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When Diane Keaton died final October, I wrote in regards to the immense photographic legacy that ran alongside her appearing profession. Her 9 books, her rescued archives, her a long time of labor with a Rolleiflex that most individuals by no means knew about. Now, with the ends in from Bonhams’ four-part public sale of her property, it is clear that collectors understood one thing critics are nonetheless catching as much as.
The sale totalled $4.2 million, with 100% of 700-plus tons bought, however a number of the most telling outcomes got here not from the sale of her Annie Hall script or her Ralph Lauren wardrobe, however from her images.
Five strips of black and white photobooth prints from the Nineteen Seventies, taken by Keaton, bought for $14,080: greater than 70 occasions their estimate. Three photobooth images she additionally took herself went for $23,040, greater than 57 occasions estimate. Three blended media collages she made bought for $14,080, greater than 28 occasions estimate.
And let me be clear. These weren’t superstar ephemera inflated by sentiment. They have been images, valued as images, by bidders who registered from 39 international locations.
Look on the photobooth strips above and also you perceive instantly why. Across 5 vertical strips, Keaton poses with a pair of high-top sneakers, shifting via a sequence of gestures: holding them up, turning them, extending her hand towards the lens, pulling again.
Each body is barely totally different. Each column of 4 frames reads nearly like a contact sheet. The entire factor consists with an understanding of sequence and motion that feels much less like somebody mucking about in a photobooth and extra like somebody who’d absorbed the teachings of Warhol, of Muybridge, of anybody who’d ever thought critically about time and repetition in a nonetheless picture.
Indeed, there is a helpful parallel right 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.
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