A Naked Kate Moss, a Pouty Brigitte Bardot, and Virginia Woolf’s …

by Shane FerroPublished:
November 18, 2011

Rare fashion photos of the supermodels of yore
” including Kate
Moss, Brigitte Bardot, and
Christy Turlington ” were
offered alongside major works by such masters
as Robert Mapplethorpe and
Julia Margaret Cameron at Thursday’s
photography auction at Bonhams
London. Despite the fact that the sell-through rate by
lot was over 40 percent for the £256,000 ($387,000)
sale, many of the most-touted works were hammered down
for sums well above their estimates.

Although as expected there was considerable interest in the
pouty portraits of Moss and Bardot, the top lot of the sale was a
somewhat different glamor shot: Cameron’s 1867 portrait of
Julia Jackson, Cameron’s young niece and favorite
subject, who would later in life come to be known as the mother of
Virginia Woolf. The work sold for
£57,650 ($90,770), a sum considerably above its
£25,000-35,000 ($39,360-55,110) estimate. A photo from
Mapplethorpe’s famous Calla Lily
” a white flower starkly contrasted against a
black background ” sold for £39,650
($62,430), well within the £30,000-50,000
($47,230-78,720) pre-sale estimate.

Of the many celebrity photographs included in the sale, the most
sought-after was Albert Watson’s 1993 portrait of
a nude Moss on the roof of a building in Marrakech, Morocco, for a
German Vogue photoshoot. It fetched £16,250 ($25,580),
at the higher end of its £12,000-18,000
($18,900-28,340) estimate.