“THE more things change, the more they stay the same,” goes the saying based on Jean-Baptiste Alphonse Karr’s 1849 epigram. Or as American baseball great Yogi Berra supposedly said: “It’s like déjà vu all over again.”
On February 14 US auction house Swann Galleries, based in New York, held its latest photography sale. It came 65 years to the day since its very first sale in this field. And the top lot was remarkably similar at both.
The 1952 sale – the first American auction dedicated to photography – included a collection of more than 1000 plates from British photographer Eadweard Muybridge’s pioneering work Animal Locomotion from 1887. It sold for $250 back then.