The Photography Market Has Its Biggest Week of the Year. Are You Watching?
The spring auctions, Sophie Calle's landmark retrospective, a Mapplethorpe anniversary, and what's opening from Los Angeles to Turin
THE FRAME
Tillmans, Sherman, Arbus, Eggleston — All Going Under the Hammer Before Sunday
Two major dedicated photography sales take place this week — one live in New York, one online. Together they represent the most concentrated photography buying opportunity of the spring, with a combined presale estimate above $1.5 million and works by some of the most consequential photographers of the 20th and 21st centuries. Bidding opens Wednesday on the Sotheby’s sale; Phillips takes the floor Saturday.
Sotheby’s Photographs Part II opens for bidding this Wednesday, April 8 and closes online April 16. Over 100 lots, tightly curated. Led by Diane Arbus’s Identical Twins, Roselle, N.J. ($70,000–100,000) and Helmut Newton’s Blonde and T.V., Hotel Gallia, Milan ($70,000–100,000). Also: Richard Misrach, Nan Goldin, Graciela Iturbide, Peter Beard, and Albert Watson.
Phillips Photographs takes place this Saturday, April 11, in New York — the most significant dedicated photography sale of the spring season. Over 260 lots spanning 150 years of the medium, from 19th-century salt prints to contemporary large-format works.
The headline lot is Wolfgang Tillmans’s Freischwimmer 123 (2004), estimated at $150,000–250,000 — a large-scale abstract work from his landmark series that used the darkroom itself as subject, exposing light directly onto photographic paper without a camera. Two Cindy Sherman Untitled Film Stills are among the strongest lots: Untitled Film Still #49 at $120,000–180,000 and Untitled #471 at $70,000–90,000. Edward Weston’s Nude (Tina on the Azotea) carries an estimate of $100,000–150,000, as does Tina Modotti’s Bandolier, Corn, Sickle and Sebastião Salgado’s Gold Mine.
Watch also for Robert Frank’s Parade — Hoboken, New Jersey ($70,000–100,000), Catherine Opie’s Untitled #4 ($40,000–60,000), and two lots by William Eggleston — Untitled (Memphis) ($100,000–150,000) and Untitled (Louisiana) ($30,000–50,000).
WHY IT MATTERS
Two high-profile photography sales in five days — and with AIPAD bringing collectors to New York on April 22, this is one of the most concentrated buying windows of the year. The Tillmans estimate signals confidence at the top of the market. The Cindy Sherman lots, the Eggleston prints, and the Modotti/Weston pairing test whether the mid-market can sustain the momentum of 2025. This week will tell.
IN FOCUS
Sophie Calle: “I Follow Strangers. I Photograph Them. I Am the Work.”
In 1979, Sophie Calle asked strangers to sleep in her bed and be photographed. She called the project The Sleepers. Most people said yes. That has been the central surprise of her career ever since: people participate in things they probably shouldn’t, and Calle keeps finding ways to make art from that willingness.
Born in Paris in 1953, Calle spent much of her twenties traveling — living in the United States, hitchhiking across North Africa — before returning to France and beginning to make work from the raw material of her own life and the lives of strangers she encountered. She followed people on the street, photographing them without their knowledge. She took a job as a hotel chambermaid and documented guests’ belongings. She asked a private detective to follow her, then published both their accounts side by side. The question of who is watching whom runs through everything she makes.
Overshare, the first major North American survey of her work, is currently on view at the UC Irvine Langson / Orange County Museum of Art through May 24, 2026. Organized by the Walker Art Center and curated by Henriette Huldisch, the exhibition spans five decades — photography, text, video, and installation — and is divided into four sections: the Spy, the Protagonist, the End, and the Beginning. Calle reportedly handed the entire curatorial decision to Huldisch: “It’s the first time in my life there’s been an exhibition as if I had passed away and someone curated a show about me.”
The title is pointed. Long before social media normalized the conversion of private life into public content, Calle was doing it by hand — with a camera, index cards, and a forensic attention to detail. Her 2003 installation Journey to California documents the months she shipped her own bed to a heartbroken San Francisco artist who had written asking to sleep in it. She is, in the words of The Art Newspaper, “alternately described as a conceptual artist, photographer, video artist, and even detective.” In 2024 she received Japan’s Praemium Imperiale — one of the most prestigious art prizes in the world.
WHY IT MATTERS
Calle’s work asks the questions that photography keeps circling: Who has the right to photograph whom? What does documentation do to the person being documented? What happens when the photographer puts herself in the frame? These were avant-garde provocations in 1979. In 2026, they describe Instagram, surveillance culture, and the ethics of street photography — which means her career looks less like a body of art and more like a forty-year prophecy. Overshare is worth the drive to Orange County.
ON VIEW
New This Week
The Girls: Sabiha Çimen & Mary Ellen Mark
Howard Greenberg Gallery | New York
Opened April 2, 2026
A two-person show pairing Mark’s landmark black-and-white portraiture with Çimen’s color work from her award-winning Hafiz series — photographing girls’ Qur’an schools in Turkey. Documentary precision meets poetic surrealism.
Outside Help — Christopher Richmond
Moskowitz Bayse | Los Angeles
April 11 – May 16, 2026
Christopher Richmond builds worlds that redefine themselves within and against the conventions of film, story, and shared human experience. Handmade props and highly technical photographic techniques accentuate the distance between the imaginary and the real. His practice spans film, video, photography, and drawing.
Sophie Calle: Overshare
OCMA | UC Irvine Langson – Orange County Museum of Art, Costa Mesa
Through May 24, 2026
Five decades of Calle’s career. First major North American survey. Photography, text, video, and installation. See IN FOCUS above.
Fortuitous Encounters — Lenard Smith
UCR Arts | California Museum of Photography, Riverside
Through July 26, 2026
The first solo museum exhibition of Ghanaian-American studio photographer Lenard Smith.
CLOSING SOON
Apr 13: Ruby Bell: Glow — Leica Gallery, West Hollywood.
Apr 25: Binh Danh & Renee Royale — ROSEGALLERY, Santa Monica.
Apr 25: JR: Horizons — Perrotin, Los Angeles.
May 4: Eugène Atget: The Making of a Reputation — ICP, New York.
THE PHOTOGRAPH
The Perfect Moment — Robert Mapplethorpe, 1989
Tomorrow — April 7 — marks the anniversary of one of the most dramatic confrontations between photography and the law in American history.
On April 7, 1990, the Contemporary Arts Center in Cincinnati opened Robert Mapplethorpe: The Perfect Moment, a touring retrospective organized by the Institute of Contemporary Art in Philadelphia. That same morning, while visitors lined up outside, a Hamilton County grand jury indicted the museum and its director, Dennis Barrie, on two counts of obscenity — one for displaying photographs deemed sexually explicit, another for displaying images of children that prosecutors argued constituted child pornography. It was the first time in American history that a museum had been criminally prosecuted for exhibiting art.
The exhibition had already been at the center of a national controversy. The Corcoran Gallery in Washington had canceled its presentation months earlier, fearing the political climate — a decision that triggered protests and a guerrilla projection of Mapplethorpe’s images onto the gallery’s exterior. In Cincinnati, the trial drew international attention and became a referendum on the First Amendment, public funding for the arts, and the definition of obscenity. The defense called art experts who argued that Mapplethorpe’s photographs belonged in the tradition of classical figure studies. The jury — eight people with no particular background in art — acquitted on all counts.
Mapplethorpe had died of AIDS-related illness the year before, in March 1989, at age 42. He never saw the trial.
WHY IT MATTERS
The Mapplethorpe trial established a precedent that has protected museums and galleries ever since. It also changed what photography could say in public. Before 1990, the legal and institutional lines around explicit photographic content were blurry and untested. After Cincinnati, the principle that art must be considered as a whole — and judged by its serious artistic, literary, political, or scientific value — had been upheld in a courtroom. The trial is studied in law schools and art schools today. And his work — flowers, portraits, figure studies, and the photographs that shocked Cincinnati — is now held by the Getty, MoMA, and dozens of major collections worldwide.
FAIR & FESTIVAL WATCH
Opening This Week and Coming Up
EXPOSED
Torino Foto Festival — Turin, Italy
April 9 – June 2, 2026 · Opens this Thursday
Third edition. Theme: Laying Bare — exploring identity, representation, and the body through photography. 18 indoor and outdoor exhibitions across Turin under the artistic direction of Walter Guadagnini. Friday night: large-scale outdoor projections across the city’s buildings and courtyards. Free entry with digital pass.
KYOTOGRAPHIE
International Photography Festival — Kyoto, Japan
April 18 – May 17, 2026
Theme: Edge. Daido Moriyama, Anton Corbijn, Pieter Hugo, Ernest Cole. Set across Kyoto’s temples and machiya townhouses.
AIPAD
The Photography Show — New York
April 22–26, 2026
45th edition at the Park Avenue Armory. New “Focal Point” single-artist sector. Aperture Portfolio Prize awarded during the fair.
OFF THE PRESS
New & Noteworthy
Las Pelilargas by Irina Werning
GOST
For 18 years, Werning traveled across Latin America seeking out women with exceptionally long hair — putting up signs in schools, hospitals, and markets, organizing hair competitions in remote mountain towns. Her project uncovered something deeper than she expected: for many Indigenous communities, hair is a physical expression of thought, an extension of the self, connected to ancient customs now spreading beyond their original communities. Winner of the Eugene Smith Grant 2023, World Press Photo 2022, and a Pulitzer Reporting Grant. Featured in the Observer and Aesthetica.
Feliicità by Luigi Ghirri
MACK
Filmmaker Luca Guadagnino and artist Alessio Bolzoni present an idiosyncratic path through Ghirri’s work — from images of discarded magazine cuttings to domestic spaces and sunlit travels around Italy. Produced on the occasion of their co-curated exhibition. Three essays by Ghirri open new vistas into his thinking. “An involuntary prophet,” said Il Manifesto. Bilingual English and Italian.
Italian Story by Andrea Modica
L’Artiere
“The title reflects the complexity of the Italian word storia, which holds meanings as diverse as history, story, situation, issue, fuss, hassle, tale, or lie.” Modica began traveling to Italy as a young woman from a third-generation Italian-American family, building a visual archive across four decades using an 8×10 view camera. A lyrical exploration of identity, memory, and belonging.
OPEN CALLS
Deadlines This Month
CPA Artist Grants 2026 — Deadline April 7. $30 fee. Five grants of $5,000 each. Center for Photographic Art, Carmel.
PPA Photo Award 2026 — Deadline April 12. No fee. $2,000 prize for US-based emerging photographers.
Aperture Portfolio Prize — Awarded at AIPAD (Apr 22–26). All five finalists exhibited at the fair.
Inge Morath Award 2026 — Deadline April 30. No fee. $7,500 from the Magnum Foundation for women and nonbinary photographers under 30.
THE WEEKS AHEAD
Key Dates: Through April 19
Apr 7: Deadline — CPA Artist Grants
Apr 8: Sotheby’s Photographs Part II opens, online
Apr 9: EXPOSED Torino Foto Festival opens, Turin
Apr 11: Phillips Photographs auction, New York
Apr 11: Outside Help (Christopher Richmond) opens at Moskowitz Bayse, LA
Apr 12: Deadline — PPA Photo Award
Apr 13: Last day — Ruby Bell: Glow, Leica Gallery, West Hollywood
Apr 16: Sony World Photography Awards winners announced, London
Apr 16: Sotheby’s Photographs Part II closes online
Apr 18: KYOTOGRAPHIE opens, Kyoto
ONE QUESTION
Which living photographer do you think is most underrepresented in major museum collections?
Name one photographer whose work deserves more institutional attention than it currently gets — and tell us why. Answer in the comments. We’ll highlight the responses in the next issue.
DID YOU KNOW?
The most viewed photograph in history is almost certainly Bliss — the rolling green hills and blue sky Charles O’Rear shot in Sonoma County, California, in 1996 on a drive from Napa to San Francisco. O’Rear, a former National Geographic photographer, used a medium-format camera and Fujifilm Velvia slide film. Microsoft purchased the rights in 2000 for an undisclosed sum. It served as the default Windows XP wallpaper for over a decade. The image is completely unmanipulated. The hill, Licatalsi Ranch in Sonoma, was later converted to a vineyard.
ON THIS DAY
April 8, 1974: Hank Aaron hit his 715th career home run off Al Downing at Atlanta’s Fulton County Stadium, breaking Babe Ruth’s record that had stood for 39 years. Photographer Neil Leifer was positioned in the stands and captured Aaron rounding second base, arms raised, two Dodgers fielders retreating behind him. The image ran on the cover of Sports Illustrated on April 15, 1974 — one of the defining sports photographs of the 20th century. Leifer, who had also photographed Muhammad Ali’s first-round knockout of Sonny Liston in 1965, remains one of the most celebrated sports photographers in American history.
