NEW YORK, NY.- Phillips announces highlights from the forthcoming Spring Photographs Auctions. The Photographs Evening sale features 27 lots and the Photographs Day sale features 214 lots. Together, the two sales feature 241 lots with a pre-sale low estimate of $6.3 million to $8.9 million.

“We are very excited about our exclusive Evening sale, which includes a great variety of extremely rare images that best represent their respective artists. Many of the images have never come up for auction, therefore making this a superb opportunity for top collectors to pursue these important works that span 101 years of photography. The Evening sale is a wonderful prelude to our Day Sale, which will feature a wider spectrum of fresh photographs.” Vanessa Hallett, Worldwide Director Photographs, Phillips.

The Photographs Evening sale offers works spanning a century of outstanding achievements in the medium. The earliest work in the sale is Alfred Stieglitz’s landmark modernist icon, The Steerage, 1907, estimated at $180,000-220,000, a rare gelatin silver contact print that has only come up for auction once in the past decade. The sale is balanced by a number of outstanding contemporary works that seldom appear on the auction market, including Hiroshi Sugimoto’s Lake Superior, Cascade River, 1995, estimated at $350,000-550,000, a hauntingly beautiful seascape that ranks among the artist’s most desirable images; Thomas Struth’s Paradise 26 (Bougainville), Palpa, Peru, 2003, estimated at $100,000-150,000, depicting a seductive and lush floral composition that reflects the artist’s approach to The Sublime; Nobuyoshi Araki’s A/FILM 6 X 7, 2007, estimated at $120,000-180,000, in which the artist presents a luminescent mandala-like gathering of 1,050 film positives that provide a panoramic overview of the artist’s most beloved subjects: beautiful women, lively flowers and Tokyo street scenes; and Cindy Sherman’s Untitled # 103, 1982, estimated at $90,000-120,000, a superb example of the renowned artist’s mastery in reinventing herself in each frame, this time straddling a fine line between a sexy vamp and an innocent naïf.

Helmut Newton’s most renowned oeuvre is Big Nudes, of which the current triptych is an outstanding example, one that has never come up on the secondary market. The images depict four models in different stages of motion. There is no apparent staging or direction. The women exercise unadulterated control over their bodies, their gaze and their pace. While other fashion photographers at the time evolved from a tradition of fashion photography that positioned the model as a vessel for highlighting clothing, Newton turned the genre on its heels— boldly thrusting his models to the forefront of viewers’ consciousness as empowered, fearless and domineering agents. Their clothing became secondary, if not inconsequential, in Newton’s intent to depict a new contemporary culture that emphasized the power of an emerging independent woman. Shot from a low vantage point, his models appear monumental, larger-than-life, otherworldly Amazons roaming about their space. The triptych format brings a sense of continuous cinematic bravado that prompts the viewers to wonder what the next frame would be, where the models were headed, and what advancements lie ahead in women’s powerful rise.

An enchanting vision of the beauty that lies between dream and reality, Reclining Nude with Satin Sheet was created by Man Ray in Paris in 1935. In this Surrealist masterpiece, Man Ray presents a modernist Sleeping Beauty, seen as an embodiment of the subconscious laid bare, transforming an otherwise familiar scene into a vision of majestic fantasy. The mythical female form is horizontally encased in a light-filled netherworld. Her hair is supernaturally aglow as is the negative space that surrounds her shrouded and darkly outlined form. Man Ray fashioned the draped nude into a Surrealist vision through the phenomena of solarization. Indeed, images of solarized women are some of Man Ray’s most coveted works of art for their timeless beauty. This rare masterpiece, created during the height of Surrealism, for over 25 years was a key image in The Thomas Walther Collection, which in 2001 was partially gifted to the Museum of Modern Art, where it is currently on display in Object: Photo/Modern Photographs/ The Thomas Walther Collection 1909–1949.

By splicing together images culled from different sources, John Baldessari strips each one of an inherent meaning and yields a hybrid narrative that disrupts continuous logic. In doing so, the artist removes photography from its traditional documentarian and objective history and allows it to adopt the qualities of painting, endowed with a liberated subjectivity. In this work, the silhouette of a cowboy hovers above a horizon. He is at once a symbol of All-Americanism, the same timeless and ubiquitous emblem of soil-of-the-earth masculinity that has been populating the American cultural subconscious since the early days of cinema. However, his benign heroism appears to be potentially undermined by its juxtaposing against the image below it. A group of individuals look up in consternation. Viewers are automatically led to extrapolate a potential dialogue and meaning behind the two corresponding images. The longer viewers continue their engrossment in this imagined narrative the more Baldessari appears to remove his presence from the artwork, allowing the viewers to exist in a space that sits between fiction and reality, between art and photography.

Diane Arbus famously claimed, “I really believe there are things which nobody would see unless I photographed them.” Her portrait of a New York City widow, taken in 1963, is from an especially fertile period for the famed artist, whose work constitutes one of the most groundbreaking oeuvres of 20th century photography. In 1967, this image was included in the legendary New Documents exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art, curated by John Szarkowski. Five years later, the year after the artist's death, the print offered here was chosen by Szarkowski for inclusion in MoMA's definitive 1972 Arbus retrospective. The exhibition drew large crowds and is still considered a landmark in Arbus’s legacy.

Richard Avedon’s The Family was originally commissioned by Rolling Stone in 1976 for the occasion of America’s Bicentennial celebration and in advance of the presidential election. Comprised of sixty-nine prints depicting a diverse cross-sectional overview of the American political milieu, The Family cleverly hints at the interconnected nature of the seemingly disparate professions represented—from presidents to journalists, alluding to the confluence of forces that contribute to the shaping of the highest office in America. In the nearly four decades that have lapsed since The Family was originally created, many of the sitters’ careers would greatly shift. None more so than Ronald Reagan, Jimmy Carter and George Bush, all of whom would go on to be elected into the American presidency. Avedon’s iconic The Family, like a personal family album, stands at a meeting point between past and future, astutely recording the moments that had come to define an era, and offering a wise nod at the many more that were to define the ensuing decades in American politics.

The Photographs Day sale will feature an exciting array of works. Among them are Irving Penn’s majestic and timelessly elegant Woman with Roses (Lisa Fonssagrives-Penn), Paris, 1950, estimated at $60,000-80,000; Lewis W. Hine’s Climbing into America, Ellis Island, New York, 1905, estimated at $40,000-60,000, which embodies the artist’s socially-conscious oeuvre; Robert Heinecken’s Recto/Verso, estimated at $40,000-60,000, a portfolio of twelve prints where commercial images are overlayered to thought-provoking results, laden with implications concerning gender and sexuality; two outstanding flower images by Irving Penn: Ranunculus/Ranunculus asiaticus: Pictoee (New York), 2006, estimated at $50,000-70,000 and Persian Violet Cyclamen/Cyclamen persicum (New York), circa 1973, estimated at $40,000-60,000; and Mitch Esptein’s Amos Coal Power Plant, West Virginia, from American Power, 2004, estimated at $20,000-30,000, a poignant analysis of the relationship between American suburbia and the spread of American power plants.

Phillips will be introducing to the secondary market the works by John Chiara with Old River Road at Seven Chimneys, 2014, and Victoria Sambunaris with Untitled (Farm with workers, Jacumba, CA), (VS-10-40) from The Border, 2010.