The Most Expensive Photograph Ever Sold Is a Pun
Man Ray's "Le Violon d'Ingres" and the Christie's Thérond preview — plus Martin Parr's posthumous retrospective in Seoul, and Stieglitz, 80 years on...
THE PHOTOGRAPH
“Le Violon d’Ingres” — Man Ray, 1924
The joke took a few seconds to make and has held for a century. In his Montparnasse studio in 1924, Man Ray photographed Alice Prin — Kiki de Montparnasse, the model, performer, and unofficial queen of the quarter — from behind, her back bared, her head wrapped in a turban, in a pose lifted knowingly from Ingres’s Valpinçon Bather. Then he painted two black f-holes onto the print, rephotographed it, and turned a woman’s back into a violin. The title compounds the pun: a violon d’Ingres, in French idiom, is a hobby — Ingres famously fiddled — so the picture is at once an homage to a painter, a wisecrack about photography’s status as a sideline art, and Surrealism’s most quoted photographic image. It appeared in André Breton’s journal Littérature that June and never really left circulation.
The pun has always cut both ways. The image objectifies with total literalness — a woman rendered as an instrument — and generations of critics have read it as exactly that, while others point out that Kiki was no passive prop but an artist and cabaret star whose collaboration with Man Ray was closer to a double act. That unresolved argument is part of why the picture stays alive: it is beautiful, funny, and uncomfortable in equal measure, and it anticipates a century of debates about manipulation — the f-holes are, after all, a hand-applied special effect made decades before anyone said “Photoshop.”
Then there is the number. On May 14, 2022, the original 1924 print — kept for decades by Rosalind Gersten Jacobs and Melvin Jacobs, friends of the artist who bought directly from him — sold at Christie’s New York for $12.4 million against a $5–7 million estimate, nearly tripling the previous auction record for any photograph (Andreas Gursky’s Rhein II, $4.3 million in 2011). Four years on, it remains the most expensive photograph ever sold at auction, the market’s yardstick for what a single print can be worth, as artnet News reported when the hammer fell.
WHY IT MATTERS
The most expensive photograph in the world is not a document but a joke — a staged, hand-altered, endlessly contested image whose value lies entirely in authorship, scarcity, and story. Every argument about what a photograph is worth eventually runs through this one, and with a major private collection on preview in Paris and Arles this week, the argument is live again.
EXHIBITION HIGHLIGHTS
We Are Martin Parr
Photography Seoul Museum of Art (Photo SeMA) | Seoul
July 16 – October 18, 2026
Seoul’s public photography museum opens the first major Martin Parr retrospective staged in Asia — and the first anywhere since the British photographer’s death last year — gathering 14 major series and more than 500 photographs. Parr’s garish, affectionate, merciless pictures of consumerism, tourism, and leisure made him the great comic anthropologist of modern life, and the show’s title makes its thesis explicit: his subjects were never “them,” always us.
Cihan Çakmak: like a warrior
Museum Morsbroich | Leverkusen
On view through November 8, 2026
Museum Morsbroich gives the German-Kurdish photographer Cihan Çakmak her first museum solo exhibition, and the title’s lowercase defiance sets the register. Çakmak’s spare, emotionally charged pictures circle questions of Kurdish identity, family, and the long shadow of displacement — work made between two languages and two homelands, where the camera becomes a way of holding ground.
Matthias Burba & Max Seeger: Seeing the World in a Grain of Sand
Alfred Ehrhardt Stiftung | Berlin
On view through September 6, 2026
The Alfred Ehrhardt Stiftung — keeper of the great German photographer-filmmaker’s legacy — pairs Matthias Burba and Max Seeger’s photomicrographs of sand with the 1930s dune studies that made Ehrhardt’s name. Magnified past recognition, single grains become planetary landscapes, and the Blake-borrowed title earns its keep: this is photography’s oldest promise, that attention to the smallest thing opens onto the largest.
Martine Dawson: Faultlines
MEP | Paris
July 17 – September 13, 2026
In the Maison Européenne de la Photographie’s Studio space — its platform for emerging and under-shown work — Martine Dawson photographs the houses of Butte, Montana, a copper-mining boomtown that spent the twentieth century slowly subsiding into its own excavations. Dawson’s deadpan frontal views read as portraits: modest frame houses standing on undermined ground, the American West’s extraction economy written into clapboard and foundation cracks.
On the Road
Sundaram Tagore Gallery | New York
July 16 – August 28, 2026
Sundaram Tagore’s Chelsea gallery turns its summer over to the open road, with a Kerouac-inspired group show drawn from its photography program — a roster that includes Edward Burtynsky, Karen Knorr, Steve McCurry, and Sebastião Salgado. The premise is familiar but durable: the journey as the American picture-making condition, from roadside vernacular to landscapes seen through a windshield.
WHAT’S ON AROUND THE WORLD
Openings, closings, and the shows worth a trip.
Opening This Week
Just opened
Dublin
Afterimage: Photography in the Digital Age — Photo Museum Ireland · Opened Jul 11 (group / computational image)
Lisbon
Michael Najjar: Heterotopic Turbulences — Galeria Filomena Soares · Opened Jul 8 (space-age hybrid photography)
Toronto
The Great Lakes — Stephen Bulger Gallery · Opened Jul 9 (group / landscape)
This week, day by day
Wednesday, July 15
Ana Mendieta opens — Tate Modern, London (first major UK exhibition)
Thursday, July 16
We Are Martin Parr opens — Photography Seoul Museum of Art, Seoul
On the Road opens — Sundaram Tagore Gallery, New York
Cortona On The Move 2026 opening days begin — Cortona, Italy (festival)
Friday, July 17
Martine Dawson: Faultlines opens — MEP Studio, Paris
Saturday, July 18
Richard Learoyd: Shark opens — Henry Art Gallery, Seattle (camera obscura)
A Brief History of Photography: The Portrait opens — Portland Art Museum, Portland, OR (collection)
Closing Soon
Boston
Faces in the Crowd: Street Photography — Museum of Fine Arts, Boston · Closes Jul 13 (street)
Kaunas
Aria Shahrokhshahi: Wet Ground — Kaunas Photography Gallery · Closes Jul 19 (documentary)
London
Sarah Moon — Michael Hoppen Gallery · Closes Jul 17 (fashion / fine art)
Los Angeles
Double Take: Photographs in Pairs — Fahey/Klein Gallery · Closes Jul 18 (group)
Santa Monica
A Simple Game: Celebrating Football During the World Cup — Marshall Gallery · Closes Jul 18 (group)
Seoul
Robert Mapplethorpe: The Poetics of Form — Kukje Gallery · Closes Jul 19 (historical)
Shanghai
Vivian Maier: Unseen Work — Fotografiska Shanghai · Closes Jul 19 (street / historical)
Vancouver
Stephen Shore: Uncommon Places — Vancouver Art Gallery · Closes Jul 26 (color / historical)
Ongoing
A rotating selection of shows worth the trip, beyond the openings and closings above.
Amsterdam
World Press Photo Exhibition 2026 — De Nieuwe Kerk · Through Sep 27 (photojournalism)
Braunschweig
Jamel Shabazz: New York Moves and Black Communities — Museum für Photographie Braunschweig · Through Sep 13 (street / portraiture)
Madrid
In the American West — Richard Avedon — Fundación MAPFRE · Through Aug 30 (portraiture)
New York
Hujar:Contact — The Morgan Library & Museum · Through Oct 25 (historical)
San Diego
Cecil Beaton’s Fashionable World — The San Diego Museum of Art · Through Jan 10, 2027 (fashion / portraiture)
FESTIVAL WATCH
9th Annual Latin American Foto Festival — Bronx Documentary Center, New York · July 9–26 (large-scale prints across Bronx streets by emerging and established Latin American photographers; free)
Cortona On The Move 2026 — Cortona, Italy · Opens July 16, through November 1 (Italy’s major documentary-photography festival; opening days this week)
Les Rencontres d’Arles 2026 — “Worlds in View” — Arles, France · Through October 4 (week two of the European photography summer’s anchor; the Christie’s Thérond preview runs alongside at the Hôtel Nord-Pinus through July 17)
OFF THE PRESS
You Are Invited by Juergen Teller
Steidl, 2026 US edition · 416 pages, over 500 images
Juergen Teller’s sprawling self-survey — more than 500 images bridging fashion, portraiture, and his own unguarded domestic life — sold through its first printing at Steidl almost immediately; a new printing lands in US shops July 28. Teller’s honest, tender, deliberately unglamorous gaze made him the most influential fashion-adjacent photographer of his generation, and this is the fullest single-volume account of the work to date. It pairs neatly with his current Berlin gallery outing, per D.A.P.
Love Hotel by François Prost
D.A.P. · 224 pages
Out July 21, François Prost’s Love Hotel compiles several hundred facades of Japan’s roadside love hotels, photographed on a 2023 road trip between Tokyo and Shikoku — buildings shaped like castles, cruise ships, cakes, and faraway cities, all engineered for discreet romance. Prost, the French photographer behind deadpan typologies of gentlemen’s clubs and roadside nightspots, treats the kitsch seriously: through these flamboyant exteriors, Japan’s landscapes — from megalopolis to farm country — come into view sideways.
Hero, Father, Friend by Carlos Idun-Tawiah
Marsilio Arte · 128 pages
After losing his father at eighteen, the Accra-born photographer Carlos Idun-Tawiah was left with almost no pictures of the two of them together — so he built the archive he wished existed, staging reconstructed scenes, both real and imagined, of Ghanaian fatherhood, boyhood, and everyday tenderness. Winner of the Deloitte Photo Grant and exhibited at the Triennale Milano, the project reaches book form with texts by Denis Curti; the US edition arrives July 28.
OPEN CALLS
OD Photo Prize 2026 — Deadline August 11, 2026. Open Doors Gallery’s annual open call for emerging artists within the first ten years of their practice; a £2,000 grand prize plus Judges’ Picks, the AJ Page Award, and an InCadaqués Award, with exhibition at the London gallery.
ON THIS DAY
July 13, 1946 — Alfred Stieglitz died in New York at 82, and this issue publishes on the 80th anniversary. No one did more to argue photography into the museum: through Camera Work, the quarterly he edited from 1903 to 1917; through 291, the Fifth Avenue gallery where he showed photographs beside Picasso and Matisse as if the equivalence were obvious; through the Equivalents, his cloud studies that insisted a photograph could be as abstract and inward as music; and through sheer stubbornness — in 1924 the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston accepted a group of his prints, among the first photographs admitted to a major American museum as works of art. He was also the great champion and husband of Georgia O’Keeffe, whose portrait he made across two decades and several hundred negatives.
THE INTERNATIONAL REVIEW OF PHOTOGRAPHY
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