Paul Strand's Rebecca photograph leads April 1 sale

Paul Strand's Rebecca is the headline lot of a photography sale at Sotheby's New York on April 1, with a valuation of $300,000-500,000.

Strand was one of a group of boundary pushing artists in the early 1900s who coalesced around the photographer Alfred Stieglitz.

Paul Strand Rebecca
Paul Strand took hundreds of photographs of his wife Rebecca

The present lot is one of a number of photographs Strand took of his wife Rebecca Salsbury between 1920 and 1932 (when they divorced).

Author Belinda Rathbone explained in an essay on the series: "Compared with his earlier subject matter these portraits of Rebecca seem effortlessly arranged; most important, they succeed in coalescing completely his art and his intimate life…

"Never again would Strand use his art to explore the facets of an intimate relationship".

A complete set of Nicholas Nixon's The Brown Sisters is valued at $200,000-300,000.

The images were taken between 1974 and 2013. Nixon had married Bebe (one of the sisters) in 1973 and took the first  photograph at a family gathering the following year. This became an annual tradition.

One Brown Sisters portfolio sold for $180,000 at Sotheby's New York in 2005.

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