Edward Burtynsky - Photographs New York Wednesday, October 12, 2022 | Phillips

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  • Provenance

    Robert Koch Gallery, San Francisco, 2007
    Private Collection, Texas
    Collection of the Amon Carter Museum of American Art, Fort Worth, Texas

  • Catalogue Essay

    The photographs in this sale offered as lots 168 through 186 come from the collection of the Amon Carter Museum of American Art and are being sold to benefit acquisition funds. Photography has been a focus of the museum since its founding in 1961 when Dorothea Lange approached the museum about acquiring her portraits of Western painter Charles Russell. Director Mitchell A. Wilder readily made the acquisition, initiating an active engagement with photography and photographers that continues today. In its history, the museum has pursued ambitious exhibition and publication programs, including Marnie Sandweiss’s groundbreaking Photography in Nineteenth Century America (1991) and John Rohrbach’s definitive Color: American Photography Transformed (2013). It was the Amon Carter Museum that commissioned Richard Avedon to produce the series of portraits exhibited and published in 1985 as In the American West.

    Driven by a succession of dynamic photography curators, the Amon Carter early-on established a robust photography acquisition program, collecting singular masterworks as well as entire archives. The collection now encompasses more than 45,000 exhibition-quality photographs ranging from one of the first photographs created in the United States to works made as recently as this year. It also includes eight artist archives – including those of Laura Gilpin, Carlotta Corpron, Eliot Porter, and Karl Struss – that allow scholars opportunities to delve deeply into the working methods of these seminal photographers.

  • Artist Biography

    Edward Burtynsky

    Canadian • 1955

    Universally termed 'industrial landscapes', Edward Burtynsky's photographs are rooted in the complex, symbiotic and, at times, destructive relationship we have with the earth. In depicting his subjects, Burtynsky balances an exacting, documentarian objectivity with a breathtakingly finessed beauty. His oversized works, whose subjects include quarries in Vermont, shipyards in China and oil refineries in Canada, have a sense of grandiosity and monumentality. There is an initial visual appeal of vibrant colors, details and scale; however, on closer inspection, the environmental dilemma unfolds. They are introspective and meditative, capturing a 'contemplative moment' where landscapes provide visual and emotional resonance.

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Property of the Amon Carter Museum of American Art sold to Benefit Acquisition Funds

183

Rock of Ages # 14, Abandoned Granite Section, E.L. Smith Quarry, Barre, Vermont

1992
Chromogenic print, printed 2001.
40 x 50 in. (101.6 x 127 cm)
Overall 49 x 59 in. (124.5 x 149.9 cm)

Signed in ink, printed title, date and number AP1 on an artist's label affixed to the reverse of the backing board. One from an edition of 5 plus 2 artist's proofs.

Estimate
$10,000 - 15,000 

Sold for $12,600

Contact Specialist

Sarah Krueger
Head of Department, Photographs, New York
skrueger@phillips.com


Vanessa Hallett
Worldwide Head of Photographs and Deputy Chairwoman, Americas
vhallett@phillips.com

Photographs

New York Auction 12 October 2022