholy-Nagy, Stieglitz, Steichen and Man Ray characterise the early twentieth century and lead into various strands of modernism as the medium gained maturity with images by Kertesz, Renger-Patzsch, Brassai, Bill Brandt and Cartier-Bresson and Americans Edward Weston, Ansel Adams and Robert Frank. The current generation of artist/photographers including Cindy Sherman, Andreas Gursky, Candida Hofer and Hiroshi Sugimoto have blurred the traditional distinction between photography and fine art as prices have risen to the rarified levels of contemporary painting.

Partly inspired by the publication of Parr and Badger’s The Photobook, A History (2004-14), an increasingly popular field for collectors is the twentieth century photo-book. Modern classics such as Cartier-Bresson’s The Decisive Moment (1952) and Robert Frank’s The Americans (1958) are always in demand as are the more elusive titles by Japanese photographers Araki Nobuyoshi, Hosoe Eikoh and Tomatsu Shomei.