A Big Sale Spurs Talk of a Photography Gold Rush

Posted on 17 February 2006

Records have continued to be broken steadily. But until last year, when a contemporary photograph by Richard Prince sold for $1.2 million at Christie’s, no single print had ever broken the six-figure barrier at auction. So when Sotheby’s announced this week that “The Pond ˜ Moonlight,” a platinum print by Edward Steichen owned by the Metropolitan Museum of Art, had sold for almost $3 million to an anonymous buyer, it was as if continents had shifted in the photography world.

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