Photographs from the Henry Buhl Collection, known as A Show of Hands due to the collection’s theme, were sold at Sotheby’s NYC on December 12 and 13. Stephen Perloff, Editor of The Photo Review, interviewed Mr. Buhl last week.

How and when did you begin collecting? What was the first photograph you bought? In 1993 I bought Alfred Stieglitz's gelatin silver print from 1920 of Georgia O'Keefe's hands titled Hands and Thimble [row 2, right]. This was one of the first significant photographs that I acquired and the work that I consider to be the inspiration behind the "hand" theme. It is the only gelatin silver print of this work; the others that Stieglitz made were all palladium or palladium-platinum prints. It has since become the icon of the collection.

How did you come to concentrate on collecting photographs of hands? After buying the Stieglitz, I waited about six months before making my next acquisition. I then started buying works by only famous photographers, e.g., Irving Penn, Richard Avedon, etc. Eventually I came to recognize a common subject in all of the works, the human hand, and thus began the theme of the collection.

Record prices were made for Herbert Bayer, Lonely Metropolitan (l) and Laszlo Moholy-Nagy, Fotogramm (c), each of which sold for $1,482,500. These two results tie for the third highest price for a classic photograph at auction. Artist records were set for photographs by Herbert Bayer, El Lissitzky, Lee Miller (r), Peter Hujar, Helen Levitt, Man Ray, and Gabriel Orozco.