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1977, Three Ways: Frank, Shore, and Meyerowitz Land in the Same Sale

Leitz Photographica's autumn photographs sale in Vienna quietly stacks up three American photographers working the same year, plus a Callahan portrait priced well under what its subject usually commands.
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1977, Three Ways: Frank, Shore, and Meyerowitz Land in the Same Sale
JOEL MEYEROWITZ (* 1938) - from the `Porch Series', Provincetown 1977

Leitz Photographica's next Photographs sale runs the usual span for this house — Viennese studio portraiture from the 1920s (Rudolf Koppitz, and a 1921 Max Halberstadt portrait of Sigmund Freud) up through American documentary and fashion work from the back half of the century. Nothing here is a single-lot spectacle; it's a working sale, built for people who actually collect prints rather than trophies.

The coincidence worth noting: Robert Frank's 'Mabou Window,' Stephen Shore's 'Miami Beach, Florida,' and Joel Meyerowitz's Provincetown porch print are all dated 1977, estimated between €3,000 and €8,000. Three very different photographers, same year, same broad question — what an American color or observational print was supposed to look like right then — and the estimates track roughly with how each has fared at auction generally, Shore and Frank pulling the top end.

The sleeper, if there is one, is Harry Callahan's 'Eleanor, Port Huron, Michigan,' estimated at just €2,800–3,500. Eleanor is Callahan's most photographed and most collected subject across four decades of work, and this estimate sits noticeably lower than the bigger names in the same sale despite that. Whether that reflects the print itself, condition, or just this particular auction's calibration isn't something the listing makes clear.

Also worth flagging: two Sebastião Salgado lots (a 1990s giraffe image and the 1991 Kuwait oil-field 'Desert on Fire' series) appear here in the wake of his death last year — an early, modest test of how estate-adjacent Salgado material moves at this level of the market, rather than at the retrospective-scale sales.

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