"Will there be an André Kertész at the same price at every photo auction," I ask Kieselbach Gallery expert Gábor Einspach. In the gallery's spring photo auction, another Kertész photograph, of a school courtyard in Paris, was put on the block for exactly the same starting price - HUF 1.6 million - as the current photograph, entitled At The News Stand. Whether the photograph will go for double, or even more, of its starting price, depends on many things, Einspach tells me.
We do know that the Kertész photograph sold in the spring found its way into a serious private collection. Let's hope that the collectors who have, until now, paid this much only for 20th century paintings, will form an affection for photography. We also saw at the auction in spring that some bidders were only interested in the lots of contemporary photographs, but there were also those with an eye for only the historical photographs. The finest historical photograph in the current auction is Károly Escher's Biatorbágy. The Valley of Horror, which shows the aftermath of a train that has fallen from a trestle in a city near Budapest. The photograph was published in the newspaper Pesti Napló on September 20, 1931, and it also became part of a six-page memorial booklet published later. Going back to the first auction, there was one other group of bidders - in addition to the classic collectors, the contemporary collectors and the historical collectors - that surprised us: the interior decorators. That is, those bidders who saw in the art photographs - which could be had for HUF 50,000-100,000 - a high quality poster.
Portrait collectors will find much at the November sale, considering the offering of portraits of such famous Hungarians as Pál Jávor, Katalin Karádi, Antal Páger, Zoltán Kodály and Béla Kádár. Collectors of photographs of dancers will be pleased to see the images of Károly Demeter and Dénes Rónai among the lots; and those interested in sociology will welcome Péter Korniss's pictures of traditional masks and György Stalter's pictures of village life.
