The Polaroid Collection auction

9 Part Self Portrait Chuck Close, 1987 collage of large-format Polapan prints Estimate: $50,000-$70,000 Close began using photographs as sketches for painting. The images that emerged from Polaroid’s 20x24in camera convinced him that this was a medium with its own unique expressive possibilities. Larger than most people’s bodies, his head is an object of stupefied wonder: a man confronts the goggle-eyed oddity and absurdity of his own existence Photograph: Chuck Close/Courtesy Sotheby's New York Chicago (Trees in Snow) Harry Callahan Gelatin silver print Est: $70,000-$100,000 Photograph: Harry Callahan/Courtesy Sotheby's New York Sierra Nevada from Lone Pine, California (Winter Sunrise) Ansel Adams, 1944 Est: $300,000-$500,000 David Hockney once said he couldn’t look at any photograph for more than 30 seconds. This one can be gazed at for as long as it would take you to cross the fields, meander up the foothills, and climb those mountains. American space is different: there is more of it, and heaven is just beyond the horizon Photograph: Ansel Adams/Courtesy Sotheby's New York Photograph: Ansel Adams/guardian.co.uk El Captain – Winter Ansel Adams From a Polaroid type 55 negative Est: $10,000-$15,000 Photograph: Ansel Adams/Courtesy Sotheby's New York Self-Portrait (Grimace) Andy Warhol, 1979 Large-format Polaroid Polacolor print Est: $10,000-$15,000 Close’s self-portrait – monumental in size, sculpturally severe in expression – shows off the capacity of Polaroid’s largest camera. Warhol uses a smaller camera to reduce his face to a fuzzy, leering, acne-pocked mask. Close poses for eternity; the vampirish Warhol looks as if he were remembering, with a shudder, what he looked like when alive Photograph: Andy Warhol/Courtesy Sotheby's New York Photograph: Andy Warhol/guardian.co.uk Panorama Lucas Samaras Composition of forty 1⁄2–1 inch strips of Polaroid Type 808 prints Est: $6,000-$9,000 Photograph: Lucas Samaras/Courtesy Sotheby's New York Photograph: Lucas Samaras/guardian.co.uk Moonrise, Hernandez, New Mexico Ansel Adams Mural-size gelatin silver print Est: $250,000-$350,000 Photograph: Ansel Adams/Courtesy Sotheby's New York Photograph: Ansel Adams/guardian.co.uk Farrah Fawcett Andy Warhol Polacolor Type 108 print Est: $5,000-$7,000 Photograph: Andy Warhol/Courtesy Sotheby's New York Junked Car, Old Lyme, Connecticut Walker Evans, 1973-4 From a Polaroid Type 105 negative Est: $1,500-$2,500 Taken at the end of his life, Evans’s Polaroids brood morbidly over decay. It’s almost a relief, after the tacky consumerist trophies of Rauschenberg and Levinthal, to see nature gobbling up the corroded remnants of culture Photograph: Walker Evans/Courtesy Sotheby's New York North Carolina (from the Bleacher series) Robert Rauschenberg, 1991 Large-format Polapan print Est: $20,000-$30,000 What do sanitary pads – euphemised here as ‘napkins’ – and a drink made from sassafras have in common? Nothing at all, which is why Rauschenberg combined them, brushing on a coat of kitchen bleach to help them blend. Adams thought of America as one enormous national park; for Rauschenberg it was an overstocked, casually wasteful supermarket Photograph: Robert Rauschenberg/Courtesy Sotheby's New York Photograph: Robert Rauschenberg/guardian.co.uk Nude in Pumps Helmut Newton, c.1975 Polaroid SX-70 print Est: $5,000-$7,000 Polaroids, usually taken by holidaymakers with loved ones as their subjects, have a privileged intimacy. But this is no private memento: it’s a geometrical arrangement of human limbs, and the gloved hand that reaches for the groin is there to contribute to the diagram, not to produce a spasm of solitary pleasure Photograph: Helmut Newton/Courtesy Sotheby's New York Photograph: Helmut Newton/guardian.co.uk Photo-transformation Lucas Samaras Manipulated Polaroid SX-70 print Est: $6,000-$9,000 Photograph: Lucas Samaras/Courtesy Sotheby's New York Photo-Transformation Lucas Samaras Polaroid SX70 print Est: $6,000-$9,000 Photograph: Lucas Samaras/Courtesy Sotheby's New York Ken Moody (with Palm Leaf) Robert Mapplethorpe, c1984 Unique large-format Polaroid Polacolor print Est: $5,000-$7,000 A wicked specimen of political incorrectness, which explains why Mapplethorpe was disliked by liberals as well as conservatives. A black male body is frankly displayed for delectation, the Polaroid film even giving his skin a sheen of midnight blue. And since spears are not readily available in Greenwich Village, this urban tribesman brandishes a palm frond Photograph: Robert Mapplethorpe/Courtesy Sotheby's New York Photograph: Robert Mapplethorpe/guardian.co.uk Avalanche William Wegman, 1982 Large-format Polacolor print Est: $7,000-$10,000 Wegman – who has almost as many prints as Adams in the sale – stages the sublime in his own solemnly jokey way. Adams celebrates nature’s endurance by photographing peaks of granite in Yosemite during snowstorms; Wegman tips a dry shower of flour on to his Weimaraner Man Ray, who is as stoically immobile as any mountain Photograph: William Wegman/Courtesy Sotheby's New York Photograph: William Wegman/guardian.co.uk Study from Modern Romance David Levinthal, 1983-85 One of five unique Polaroid SX 70 prints Est: $5,000-$7,000 Photograph: David Levinthal/Courtesy Sotheby's New York Photograph: David Levinthall/guardian.co.uk Sylvester Stallone Andy Warhol Polacolor Type 108 print Est: $5,000-$7,000 Photograph: Andy Warhol/Courtesy Sotheby's New York Sulfite Crystals Ansel Adams, 1962 From a Polaroid Type 55 negative Est: $10,000-$15,000 Here the Polaroid positive/negative film studies its own origins. After exposure, the sodium sulfite in these crystals washed away the black backing on the acetate film. Adams was photographing the science that made his art possible Photograph: Ansel Adams/Courtesy Sotheby's New York Photograph: Ansel Adams/guardian.co.uk Untitled (from the Wild West series) David Levinthal, 1988 Unique large-format Polacolor print Est: $5,000-$7,000 Another Wild West, very unlike that of Adams – not God’s own country, freshly created, but a battlefield where stick figures re-enact a cavalry charge and culture wages war on unspoilt nature. The Polaroid SX-70 was often described as a toy, and here it is trained on some of its fellow playthings Photograph: David Levinthal/Courtesy Sotheby's New York Photograph: David Levinthal/guardian.co.uk