When Diane Keaton died last October, I wrote about the immense photographic legacy that ran alongside her acting career. Her nine books, her rescued archives, her decades of work with a Rolleiflex that most people never knew about. Now, with the results in from Bonhams' four-part auction of her estate, it's clear that collectors understood something critics are still catching up to.
The sale totalled $4.2 million, with 100% of 700-plus lots sold, but some of the most telling results came not from the sale of her Annie Hall script or her Ralph Lauren wardrobe, but from her photographs.
Five strips of black and white photobooth prints from the 1970s, taken by Keaton, sold for $14,080: more than 70 times their estimate. Three photobooth photographs she also took herself went for $23,040, more than 57 times estimate. Three mixed media collages she made sold for $14,080, more than 28 times estimate.
And let me be clear. These weren't celebrity ephemera inflated by sentiment. They were photographs, valued as photographs, by bidders who registered from 39 countries.
Photobooth as photographic tool
Look at the photobooth strips above and you understand immediately why. Across five vertical strips, Keaton poses with a pair of high-top sneakers, moving through a sequence of gestures: holding them up, turning them, extending her hand toward the lens, pulling back.
Each frame is slightly different. Each column of four frames reads almost like a contact sheet. The whole thing is composed with an understanding of sequence and movement that feels less like someone mucking about in a photobooth and more like someone who'd absorbed the lessons of Warhol, of Muybridge, of anyone who'd ever thought seriously about time and repetition in a still image.
Indeed, there's a useful parallel here with artist David Hockney's joiners, which I wrote about last week upon the artist's passing. Both Keaton and Hockney were drawn to photography's limitations as much as its possibilities: the frozen moment, the single frame, the fixed perspective.
Hockney's response was to physically collage his way out of the problem. Keaton's photobooth work suggests a simpler, more instinctive solution: let the machine do the sequencing, and then work within that constraint. The strips impose their own rhythm: four frames, fixed interval, fixed focal length. And Keaton choreographs herself within that rhythm, rather than fighting it.
This was always her approach. Her waist-level Rolleiflex shooting forced slowness and deliberation. Her curatorial projects, the rescued hotel interiors, the county coroner's car crash photographs, the 20,000 negatives by an unknown Fort Worth commercial photographer; all showed someone who was interested in what the photographic process itself reveals when you strip away the intention to make art.
The photobooth strips belong to the same instinct: a machine takes the pictures, and what's left is pure performance and timing.
What the auction tells us
The rest of the photographic results from the auction reinforce this narrative. Four black and white photographs of Keaton sold for $56,320, more than 112 times estimate, the highest multiplier in the entire sale. Two colour photographs by Ruvén Afanador went for $20,480, more than 25 times estimate. An Annie Leibovitz print from her Pilgrimage series sold for $32,000, more than 10 times the estimate.
But this wasn't just an auction where anything with a famous name attached gets inflated. The photographic works consistently outperformed the fashion pieces on multiplier terms. And consider that the hat Abraham Lincoln wore the night he was assassinated, also in the collection, sold for $32,000: under two-thirds of the $51,200 total raised by Keaton's own creative work.
Why? Because bidders were making judgments about specific objects, not just buying proximity to a famous life. Keaton always resisted the notion that photography was a secondary activity for her, something she merely did between films. The Bonhams results suggest the market agrees.
What's most striking to me about the photobooth strips particularly is their modesty. They cost a few coins to make, they were printed on the standard paper that comes out of the machine, and they show a woman with some sneakers and a curtain backdrop.
There's no pretension, no expensive equipment, no studio lighting. Just someone who understood framing, sequence and timing well enough to make something genuinely interesting, in the least promising circumstances imaginable. That's not a celebrity's hobby. That's a photographer's eye.
