Phillips is auctioning a group of 64 works by fashion photographers from the collection of veteran dealer Peter Fetterman in a dedicated auction titled Tailor-made. Bidding will be open until June 25.
The 64 photographs reveal Fetterman’s decades-long cultivation of some of the most recognized names in the industry including Lillian Bassman, Sarah Moon, Sheila Metzner, Gordon Parks, Ormond Gigli, William Klein, and Horst P. Horst, among many others. The modestly sized sale is slated with an pre-sale estimate of $457,000 to $670,000, offering works within a range of price points between $2,000-3,000 going up to $40,000-60,000.
Among the top offerings are images including french photographer and former model Sarah Moon’s Fashion 4, Yohji Yamamoto from 1996, which carries an estimate of $40,000 to 60,000. Moon is among the new names to the market, but her painterly images have been published in various fashion outlets like Vogue and Harper’s Bazaar. In 1995 she won the the Grand Prix National de la Photographie in 1995. American photographer and longtime Vogue contributor Sheila Metzner’s, Campidoglio from 1986 depicting a model in a black cloak standing on a stone wall, another edition of which is in the J. Paul Getty collection is valued at $12,000 to 18,000.
The Santa Monica dealer has partnered with Phillips in two past sales, starting in 2017 with the Henry Cartier-Bresson: The Eye of the Century, Personal Photographs from the Collection of Peter Fetterman. The Cartier-Bresson auction saw a neat 100% sell-through rate. It also featured the $100,000 price achieved for a print of Cartier-Bresson’s Hyeres, France, which Kreuger notes is among the standout prices in the photographer’s market.
“His gaze is always aimed above boundaries and classifications, and this has led him to create a variety of collections within his collection” said Sarah Krueger, Head of the Photographs Department in New York of Fetterman, who added the collection of works coming up for sale are emblematic of the dealer’s “finely-tuned sensitivity to individual images.”
The success of the Cartier-Bresson sale, according to Krueger brought another consignment collaboration in 2019 titled Artist | Icon | Inspiration: Women in Photography, a sale that focused on the depictions of modern women. In that sale Dorothea Lange’s widely-known Migrant Mother, Nipomo, California, sold for $87,500.
“Great fashion photographs represent a kind of heightened reality” said Kreuger, who also noted a group of names new to the market. “We’re offering some sublime images by photographers that we’ve never handled before, like Georges Dambier who produced images for Elle in the 1950s, as well as deepening our engagement with photographers like Sarah Moon and Melvin Sokolsky.”
Phillips’s auction is aptly timed with the proliferation of smaller themed and tightly curated sales that are more appropriate to online-only selling.
