Photography Auction Bonhams Cornette de Saint-Cyr’s Exclusive Auctions of LIFE

The Golden Years of LIFE. Bonhams Cornette de Saint Cyr will hold a sale of nearly 200 lots of prints from the archives of the renowned LIFE magazine on September 22, 2022 in Paris. For the second time in Europe, never-before-seen photos from this legendary magazine will be brought out of the archives and offered for auction. The sale, entitled The Golden Years of LIFE, is the result of extensive research into the magazine’s archives of the iconography of America’s golden years, from the end of the 1929 stock market crash to the late 1960s. Estimates range from €1,000 to €4,000.

This sale is conceived and organized by BITL under the direction of Agnès Vergez / BITL Agency.

Created in 1936 by Henri Luce, American publishing magnate and co-founder of Time Magazine, LIFE magazine was published weekly and then monthly until the 2000s. It is considered the absolute reference of photojournalism in the world. With more than eight million copies left, the weekly magazine became in 1960 the most distributed magazine in the world. For 70 years, it had the greatest photojournalists working for it: Margaret Bourke-White, Alfred Eisenstaedt, Andreas Feininger, Gordon Parks, John Dominis, Nina Leen, etc…

At its peak, the magazine reached one in three Americans. Based in New York and owned by Dotdash Meredith, LIFE has one of the largest photographic collections in the world: more than 10 million photographs taken through more than 100,000 reports. Created, as its founder Henri Luce emphasized, “to see life, to see the world, to witness great events…”‘To see life; to see the world; to eyewitness great events…”, LIFE thus became the mirror of a generation which, tasting little by little the delights of the consumer society, discovered the emotional power of images.

Prestigious magazines such as Vu or Regard, born between the two wars, or Paris-Match after the war, affirmed the primacy of the image over the text. But it is undoubtedly LIFE that has made it its credo and that, since the early 1950s, illustrates the golden age of photojournalism and the glorious myth of the photoreporter.

This sale offers a joyful and colorful selection (1/3 of the lots are in color) of photographs immortalizing the 50s and 60s in the United States, which were then experiencing an unprecedented development and transformation.

Among the themes covered are sports (from boxing matches in Madison Square Garden to the madness of car racing), music (from Ella Fitzgerald performing in a Chicago nightclub to the Beatles, via Elvis Presley’s tours), cinema (Marilyn Monroe, Marlon Brando, Steve McQueen …), but also the United States (from drive-ins to the first supermarkets, from the streets of Chicago to the neon lights of New York and Las Vegas) and the way Americans looked at the rest of the world.

Main lots of the sale are :

• Ballerinas standing on a windowsill in the rehearsal room of Georges Balanchine’s School of American Ballet, New York City, New York, USA 1936 by Alfred Eisenstaedt. Estimate: 3 000-4 000€
• Close-up of Argentinean racing driver Juan Manuel Fangio in his rear view mirror by Howard Sochurek. Estimate: €2,000-3,000
• Actor Gary Lockwood walking in a spacesuit during the filming of ‘2001: A Space Odyssey’, 1966 by Dmitri Kessel. Estimate: €1,500-2,500
• Workers working on giant pipes used to divert a section of the Missouri River during the construction of the Fort Peck Dam, 1936 by Margaret Bourke-White. Estimate: €1,800-2,800
• Close-up of neon lights in Time Square, New York City, 1957 by Andreas Feininger. Estimate: €2,000-3,000
• Worker welding a steel plate at the Gary Armor Plant, Indiana, 1943 by Margaret Bourke-White. Estimate: €2,000-3,000
• Portrait of astronaut John Glenn in a pressure suit and helmet, 1959 by Ralph Morse. Estimate: €1,800-2,800
• Mannequin wearing dress and gloves during the 14th Street Fashion Show, New York, 1951 by Nina Leen. Estimate: €1,800-2,800

The prints offered for sale are very high quality modern prints, made using techniques exclusively for this sale and selected according to the nature of each image.

The black & white prints are made with carbon ink (piezography) by the Picto laboratory in Paris.

The color prints are made partly with the unique Fresson process (direct carbon prints with matte rendering and saturated colors), and partly on Fujiflex paper (prints with ultra-bright rendering close to cibachrome prints).

More informations

Exhibition from Saturday 17 to Thursday 22 September.
Auctions on Thursday 22, 6.30 pm.