House On Fire

MacLean, Virginia, 1978 by Joel Sternfeld

Sometimes when a certain image, or photographer or idea is sticking in my head it's suddenly everywhere. I've had the Joel Sternfeld photo above on my mind for a couple of weeks now, and in fact I referred to it over on the Hey, Hot Shot! blog just a little while ago.

Turn's out that a print of McLean, Virgina is being sold in the upcoming 27 Exceptional Photographs auction @ Phillips de Pury. (Thanks to MAO for that tip.) The estimated price is $30,000 - $50,000. Using recent contemporary photo auctions as a barometer, I wouldn't be surprised if it went for double that. You could say that the market is on fire (yuk yuk) in spite of what some people might be saying.

For the time being, the closest I'm going to get to owning any thing of Sternfeld's is by buying a copy of American Prospects. And to be honest I'm pretty happy with my burgeoning collection of work by emerging photographers - as I've said elsewhere, it doesn't need to be expensive to be good, and besides, who knows what work will be breaking records at auctions ten years from now?

Comments

[Shane Lavalette]

I just finally bought myself a copy of American Prospects a few days ago. And since a few weeks ago, when I wrote a paper that involved discussion of Sternfeld and citing a few images of his, my desktop background has been the above 'MacLean, Virginia, 1978'. Haha, how strange!