Auction: Sotheby's London - 7 May 2014

12200990460?profile=originalSotheby's London is to offer a stuning album of photographs by John Beasley Greene. Estimated at £100,000-150,000 the album contains views of Egypt and Algeria dating from 1852-1856.

John Beasley Greene's work has been called ‘proto-modernist’ and looking back it is evident today that his views of Egypt and Algeria are some of the most radical in early photography. A student of Gustave Le Gray and the son of a Boston banker Greene was one of the rare American artists to have adopted the paper negative process with great mastery. His oeuvre includes views of Paris and the Fontainebleau forest – two forest scenes are included in this album – but the majority of his output depicts the land and documents the monuments and their inscriptions in Egypt, Algeria and Nubia realised during his expeditions as an archaeologist in 1853, 1854-1855 and 1855-1856. 

12200990683?profile=originalThe auction also includes Camille Silvy's Studies on Light: Fog, London, 1859 (shown here) (estimate £20,000-30,000); Bisson, Negre, Fenton, Clifford, Le Seqc, Le Gray, and Atget as well as C20th and C21st century photographers. 

Sotheby’s will open the sale with a section of works donated by leading contemporary photographers such as Hiroshi Sugimoto, Susan Derges and Guido Mocafico in support of the Bodleian Library’s campaign to acquire the Personal Archive of William Henry Fox Talbot.

The catalogue is available online by clicking here.

 

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