NY Art Photo Frenzy

Photographs totalling £16.6 million were sold last week in New York - the highest total for any series of photographs at auction. New York's Pace/MacGill Gallery broke the record for a single photograph at auction, paying £467,000 at Sotheby's for a 1920s vintage print by Edward Weston. Woman in a Moroccan Palace by Irving Penn (1951) fetched £175,000 At Christie's, records tumbled for Henri Cartier-Bresson, Brassaï, Irving Penn, Richard Avedon and Robert Mapplethorpe. Experts attributed the expanding market to a new wave of buyers, including US hedge-fund managers. "Some of the buying lacked connoisseurship," commented one dealer. For the full story - click the title Irish Art