At 15ft (4.57m) long overall, the largest 19th century photographic panorama of New York – a sequence of nine albumen prints produced atop the Post Office Tower by William Silver on a bright morning in 1874 - made $20,000 (£10,600). A bird’s-eye view of midtown Manhattan, from what was to be the 86th floor of “Right Wonder of the World”, seen right, provides the backdrop to an image by Lewis Hine, the Empire State Building’s official photographer. A variant of an image tjhat is also known as ‘Skyboy’, it was sold at $13,000 (£6890).
Also seen right is an example of the work of Hannah Höch (1889-1978), a pioneer in the field of photo-collage and the only female member of the Berlin Dada movement. Much of her work focuses on “the political and psychological deconstruction of the representation of women in the mass media during the Weimar era”. This image of c.1925-30 was sold for $21,000 (£11,130).
New York from the rooftops, with Skyboy adding to the Right Wonder
TWO views of New York from what were, at the time, the city’s tallest buildings, are illustrated here. Both were part of the February 17 Swann’s sale of ‘100 Fine Photographs’, where ‘The Movement’, another of Frantisek Drtikol’s much admired pigment prints was scheduled to have become the sale’s best seller for the third time in a row, but in this instance failed to live up to expectations of $340,000-60,000.
