Auctions | November 21, 2024

Cartier-Bresson and Chris Killip Lead Auction of Eric Franck’s Photography Collection

Heritage Auctions

Cartier-Bresson's New Orleans, Louisiana, 1947

Heritage Auctions' November 25 Photographs from the Collection of Eric Franck sale featues photographs taken by his brother-in-law Henri Cartier-Bresson, plus Josef Koudelka, Chris Killip and Graham Smith.

“For many decades, Eric Franck, brother of Magnum photographer Martine Franck, has been at the forefront of the fine art photographic community,” said Laura Paterson, Heritage’s Consignment Director of Photographs. “As a highly respected photography dealer, collector and philanthropist, Franck’s connoisseurship and curatorial sensibility have helped shape our understanding of some of the most celebrated photographers of the 20th and 21st centuries.”

The 50 photographs on offer from Franck’s collection cover more than a century. “The images share a common theme of ordinary people making the best of life in unfavorable circumstances, whether in the Soviet bloc, Margaret’s Thatcher’s Britain, or the segregated American South,” said Paterson. Highlights include Josef Koudelka’s candid exposure of life as a Roma gypsy in the Czech Republic (then Czechoslovakia) of the 1960s and a broad selection of works by Henri Cartier-Bresson.

Cartier-Bresson’s photograph Barcelona, from 1933, leads the auction. In the 1940s, during the photographer’s imprisonment by the Nazis, The Museum of Modern Art began to plan a posthumous retrospective of Cartier-Bresson’s work. The artist escaped and then took over the curation of a major exhibition of his pictures. In 1946, armed with 300 contact prints in a suitcase, including Barcelona, Cartier-Bresson traveled to New York. The resulting exhibition opened at MoMA on February 4, 1947. Another significant Cartier-Bresson picture from this period will also go under the hammer, New Orleans, Louisiana, 1947, which shows us a young girl on a determined walk between houses in one of the city’s historic wards.

Among the highlights of this auction is Josef Koudelka’s portrait of three Roma boys clowning for the camera, a portrait of an old Roma couple in an interior, and Jarabina, Czechoslovakia, 1963 with a young man suspected of murder standing alone wearing handcuffs against a backdrop of police and bystanders.

Cartier-Bresson’s photograph Barcelona
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Heritage Auctions

Cartier-Bresson’s photograph Barcelona

Josef Koudelka’s portrait of three Roma boys
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Heritage Auctions

Josef Koudelka’s portrait of three Roma boys

Chris Killip’s 'Cookie' in the Snow, Seacoal Camp, Lynemouth, Northumberland, 1984
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Heritage Auctions

Chris Killip’s 'Cookie' in the Snow, Seacoal Camp, Lynemouth, Northumberland, 1984

Graham Smith’s The Black Path, Clay Lane Furnaces, Derelict Remains of Cargo Fleet Iron Company, South Bank, Middlesborough, 1982
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Heritage Auctions

Graham Smith’s The Black Path, Clay Lane Furnaces, Derelict Remains of Cargo Fleet Iron Company, South Bank, Middlesborough, 1982

Other lots include work by photographers Chris Killip and Graham Smith who both recorded the devastating effect of industrial decline of communities in the north of England in the 1970s and 1980s. Among these are Killip’s 'Cookie' in the Snow, Seacoal Camp, Lynemouth, Northumberland, 1984 with the darkened silhouette of a lone figure walking against a strong wind in a bleak and icy landscape. The landscape ruin in Graham Smith’s The Black Path, Clay Lane Furnaces, Derelict Remains of Cargo Fleet Iron Company, South Bank, Middlesborough, 1982 shows the decline of a once thriving industrial landscape.

In 1991, photographs by Smith and Killip were included in a group show at The Museum of Modern Art in New York alongside John Davies, Paul Graham and Martin Parr called British Photography from the Thatcher Years. “Following the backlash by some UK newspapers, which Smith felt adversely affected the individuals and communities he had photographed, he gave up photography to become a woodworker," said Nigel Russell, Heritage’s Director of Photographs. "His photographs only occasionally appear at auction."

Other highlights include:

  • Kiichi Asano’s homage to the Japanese winter landscape
  • Cristina Piza’s portraits of Havana neighborhoods
  • Jindrich Štreit’s glimpses into life in rural Slovakia under Soviet control
  • Karen Knorr’s studies of wild creatures in Indian settings

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