“This was an exciting auction in which the synergy between Photographic Literature and classical photography was reconfirmed…” Daile Kaplan Photogravure highlights included several editions of Camera Work, among them Number 36, with 16 photogravures by Alfred Stieglitz, New York, 1911, which brought $28,800. Hiroshi Sugimoto’s Theaters, special edition, issued with a signed photogravure, New York, 2000 brought $4,800. And Roy De Carava’s Roy De Carava, with 12 dust-grain photogravures printed by Paul Taylor in 1991, was the auction’s top lot at $81,000.
Roy DeCarava’s (American, b. 1919) photographs have documented African American life in New York from a deeply personal and yet socially conscious perspective. DeCarava explained his feelings when taking the 1964 photograph of five men coming out of the church service: "The motivation at that moment was my political understanding of the treatment of black people and their response to injustice…I wasn’t at the bombing, I wasn’t in the church, but I knew what it was and I wanted to make a picture that dealt with it. The [five] men were coming out of the church with faces so serious and so intense, and the image was made."
