LONDON.- This May in London Phillips will offer a distinguished selection of classic and contemporary works, which are outstanding across all genres of the medium, including works by 20th century masters such as Diane Arbus, Herb Ritts, Richard Avedon and David Hockney, as well as contemporary stars such as Gilbert & George, Florian Maier-Aichen, Vik Muniz, Barry Frydlender and Pieter Hugo.

The auction features over 130 lots with a pre-sale low estimate of £1.6m/$2.4/€2.2m and pre-sale high estimate of £2.2m/$3.3/€3m.

“We are immensely proud to be offering works by two of Photography’s most loved ‘outsiders’ Diane Arbus and Pieter Hugo. These excellent works focus on switching the known and unknown and substituting the familiar with the unfamiliar. We are delighted to offer works by Barry Frydlander, Kim Joon, Walter Pfeiffer and Lyle Owerko amongst others in the section of Ultimate Contemporary. For the second time we will offer a new section of the sale entitled Ultimate Contemporary which offers the last available print of an image for sale by hand-picked artists.” Lou Proud, Head of Photographs, London.

For Diane Arbus, photography was not a medium that presented straightforward facts but instead was a tool to expose the deeper part of the subject – the encounter with her sitter somehow produced the dramatic, the awkward, the ‘otherness’ of the person. Identical Twins, Roselle, New Jersey, 1967, is a concrete example of her curiosity and anthropological interest. No-one exactly knows how Arbus found out about this small-town Christmas party being held in honour of twins and triplets. The twins Cathleen and Colleen Wade were seven years old when they were photographed by Arbus. This portrait provides us with so many different emotions and offers a glimpse of the people they may become; their mature personas are uncanny. Their father commented on the photograph, “We thought it was the worst likeness of the twins we’d ever seen.” The twins’s individuality via Arbus, the catalyst, transcends their likeness, a togetherness which comes with the territory of being a twin. Their individuality is seen in their unique body language and facial expressions – one slightly smiling, the other slightly frowning – even in the different patterns of their stockings. Arbus truly sees into the souls of her specifically chosen subjects, revealing their deeper personalities in her work. Diane Arbus’ gift for rendering strange the familiar and vice versa continues to challenge our assumptions about the nature of everyday life. By the same token, her ability to uncover the familiar within the unusual has provided her images with an unwavering appeal and attraction.

In his 2009 monograph, Pieter Hugo describes his image-making process for seminal series The Hyena and Other Men: “In Abuja we found them living on the periphery of the city in a shantytown – a group of men, a little girl, three hyenas, four monkeys and a few rock pythons. It turned out that they were a group of itinerant minstrels, performers who used the animals to entertain crowds and sell traditional medicines. The animal handlers were all related to each other and were practising a tradition passed down from generation to generation. I spent eight days travelling with them. The spectacle caused by this group walking down busy market streets was overwhelming. I tried photographing this but failed, perhaps because I wasn't interested in their performances. I realised that what I found fascinating was the hybridisation of the urban and the wild, and the paradoxical relationship that the handlers have with their animals - sometimes doting and affectionate, sometimes brutal and cruel. I started looking for situations where these contrasting elements became apparent. I decided to concentrate on portraits. I would go for a walk with one of the performers, often just in the city streets, and, if opportunity presented itself, take a photograph…”

A sublime image by Herb Ritts was created originally as part of an advertising campaign for Versace featuring the supermodel Christy Turlington. She is fanned by a divine halo of black silk, secured by tarpaulin, creating a goddess-like aura around her body. She is positioned bastion-like on the El Mirage Dry Lakebed, an arid landscape which could easily be mistaken for the edge of the world. Largely born from the very specific light of the West Coast, Herb Ritts’ work is elemental, conjuring wind, earth, warmth. The bodies he depicts are beautiful, sensuous and close to nature. Often pieces of terrain or ocean ephemera are used as natural fashion fixtures. The silk dress in this image is the prop that frames and ornaments the lines of the body and adds drama. Ritts places his figure inside a canopy to provide perspective and scale within a confined space. Here, we revel in the delights of abstraction: the combination of sculpted silhouette, bleaching out of the body, exclusion of limbs and sleek cap-like hair.

Working as a pair and sacrificing their own individual identities, Gilbert & George envisage themselves as living artworks and place themselves at the heart of their creations. It is rare that you would ever see one without the other in any situation or without wearing their matching suits and ties. From the portal of vibrant gridded arenas, they use their unabashedly titillating style. Satirists, polemicists and regal bad boys with a dress code have become an instantly recognisable brand. Together they have chewed and spat out most political subjects, economic, social and sexual, producing eye-splitting high-voltage works which embrace aspects of commercial advertising, pornography and physical theatre. They reach out to their audience via a contemporary hieroglyphic code, projecting feelings they consider to have universal significance, exposing the unmentionable, challenging boundaries and conventions not to shock but to exorcise and evict.

Florian Maier-Aichen’s photographic works portray natural and industrial landscapes held together with a stylised eccentricity; their air of fantasy sweeps us into a disorientated state of elation. Refreshingly breaking away from certain doctrines which had been the ‘default’ marker of how images should be formed or presented, typological serialisation for example, Maier-Aichen literally creates a new landscape in the medium of photography. The work in the current lot is part of a series in which the artist employs infrared film then digitally manipulates the image before printing it as a c-type print. With the film’s ability to invert the colour green into red while keeping all other colours intact, Saddle Peak’s green flora turns into an apocalyptic red. This particular film also has an affinity to early colour photography, while the final image incorporates an effect of science fiction. The resulting image oscillates between an industrial wasteland and a red hot Californian desert, imposing a bizarre tension on the viewer. Containing composites, non-photographic details and unconventional tones, the work subverts the old saying ‘Life is stranger than fiction’. In this case, fiction is certainly stranger and more fantastic than life.

Famous for her roles as much as her strength, Davis was further canonised in American pop culture in Kim Carnes’s number one hit song ‘Bette Davis Eyes’, in which the beloved star’s sultry gaze is sung in praise and awe. Similarly, in Vik Muniz’s photograph, Bette Davis’ seductive expression, as rendered in diamonds, mesmerises the viewer with both her beauty and the thousands of jewels.

In his monumental work Smoking, Sinai (2004), acclaimed Israeli artist Barry Frydlender creates a multifaceted tableau – meticulously and seamlessly constructed from hundreds of images – which depicts young Israelis relaxing on the beach in Sinai. Frydlender photographed the location for several days, accumulating individual shots from multiple angles. When he returned to his Tel Aviv studio to digitally assemble the images, he chose to focus on the activities of smoking, drinking and reading. In telling the story of what he saw, Frydlender preserves the unity of space – the landscape and the positions of the figures and structures are accurate – but not the unity of time – all the activities did not occur at the same time. In 2007, Frydlender became the first Israeli artist to hold a solo exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art in New York and was awarded the 2010 Sandberg Prize for Israeli Art by the Israel Museum, Jerusalem. His works are held in a number of prominent collections, including the Museum of Modern Art, New York; the J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles; the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston; and the Israel Museum, Jerusalem.

New York City-based photographer, filmmaker and self-professed ‘pop-culture junkie’ Lyle Owerko shot the JVC M70 – the quintessential audio device of the 1980s – for his acclaimed series The Boombox Project. In this photographic typology, Owerko represents an era of discovery and sonic innovation that launched the hip hop movement. The monumental size of the present work reinforces the significance of the boombox as an icon of popular culture.

Another Boombox image is held in the collection of the Victoria and Albert Museum, London.