Marks of Honor

Here are some images of my Marks of Honor photo-book homage to William Eggleston. First shown in May at FOAM in Amsterdam, the exhibition opens July 17 at Kaune Sudendorf Gallery in Cologne.

Kodak to Kill Kodachrome

The Eastman Kodak Company announced Monday it would retire Kodachrome, its oldest film stock, because of declining customer demand in a digital age.

It was the world’s first commercially successful color film, immortalized in Mr. Simon’s song in 1973: “They give us those nice bright colors. They give us the greens of summers. Makes you think all the world’s a sunny day. ... So, Mama, don’t take my Kodachrome away.”

It enjoyed its heyday in the 1950s and ’60s, but in recent years sales have dropped to just a fraction of 1 percent of the company’s total sales of still-picture films.

“It really has become kind of an icon,” said Mary Jane Hellyar, the departing president of Kodak’s Film, Photofinishing and Entertainment Group.

The company, which is based in Rochester, now gets about 70 percent of its revenue from its digital business, but plans to stay in the film business “as far into the future as possible,” Ms. Hellyar said.

Kodak has seven new professional still films and several new motion picture films introduced in the last few years.

Kodachrome was favored by still and movie photographers for its rich but realistic tones, vibrant colors and durability.

It was the basis not only for countless family slide shows but also for world-renowned images, including Abraham Zapruder’s 8-millimeter reel of President John F. Kennedy’s assassination on Nov. 22, 1963.

The widely recognized portrait of an Afghan refugee girl that appeared on the cover of National Geographic in 1985, taken by Steve McCurry, was shot on Kodachrome. At Kodak’s request, Mr. McCurry will shoot one of the last rolls of Kodachrome film and donate the images to the George Eastman House museum in Rochester, which honors the company’s founder.

Unlike any other color film, Kodachrome, introduced 74 years ago, is purely black and white when exposed. The three primary colors that mix to form the spectrum are added in three development steps rather than built into its layers. Because of the complexity, only Dwayne’s Photo, in Parsons, Kan., still processes Kodachrome film. The lab has agreed to continue through 2010, Kodak said.

On Beattie's book blog....

YOU WON’T BE WITH ME TOMORROW
A new photo-book from Harvey Benge

Working between Auckland and Paris, photographer Harvey Benge’s photographic practice investigates the idea of parallel lives, when one thing is happening here, something else is happening over there. Laced with humour and irony Benge’s pictures remind us of just how strange the world is.
Benge’s German publisher Markus Schaden comments, "One of the few photographers today who does as much for the poetics as for the philosophy of photography."

With a passion for the photo-book Benge is firmly of the opinion that photography works best in book form where narratives and visual associations can be explored. Not surprisingly then, since the early 1990’s, with publishers in France, Britain and Germany, Benge has produced over fifteen photo-books.

His latest book YOU WON’T BE WITH ME TOMORROW is a self-published artist’s book under his own imprint FAQEDITIONS. The 64 page book has been published in a limited edition of only 100 copies, each numbered and signed. It has just been launched in conjunction with Benge’s current exhibition at Auckland’s Bath Street Gallery.

YOU WON’T BE WITH ME TOMORROW is an intensely personal book and a meditation on loss and the inevitability of change. Benge’s friend “S” a central figure in the book writes, “the whole book feels like solitude… like the peace you feel when you walk alone… beautiful peace but also lonely…mournful.”
And Michael Gifkins comments, “this book starts its life simply as a book of photos. It becomes much more than this, chiefly because of the author’s careful attention to the meaning of his own work. But then it becomes much more again than even he intends, and even as we read it, which is always the measure of art.”

YOU WON’T BE WITH ME TOMORROW is published by FAQEDITIONS
PO Box 47 373 Ponsonby, Auckland 1144, New Zealand.
ISBN 978-0-473-15146-1
Edition limited to 100 signed and numbered copies
(RRP NZ$80 incl.gst)

Available at Parsons Bookshop, Auckland, selected other bookshops
or enquire from the publisher: harvey@harveybenge.com

Bath Street show, TJ McNamara writes

New Zealand Herald, June 13

Harvey Benge, whose work is at the Bath Street Gallery, is a photographer who goes about the world recording what his alert and trained eye sees. Usually his work is published in books but for the festival the gallery is showing a large frieze originally commissioned by Dunedin Art Gallery.

This spectacular work, which occupies one long wall, is made of 240 A3-sized digital prints with few repetitions. In his travels the artist has spotted many things often paradoxically juxtaposed. Bikes and rubbish, a luxurious swimming pool and mountains beyond, a single cloud in a blue sky, airports, an advertisement for a porn theatre, crowds at the Louvre, sex shops and soap. It shows the variety of the world from sleaze to domesticity and it is held together by bright tones of red as accents. One of the most attractive photographs is simply colourful plastic pegs on a lawn strewn with autumn leaves. Certainly the effect of this huge endeavour is greater than the sum of its parts. The show is accompanied by bigger photographs which seem much more conventional by comparison although each has a small, disturbing quirk. Sculptural plaster of Paris hands are rendered strange by the layer of dust on them and a tidy image of a blond woman viewed from behind is given a little spin in the oblique glimpse of a piercing through her lower lip.

Venice - The 53rd Biennale

Michael Kimmelman writes in last Wednesday’s New York Times.

“Organized by Daniel Birnbaum, this 53rd version of the venerable Biennale is tidy, disciplined, cautious and unremarkable. If any show can be said to reflect a larger state of affairs in art now, this one suggests a somewhat dull, deflated contemporary art world, professionalized to a fault, in search of a fresh consensus. It has prompted the predictable cooing from wishful insiders, burbling vaguely about newfound introspection and gravity.

The Biennale’s ostensible theme is “making worlds.” Mr. Birnbaum has explained in a news release that this means “an exhibition driven by the aspiration to explore worlds around us as well as worlds ahead,” which hardly explains anything at all, of course.... Mr. Birnbaum has also said his show is “about possible new beginnings,” to which end he has included works by the Gutai group, Japanese avant-gardists from the 1950s and ’60s; Lygia Pape, the Brazilian artist who came to prominence around the same time; and Gordon Matta-Clark, the short-lived American iconoclast of the 1970s. The art crowd gladly talked them all up, as if they were news.

But the Biennale is meant to be a survey of new art, and while conscientious young artists now dutifully seem to raise all the right questions about urbanism, polyglot society and political activism, their answers look domesticated and already familiar. They look like other art-school-trained art, you might say, which is exactly what Pape and Matta-Clark and the Gutai group didn’t want their work to look like, never mind that the art market ultimately found a way to make a buck off what they did, as it does nearly everything, eventually."

Makes me feel just a little better about being stuck in Auckland in winter.....

Photography Sell-Out, Gus Fisher Gallery

This is a reposting from photoforum's blog site, with text and pictures by John B Turner.... thanks John.

Photographs from last night’s ‘Photography Sell-Out’ at the Gus Fisher Gallery, Shortland Street, Auckland, at which an estimated crowd of around 400 lined up to purchase photographs by notable practitioners for $15 a print. The idea for this event, organised by Craig Hilton, was for 15 photographers each to provide a 15 prints for sale at bargain basement prices. In the end 17 invited photographers participated: Mark Adams, Edith Amituanai, Fiona Amundsen, Harvey Benge, Conor Clarke, John Collie, Jennifer French, Darren Glass, Sam Hartnett, Rebecca Hobbs, Jae Hoon Lee, Ian Macdonald, Fiona Pardington, Haruhiko Sameshima, Ann Shelton, Shigeru Takato, and Ans Westra. Some provided sets of the same image, while others, like Ans Westra, proffered 15 different images (proof sheets in her case). Harnett provided both a print and CD of work, while Shelton provided a dyptych (for $30).

A long queue formed down Shortland Street from the entrance to the gallery which opened at 6pm sharp to let in the expectant but patient crowd. The work was fully sold out in just over an hour, grossing just over $4,500, at what must be one of the most unusual events at this year’s Auckland Festival of Photography.

Bath Street Gallery BIG WORK

Here is an installation picture of my BIG WORK at Bath Street Gallery, Auckland.

Still on the subject of sex.... it seems it still sells!

Paris tonight! Pumpin' House Style and Topless! Ok?

What Michael said...

Here is the transcript of what Michael Gifkins had to say at my exhibition opening and the launch of my new book YOU WON'T BE WITH ME TOMORROW at Bath Street Gallery last Tuesday night.

"The reason Harvey asked me to launch his new book tonight is not because I know anything about photography. What I know is what Harvey has told me so on that basis it would be like reading out Harvey’s own PR release.

There is a truism though, which says a picture is worth a thousand words. On that basis I estimate that all over Auckland tonight the equivalent of perhaps five new novels are being launched and as a literary agent I do know a small amount about books.

Incidentally, you may have noticed that Harvey has just written War and Peace on the gallery’s southern wall.

You might ask yourself, why does a photographer choose primarily to make books of his photos rather than simply place them on gallery walls?

This is not the same thing as a curatorial retrospective accompanied by a book. The kind of book that Harvey invites us to enjoy is an all-new, artist-made thing, which is to be read according to quite specific rules.

First, it has a title – this book is called You Won’t Be With Me Tomorrow. As with a novel, the title is not merely descriptive of content – it resonates with that content, tells us how to read it. Harvey told me at dinner on Sunday that the average man thinks of sex once every seven seconds. It may have been seven minutes, but I immediately thought, thank God that the corollary isn’t true – that a woman thinks of sex every seven seconds.

Then I thought that perhaps Harvey should get out more.

But he went on to say – about this book – that it deals with the next stage within relationships after that seven-second urgency has been lost. In other words, if this is not a sad book, then it is certainly a poignant one.

Books also impose a mode of reading. As an English speaker, the impulse is to “read” a book from start to finish – in other words, to discover the narrative that the images cumulatively suggest. In photographic terms, each double page spread plays one picture of against another. So the editing of the book becomes hugely important – especially when the photographer himself is the editor. Why this order, and not another? Why this juxtaposition of one photo with the one on the page opposite? A lot can be explained in the relatively simplistic terms of a photographic critique – resonances of colour/form/line. But then too there are resonances of ideas, and as the book progresses we cannot help but feel that the author – the photographer – has something to tell us.

What?

We notice the recurrence of pictures of three women whom a police investigation would establish as “persons of interest”. We might choose to call them beautiful. We might want to label them as “the woman in the photographer’s life” and I’m sure Harvey would confess to this. But why the sadness/the longing/the poignancy of these and other images? Why the sense of spiritual desolation? What is all this white noise from colour’s existential vacuum? Harvey the photographer has taken the photos and then Harvey the editor has arranged them to tell us something.

If this was all there was to it, it would not be quite enough. But I suggest it goes beyond Harvey’s own intention for his images – or at least beyond his conscious intention. Who is the man with the bandaged leg? It’s Harvey, of course. But Harvey doesn’t know about Philoctetes, who 2500 years ago was one of the many suitors of Helen of Troy, the most beautiful woman in the world. Philoctetes achieved an injury exactly the same as this and it smelled terribly when the bandages came off. And how does this photo relate to my favourite in the book – and on the wall – of the bandaged woman whose arm twists up her own back to show us her tattoo of an anchor? Who has injured whom? Does love have to be like nuclear war, always resulting in mutually assured destruction?

This book starts its life simply as a book of photos. It becomes much more than this, chiefly because of the author’s careful attention to the meaning of his own work. But then it also becomes much more again than even he intends, and even as we read it, which is always the measure of art."

Philoctetes and me

In the absence of a publisher, literary agent and friend Michael Gifkins spoke with eloquence at Bath Street Gallery last night to launch my new photo-book YOU WON'T BE WITH ME TOMORROW.
Michael, as ever acutely observant, spoke of the similarity between the books photograph of my bandaged leg and this image of Greek hero Philoctetes, who in Greek mythology was bitten by a snake. I think Michael was trying to say that perhaps it wasn't an anchor chain I'd tripped over but was a snake. He might be right.

Michael's post-script comment to this post is not postable or printable!

Auckland - Photography Sell-Out

Next Tuesday night June 9, it's photography sell-out time at the Gus Fisher gallery. A lot of photography for not much!

Editing - some thoughts

I watched David Mamet's film Red Belt (2008) last night. Mamet is both a film writer and director whose work I like a lot. Remembering that I have a little book of his, On Directing Film, written in 1991, I re-read Mamet's thoughts about the folly of rushing into visual / pictorial solutions. His advice, before rushing into anything is to understand what the scene means (read picture in photo terms) and to understand the progression of the work. He quotes Hemmingway who said, "write the story, take out all the good lines, and see if it still works". Mamet goes on to say that a work only gets better by learning to cut the ornamental, the narrative, and especially the deeply felt and meaningful. What remains? The story remains. Photo-book editors could think about this, I include myself here. Shoot the pictures, edit, make a sequence, take out all the good images and see if what remains works.

Auckland Public Library - The Photo Book

At 2pm tomorrow, Sunday May 31st, at Auckland's Central Public Library I will be talking about the photo-book. Among other things, how the photo-book has become an important and lasting vehicle for the presentation of photographic series and how it has become a significant rival and alternative to the showing of photographs on the gallery wall. I will also be talking about and showing my new book YOU WON'T BE WITH ME TOMORROW. The picture here shows some of the photo-books I've made since my first in 1993.

Bath Street Gallery - BIG WORK

And here is the BIG WORK which I will install at Bath Street. First show at the Dunedin Public Art Gallery in 2002, it consists of 240, A3 prints hung together to make an installation 1.8 x 16.8 m.

Auckland, Bath Street Gallery - BIG WORK, small works

Here are five of the small works that I will show at my Bath Street Gallery show which opens Tuesday of next week, June 2. The works, each in an edition of five measure 640 x 480 mm. They include images made in Auckland, Paris and Genoa together with two works made in Auckland from my "S" series. These works are all from my new book work YOU WON'T BE WITH ME TOMORROW, to be launched at Bath Street on Tuesday night. This artist book, under my own imprint FAQEDITIONS has been produced in a limited edition of 100 copies, each signed and numbered.

Paris - La Force de l'Art

Last chance this weekend to see LA FORCE DE L'ART, La triennale de l'art en France, showing in the magnificent Grand Palais in Avenue Winston Churchill. If the art doesn't get you the building will. It was at the first Triennale in 2006 where I made a number of the portraits for my book I LOOK AT YOU, YOU LOOK AT ME. How time flies.....

Bill Jay dies on May 10th

CURATOR, AUTHOR AND PHOTOGRAPHER
BILL JAY PASSES AWAY IN HIS SLEEP

"Everything about photography, everything I write about photography, everything I photograph has a feedback system which says: This is what it's like to be human."--Bill Jay in a 2007 interview by Darius Himes of the Photo District News.

Bill Jay passed away in his sleep in Costa Rica Sunday night, May 10th. As Tucson photography dealer Terry Etherton noted in an email to fellow AIPAD photography dealers, "For those of you who knew Bill, you understand what a huge loss this is to the photography world."

Bill Jay began his career in the U.K. His first article to appear in print was published in "Practical Photography" magazine, then the largest circulation monthly in Europe, when he was only 19 years old. It was the start of career writing about the photography medium that extended over more than 40 years.

He later became the first director of photography at the Institute of Contemporary Arts and was the first editor/director of "Creative Camera" magazine from 1968-1969. In 1970 he founded and edited a new London-based journal, "Album". It only survived for one year, 12 issues.

To pay the bill during this early period, he was also picture editor of a large circulation news/feature magazine and the European manager of an international picture agency. He left England in 1972 to come to the U.S.

After studying with Beaumont Newhall and Van Deren Coke at the University of New Mexico, he founded the program of photographic studies at Arizona State University, where he taught history and criticism classes for 25 years.

Bill Jay published over 400 articles and was the author of more than 20 books on the history and criticism of photography. Most of these books have been published with Chris Pichler of Nazraeli Press, a former student of Jay's. Some
of his recent titles include: Cyanide and Spirits: an inside-out view of early photography; Occam's razor: an outside-in view of contemporary photography; USA Photography Guide; Bernard Shaw: On Photography; Negative/Positive: a philosophy
of photography; 61 Pimlico; Sun in the Blood of the Cat; Men Like Me, etc.

Jay was also frequently asked to contribute essays to monographs by well-known photographers, such as Jerry Uelsmann, Bill Brandt, Michael Kenna and Bruce Barnbaum.

Until his retirement, Bill Jay was a frequent guest lecturer at symposia and conferences and at colleges and universities in England and Europe, as well as throughout the U.S.

His own photographs have been widely published and exhibited, including a solo show at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. His previous monograph, "Photographers Photographed", included a selection of the thousands of portraits
he has taken of prominent individuals of the medium of photography, a database of which is located at the Center of Creative Photography, which also houses his research archives.

The photograph is one I made of Martin Parr and Bill Jay at the Wellington Photography Festival

Paris May 1st

Spring day in Paris today..... how pleasant to be in the gardens at Palais-Royal

Photography Sell-Out

At Auckland's Gus Fisher Gallery on Tuesday June 9 from 6 to 8pm seventeen photographers will each present an edition of 15, each work to be sold for $15. Part piss-take, part conceptual and creative challenge the event has already raised the hackles of some in the "art business" who feel that the whole affair is indeed a sell-out. I'm sure it will be!
Photographers include Mark Adams, John Lyall, Ian Macdonald, Fiona Partington, Haru Sameshima, Ann Shelton and Ans Westra.
My work is called $15 Scream, After Baldessari (and with thanks to Edvard Munch).

William Eggleston's Paris

William Eggleston is exhibiting his "Paris" pictures at the Fondation Cartier pour l'art contemporain (until June 21). For the last three years, Eggleston has photographed Paris as part of a commission for Fondation Cartier. The "Paris" series marks his second solo show at the Fondation Cartier and follows two other Cartier commissions "Deserts" (2000) and one on "Kyoto (2001). The exhibition also includes a rare look at the photographer's drawings, some of which are juxtaposed with his photographs.
Eggleston's photographs are most closely associated with the American South. His work is characterized by his observation of the banal and ordinary. Not surprisingly Eggleston's Paris series avoids the usual cliches. Many of his pictures look like they could have been taken anywhere. Says Eggleston "I approached it as if it is just anywhere...You're not sure: is this Paris, Mexico City, elsewhere? I didn't change my style for Paris. I just did as always, used the same approach."
"When people ask me what I do," says Eggleston "I say that I am taking pictures of life today." Many of the images exhibited at the Cartier Fondation such as two children playing at a café, motorcycles at a stoplight, anonymous passers-by express Eggleston's concern for the everyday.
The photographer has often said that he attempts to photograph "democratically," which means for Eggleston that everything may potentially be an interesting picture and that every element within the photo should be of equal importance.
Many of Eggleston's pictures have a touch of melancholy. The photographer once described his approach saying "I want an absence of too much prettiness...Not a complete absence of it, but just like coffee, pictures can get too sweet."
Does this exhibition mark the end of photographing Paris for Eggleston? "After three years working at it on and off, I still feel I have just barely begun. It's a big project...I hope it will be my crowning achievement."

"Willam Eggleston Paris" to June 21, 2009, Fondation Cartier pour l'art contemporain, 261, Blvd. Raspail, 75014 Paris. Open daily (except Mondays) 11-8pm. Tues eves. to 10pm.

Christie's London Photo Book Sale May 19th

You can view the catalogue for Christie's Photo Book sale on line at http://bit.ly/PRUsX. The sale is a treasure trove of photo book works and flipping through the catalogue at random you will find these listings:
Stephen Shore's Uncommon Places published in 1982, this is the deluxe issue, one of 100 signed copies with a signed print. Estimate US$8,700 - $13,000.
There is also a copy of Paul Graham's book A1. The Great North Road, 1983. A First edition. And a supporting quote from Parr and Badger, Graham 'has continually pushed the boundaries of documentary practice'. Cf. The Photobook, vol. II, pp.55, 291. Estimate US$580 - $870

Sydney, looking West

Here's a picture I made in Sydney last week..... looking west over the Tasman Sea from the walk from South Head Lighthouse to the Gap.
Sydney.com has this to say about the walk...."Perhaps the most magnificent harbourside walk is one that starts at The Gap, a spectacular ocean cliff at Watsons Bay, near South Head. It winds its way down through Vaucluse, meanders through Watsons Bay and takes you all the way up to the lighthouse at South Head. The Gap is famous not so much for its natural scenic beauty, but for more bizarre reasons: a reported 20-30 people suicide each year by leaping from The Gaps on to the rocks below. Dozens slip from the rocks, which makes it a dangerous place to be if you don't keep to the paths and stay behind the barriers.

Attachment. Impermanence. Loss.

I'm working on a new series of pictures dealing with the issues of attachment, impermanence and loss. I have a book work in mind with roughly sixty pictures, here are four so far....

William Carlos Williams - Between Walls

I came across this short, evocative poem by William Carlos Williams facing the essay by Sandra S Phillips in her introduction to Henry Wessel's book published by Steidl.... this prompted me to think of my wanderings a few weekends ago around the abandoned hospital complex at Hanmer Springs. Here is a picture I made at the Hanmer Hopsital, not the back wings but still strange and silent. Things growing but nothing happening.....

Between Walls

the back wings
of the

hopsital where
nothing

will grow lie
cinders

in which shine
the broken

pieces of a green
bottle

William Carlos Williams

The Most Photographed Barn In America

I've always enjoyed this passage from De DeLillo's book White Noise, about the Most Photographed Barn In America. An excuse to post my cliched image of the Red Barn I found at Hanmer Springs a thermal resort town a couple of hours out of Christchurch in NZ's South Island.

An excerpt from White Noise by Don DeLillo:

Several days later Murray asked me about a tourist attraction known as the most photographed barn in America. We drove 22 miles into the country around Farmington. There were meadows and apple orchards. White fences trailed through the rolling fields. Soon the signs started appearing. THE MOST PHOTOGRAPHED BARN IN AMERICA. We counted five signs before we reached the site. There were 40 cars and a tour bus in the makeshift lot. We walked along a cowpath to the slightly elevated spot set aside for viewing and photographing. All the people had cameras; some had tripods, telephoto lenses, filter kits. A man in a booth sold postcards and slides -- pictures of the barn taken from the elevated spot. We stood near a grove of trees and watched the photographers. Murray maintained a prolonged silence, occasionally scrawling some notes in a little book.

"No one sees the barn," he said finally.

A long silence followed.

"Once you've seen the signs about the barn, it becomes impossible to see the barn."

He fell silent once more. People with cameras left the elevated site, replaced by others.

We're not here to capture an image, we're here to maintain one. Every photograph reinforces the aura. Can you feel it, Jack? An accumulation of nameless energies."

There was an extended silence. The man in the booth sold postcards and slides.

"Being here is a kind of spiritual surrender. We see only what the others see. The thousands who were here in the past, those who will come in the future. We've agreed to be part of a collective perception. It literally colors our vision. A religious experience in a way, like all tourism."

Another silence ensued.

"They are taking pictures of taking pictures," he said.

He did not speak for a while. We listened to the incessant clicking of shutter release buttons, the rustling crank of levers that advanced the film.

"What was the barn like before it was photographed?" he said. "What did it look like, how was it different from the other barns, how was it similar to other barns?"

Clouds....

Clouds in my street this morning, Good Friday 2009 and in Paris, May 2008. I wonder if there is a connection?

Happy Easter!

Auckland - Webbs auction, Contemporary Art and Modern Design, May 12th

My work, Victory of the Trivial, Number 12 is included in Webbs contemporary art auction on May 12. The photograph measures 60 x 48 cm and is number one from an edition of five and is a pigment print on photographic paper.

Auckland - photoforum fundraising auction

Webbs are conducting a fundraising auction for photoforum on Tuesday April 17th at 7pm. I have put a work in the auction, it is from my book A Short History of Photography and is the image Bangkok 2001 (after Tillmans). The work is 36 x 24.8 cm, a pigment print on archival matt paper and is number one from an edition of three.

Paris is HOME

Working on a small edition of about sixty pictures, dealing with HOME and what that means to me.... although home is in reality located in the head and has less to do with location..... Paris is home to me.... here are four pictures and like much of my work they could anywhere.

Auckland - cat story

Following my yesterdays "cat post" and despite being chastised by a photographer friend in Minnesota for stealing his cat material I could not resist making these pictures this morning. One to show if nothing more, that the cat idea is well and truly dead!

Auckland - Have You Seen This Cat?

Since Alec Soth was here in January and started to photography Lost Cat posters, they seem to be cropping up everywhere. The posters not the cats! Here is one I photographed this morning on my coffee mission. Go figure....

New York - photography sale season

It's spring photography sale time in New York. Sotheby's have just posted the results of their sale this last Monday. The sale realised US$2,384,690. There were several Eggleston photographs in the sale. This picture, Peaches! Near Greenville, Mississippi, has always grabbed me. I first saw it in Eggleston's book Ancient and Modern, 1992. The image is a dye-transfer print, 30.8 x 47.6 cm, signed by Eggleston in pencil and with a numerical stamp on the reverse, matted, framed, 1971, printed no later than 1980 and it came from the collection of the Bank of America. Pre-sale estimate was 50,000 - 70,000 USD. Sold for 80,000 USD, including buyer's premium. Not bad going!