Someone bought this photo at a yard sale: it could now be worth $1 million!

The story begins, as the best stories do, with someone buying something they didn't fully understand. A young man at a New York yard sale on the northern shores of Lake George is drawn to a wide wooden frame. He pays for it. He takes it home. And only then, looking more closely, does he notice a faint signature in the lower corner: Steichen.

Thankfully, he knew enough to know that mattered. He contacted Sotheby's. The work was confirmed as an original print of Balzac, The Open Sky, 11 P.M., made by Edward Steichen in 1908. It sold that spring for $53,400: a record for the photographer at the time, and among the highest prices ever paid for a photograph.

Jill and Marshall Rose (she a visionary curator and president of the International Center of Photography, he a patron and former chairman emeritus of the New York Public Library) acquired it, took it home, and lived with it for nearly four decades. This April, it comes to auction again, estimated at US$700,000–1 million (£530,000-750,000).

A ghost under the moon

The photo itself is worth pausing over. In late summer 1908, the Luxembourgish American photographer, painter and curator Edward Jean Steichen set up his camera in front of Auguste Rodin's plaster statue of Honoré de Balzac and waited for nightfall. Using exposures of up to an hour under the open moon, he transformed a sculpture into something else entirely. A looming, spectral presence emerging from darkness; less a depiction of a man than a force of nature, barely contained by physical form.

When Rodin saw the prints, he reportedly declared that Steichen would make the world understand his Balzac through photography. High praise from a man not known for sharing credit.

The negative was destroyed during the First World War. There are believed to be just three prints of this scale in existence today. The other two are in institutional collections, so this is probably the last time a private collector will ever have the chance to acquire one.

All of which makes you wonder: how many photos of comparable significance have passed through yard sales, charity shops and skips; unrecognised, unvalued, discarded? Remember, photography spent much of the 20th century being treated as a lesser art form. Prints were not always cared for. Negatives were not always preserved. The culture that produced these images often did not yet understand what it had.

Tina Modotti is a case in point: her Roses, Mexico (1924), also in the Rose Collection and estimated at $250,000–350,000, is now recognised as one of the finest platinum-palladium prints remaining in private hands. Yet during her lifetime, she was better known as a political activist than a photographer. The work outlasted the categorization.

Market correction

In recent years, the market has been correcting this misapprehension, if slowly and unevenly. Steichen's The Pond – Moonlight surpassed $2.9 million in 2006. His Flatiron achieved $11.8 million in 2022, the second-highest price ever paid for a photo at auction.

Edward Weston's Nautilus (Shell) (1927), the third major lot in the Rose Collection at $300,000–500,000, tells a similar story: once considered merely a study in natural form, it is now understood as a benchmark of American modernism, the image that marked Weston's decisive break from pictorialism. The trajectory across all three works is unmistakable. And yet the yard sale story lingers, a reminder of how recently (and how narrowly) these objects were nearly lost altogether.

Balzac, The Open Sky, 11 P.M. comes to auction as the headline lot of the Jill and Marshall Rose Collection, assembled in the 1980s at precisely the moment when the market for early Modernist photography was still emerging. Jill Rose, who served as president of the International Center of Photography and shaped major private collections, recognised what others had not yet grasped: that these images were not documents or curiosities but art, deserving the same scrutiny and stewardship as any painting or sculpture.

The yard sale buyer understood something too, even if he couldn't articulate it. He was drawn to the frame, yes; but he kept the photograph.

The Jill and Marshall Rose Collection will be offered across Sotheby's spring Photographs auctions on 14 and 16 April, and the May Modern Day auction, at Sotheby's new global headquarters at the Breuer Building, 945 Madison Avenue, New York.