NEW YORK (The Associated Press)—It's quite the opportunity - a chance to buy a photograph so highly regarded that the only two other prints of it are in museum collections.

Photography collectors will have that opportunity this week, at an auction that could set a record for the highest price paid for a 20th-century photograph.

The Pond-Moonlight, by Edward Steichen, is part of a group of close to 140 photographs scheduled to be auctioned by Sotheby's on Tuesday night and Wednesday morning. The photo, taken on Long Island in 1904, shows a pond in a wooded area, with light coming through the trees and reflected in the water.

Pre-sale estimates by the auction house price it between $700,000 (euro588,829) and $1 million (euro840,000), the highest estimate in the sale. If it sells for more than $822,400 (euro691,790) on Tuesday night, it will set a record for a 20th-century photograph; if it sells for more than $1,248,000 (euro1,049,798), it will become the highest-priced photograph ever auctioned.

"Everyone I talk to is going to be there, even if they're not buying, just to be there in that moment of history," said Stephen Perloff, editor of The Photograph Collector, a newsletter about the photography art market.

The photographs have been put up for sale by the Metropolitan Museum of Art from its acquisition last year of the more than 8,500 photographs in the renowned Gilman Paper Co. collection. Some of the Gilman works duplicated material already in the museum's holdings so they were put up for auction, as were some photographs in the Met's collection that were in better condition in the Gilman collection, Met photo curator Malcolm Daniel said.

The museum already has one of the other Steichen prints; the third print is in the collection of the Museum of Modern Art.

Along with the Steichen photo, which is slightly bigger than 16 inches by 19 inches, the auction also includes works by Alfred Stieglitz, Paul Outerbridge Jr., Edward Weston and Alvin Langdon Coburn. The Stieglitz works include photographs of his wife, the artist Georgia O'Keeffe. A photo of her hands and another of her nude have pre-sale estimates of between $300,000 (euro252,355) and $500,000 (euro420,592).

The entire sale is estimated to bring in between $4 million (euro3.4 million) and $6 million (euro5.1 million), said Denise Bethel, director of the Sotheby's photography department. The proceeds will go toward defraying the costs of acquiring the collection.

The record for highest price for a photograph was set in November by Untitled (Cowboy), from Richard Prince. For 20th-century photographs, the record is held by two works, White Angel Breadline, from Dorothea Lange, and The Breast, by Weston.

The kind of money going into the photography art world has steadily been increasing, Perloff said. "It's finally come of age," he said. "It's just a market that has matured over a very long time."

This auction had raised interest because of the collections to which the photographs belonged and because the photographers involved are celebrated in their field, he said.

"The top pieces, Steichen and Stieglitz, they're among the most important pictures and among the rarest prints that there are," Perloff said.

And Daniel agreed.

"It's a really, really rare opportunity for anybody to have access like that," he said. "Normally they'd already be in a museum collection."

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Sotheby's: http://www.sothebys.com
 
Copyright AP 2006