Christie's Paris to Sell 350 Photos Marking 200 Years of Photography

More than 350 photographs go under the hammer at Christie's Paris on November 13 and 14, as France marks 200 years since Nicéphore Niépce made the oldest known camera photograph. The Roger Therond Collection: A French Passion spans the full arc of French photography, from 19th-century pioneers Nadar and Gustave Le Gray to Man Ray, Henri Cartier-Bresson and Helmut Newton.

The timing is deliberate. The live sales coincide with Paris Photo, the world's largest art fair dedicated to photography, and an online sale runs from November 6 to 17. France is celebrating its bicentennial of the medium, honoring Niépce's View from the Window at Le Gras, captured around 1826–1827 and widely considered the earliest surviving photograph made with a camera.

Who was Roger Therond?

Therond spent half a century as editor of Paris Match, the news magazine that defined French photojournalism. Collecting gave him a different relationship to the medium he worked with daily. Where the magazine chased current events, Therond's private passion was photography's ability to reveal hidden worlds, and he spent decades assembling a collection that reads as a history of the French tradition.

The 19th-century holdings include works by Auguste Belloc, Gustave Le Gray, Édouard Baldus and Nadar — the names that built French photography's founding century. The 20th-century material is broader still: Man Ray, who became a naturalized French citizen, Dora Maar, Brassaï, Cartier-Bresson, Newton and Guy Bourdin. Several of those photographers were personal friends of Therond. This is a collector's collection, built on relationships as much as on connoisseurship.

What is the star lot?

Man Ray's Le Baiser (The Kiss), estimated at $280,000–$392,000 (€250,000–350,000), held particular significance for Therond. The image shows two sitters, photographer Lee Miller on the left, but withholds certainty about who they are or how they relate. Therond used it as a lesson in looking, urging his children to return to it again and again.

His reading of the picture, quoted in Christie's release, is worth repeating in full: "A man and a woman? Two women? Two men wearing make-up? Let us not try to know. Instead, let us half-close our eyes and allow into our field of vision the black-clad Gypsy woman who emerges, beyond the photographer's intention, a dancing silhouette whose skirt billows like a corolla. And where are we? In another world, the world of the strange, the world of the unknown."

What does this change for the market?

A single-owner sale of this depth, timed to both Paris Photo and a national bicentennial, gives the photography market a clear test of demand for classic French material at the top end. The estimate on Le Baiser alone — approaching $400,000 — signals where Christie's expects the collection's center of gravity to sit. Mid-range French modernism from Brassaï, Maar and Bourdin has been steady in recent seasons; a passionate, provenance-rich collection can push it further.

The Therond name carries weight beyond the auction room. A Paris Match editor who befriended the photographers he collected offers buyers provenance with a story attached, and institutions seeking French material during the bicentennial year may compete for key lots.

The results in Paris this November will offer the first full measure of what two centuries of French photography is worth — and whether the bicentennial celebr retion translates into record prices or steady consolidation.