The 20 most expensive Photo's sold at auction (as of 2017)

Interesting...
https://petapixel.com/2017/12/21/20-expensive-photos-sold-auction-2017/

"The overwhelming majority of these photographs were created via analog cameras, suggesting that film photography is considered far more valuable than digital. The most recent image to have been captured in the list is Tobolsk Kremlin, a digital print from Dmitry Medvedev, taken in 2009, and the oldest is Joseph Philibert Girault de Prangey’s Daguerreotype 113 Athenes, Temple de Jupiter captured in 1842. These photographs were taken 167 years apart."

I think it's the ideas that are important...one might alternatively say that film photographers have more depth to their thinking or some such thing...

"The overwhelming majority of these photographs were created via analog cameras, suggesting that film photography is considered far more valuable than digital."

This statement is a bit of wishful thinking on the part of traditionalists.Digital has not been around as long so the pool of images from which to draw is significantly smaller. Also, it takes time for an image to gain respect and become desirable, and thus more valuable. But I don't think that those who collect art and pay gigantic sums for photographs are thinking about the difference between traditional photography and modern digital images

Good to see Man Ray made the cut twice.

It's interesting that the two leading names position themselves in an art gallery context, not just as photographers. Gursky's work in particular looks designed to appeal to corporate buyers, and would fit the boardroom of a major corporation perfectly,

what has sold for the most amount of money has more to do with
what high end galleries and museums are buying and selling than
the camera that took them. while i love to look at color photographs
i always wonder if there is a problem, lets say 5 or 15 years from now
when the cindy sherman untitled stills sell for 15million &c because of fading
or tonal shift &c, if the images will be reprinted on the same paper &c
or if it will have been OK to print on a different material. ( lets say pigment on cotton rag
or gum over something, or a new fangled dye transfer technique ) or if in 5 or 15 years
the jig willbe up as if it was a solar graph that wasn't fixed with NedL's solution
onlyto be looked at using night vision goggles.

choiliefan said:

Good to see Man Ray made the cut twice.

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YES!

jnanian said:

i always wonder if there is a problem, lets say 5 or 15 years from now
when the cindy sherman untitled stills sell for 15million &c because of fading
or tonal shift &c

Click to expand...

Galleries and collectors aren't averse to volatile artefacts if the provenance is right and the artist is hot. Some sculptures in early plastics are too unstable to be viewed today, and are kept in environmentally controlled conditions, but their commercial value is intact. Cindy Sherman's photos probably have average life expectancy for a modern artwork sold today.

I will never understand the appeal of Gursky's Rhein II. Composition is nice, but it is a very simple picture, looks like something you would find on Flickr, or any other social media, and not being sold in an auction for 4M dollars.

SilverShutter said:

I will never understand the appeal of Gursky's Rhein II. Composition is nice, but it is a very simple picture, looks like something you would find on Flickr, or any other social media, and not being sold in an auction for 4M dollars.

Click to expand...

From what I've read, the image in Rhein II is something you can never see in real life because of buildings, people, obstructions, etc. Apparently he edited all that stuff out to produce a "clear" view.

I did stuff like that all the time when I had to produce clean digital photos of street scenes or landscapes -- it's kind of fun and a skill to do it properly, where the result is not detectable without using computer analysis of the image.

No one can see views like Rhein ll the question in my mind would you think to make an image of something that seems so simple

Personally I never understood that photo until I was sitting in a chair watching that screen in front of me or something very similar and
The light went on in my head and it was a wow moment . Would I have taken something like that. No as I thinking differently but it was an interesting moment as I had been sitting there for several hours while we sailed along when it finally dawned on me what I had been watching