Gilles Decamps, who also profiles for La lettre all of the features on auction sales this week, has had the idea to portray the people in the shadows that run the photography departments in Sotheby’s and Chtistie’s.
Denise Bethel
Senior Vice President
Head of Department
Photographs
Denise Bethel, Director of the Photographs Department, Sotheby’s, New York, is the senior expert in the world of photographs auctions in the United States. In the past decade, she has established Sotheby’s New York as the photographs market leader in practically every auction category — setting world records for a host of blue-chip photographers, as well as record sale totals for private, corporate, and museum photographs collections. Now in her twenty-eighth year of conducting photographs sales, Denise has hammered down the most expensive photograph ever sold at auction, ‘The Pond — Moonlight’ by Edward Steichen, at $2, 928,000. This was included in the February 2006 landmark Sotheby’s sale, Important Photographs from The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Including Works from the Gilman Paper Company Collection, which brought a total of $14,982,900, a record for a single-owner collection of photographs sold at auction. Trusted by collectors, curators, and dealers the world over, Ms. Bethel has garnered for Sotheby’s the lion’s share of photographs sold by American museums in the past several years, among them works from The Metropolitan Museum of Art, The Museum of Modern Art, the Museum of the City of New York, the George Eastman House, the San Diego Museum of Art, the Museum of Science and Industry in Chicago, and the Canadian Centre for Architecture in Montreal.
Christopher Mahoney
Senior Vice President
Senior Specialist
Photographs
Christopher Mahoney joined Sotheby’s as Senior Cataloguer in 1995, after four years with a rare-book auction firm in Manhattan, where he was both Senior Cataloguer and an auctioneer. After Denise Bethel, Mr. Mahoney is one of the most senior experts in the world of American photographs auctions, with twelve years of experience in soliciting, estimating, researching, and cataloguing photographs for auction sale. His wide-ranging knowledge and skills have been essential to the success of all of Sotheby’s record sales in recent years, especially the David Feigenbaum Collection of Southworth & Hawes, for which he was the catalogue’s primary author; the Stephen R. Anaya Collection of Gold Rush Daguerreotypes, where he again authored all of the catalogue entries; Photographs from the Collection of 7-Eleven; two sales of photographs from The Museum of Modern Art; and the recent auction of Berenice Abbott Photographs from the Museum of the City of New York. He has also contributed photographs entries for lots in other Sotheby’s auctions, most notably the collection of photographs in the sale of works by Allen Ginsberg and his circle.
Trained as a photographer, Mr. Mahoney brings to his work not only the eye of a connoisseur, but also an in-depth understanding of photographic processes, papers, technical details, and cameras. His work as a photographer has led him to experiment with both conventional and alternative photographic processes, and to pursue his interest in chronicling the work of contemporary daguerreotypists, of which he is an authority. He has written on various photographic subjects for 21st: The Journal of Contemporary Photography, the Daguerreian Annual, and the PhotoArts website. He has lectured for a variety of institutions and groups, among them the Chrysler Museum in Norfolk, the Portland Museum of Art in Maine, the Springfield Art Museum of Massachusetts, and at other locations in Boston, Seattle, New Jersey, and the Bahamas.
Beth Iskander
Vice President
Specialist
Photographs
Beth Iskander joined Sotheby’s in January 2003, bringing with her a wealth of knowledge and experience from twenty-eight years at Time Inc. As Director of the Time Inc. Picture Collection, one of the largest and most important photographs archives in the world, she oversaw every aspect of the Collection’s 22 million images, from cataloguing to digitization. An authority on some of the 20th-century’s pre-eminent photojournalists—among them Margaret Bourke-White, Alfred Eisenstaedt, W. Eugene Smith, Robert Capa, and Andreas Feininger — Ms. Iskander also served as Director of Photography for the company’s Editorial Services division and was that division’s in-house photographic copyright authority. At her instigation, Time’s online database for photographic syndication was created, as well as a program for de-accessioning images through New York auction houses and galleries. In her long tenure at Time Inc., Ms. Iskander established herself as one of the most knowledgeable people in the business world of modern photography. She has lectured on both photo archiving and electronic photo databases.
Emily Bierman
Junior Specialist
Photographs
Prior to her joining the department in 2007, Ms. Bierman worked at the Middlebury College Museum of Art, International Center of Photography, Neuberger Museum of Art, Katonah Museum of Art, Greenwich Gallery, as well as with another major auction house. Her broad range of activity within the department includes estimating and cataloguing photographs to be offered at auction, essay writing, all aspects of catalogue production, as well as coordinating insurance appraisals. Ms. Bierman has been involved with the department’s numerous important single-owner collections, including Photographs from the Collection of Nancy Richardson, The Quillan Collection of Nineteenth and Twentieth Century Photographs, and most recently Photographs from the Polaroid Collection. Ms. Bierman is a graduate of Middlebury College , Vermont , from which she received a BA in the History of Art and Architecture (Honors) and in Film and Media Cultures.
Olivia Romeo
Administrator
Photographs
Ms. Romeo joined the Photographs Department in 2009 after having worked with her colleagues as a summer intern in the department during Sotheby’s Internship Program in 2008. She previously worked at The Phillips Collection in Washington DC, The Centre Georges Pompidou in Paris, and as a work-scholar at Aperture Foundation in New York. As department administrator, Ms. Romeo manages all administrative matters for the department’s twice-early photographs sales, and in 2010, she played a major role in the preparation of the successful sale, Photographs from the Polaroid Collection. Ms. Romeo is a graduate of the University of Richmond, where she was a double major in Art History and French.
