Photographic Archive With Copyrights to Be Auctioned

The Art Newspaper posted an interesting article on the Milton Greene photo archives which will soon be sold by auction house Profiles in History.  Greene was a celebrity and fashion photographer, and the collection is said to have 75,000 negatives and transparencies.  The collection includes images of Marilyn Monroe, Elizabeth Taylor, Cary Grant, Barbra Streisand, Linda Lovelace.

The interesting part of the sale is the images will be sold along with the copyright. That means the potential future sale of limited edition prints or licensing agreements.  This is a very interesting example and sale for appraisers to be aware of because of the potential for income generation from some of the images.

The Art Newspaper reports

The inclusion of the copyright is a potential boon for any buyer, who could create a new market by printing and selling limited edition prints. By acquiring the copyright, the owner would also be able to license the images for a fee, and control anyone else’s use of them. David Wolf, a New York-based lawyer who specialises in intellectual property says the copyright could be valuable, “depending on the value of the print”. Maddalena says a negative from Greene's archive sold without copyright “could be worth a few thousand [dollars], but with the copyright, the value increases by an exponential number”.

The archive followed an unusual path to the market. In the 1970s, Greene took out a loan using his archive as collateral. “Somehow, some way, a Polish government entity became the debt holder,” Maddalena says. In the 2000s, it demanded repayment, and when the debt wasn’t paid it took ownership of the archive. In 2005 the archive was sold to an anonymous US collector, who contacted Maddalena at the end of last year to arrange the sale.

The auction is divided into 268 lots, and also features images of other celebrities, including Elizabeth Taylor, Cary Grant, Barbra Streisand and the porn star Linda Lovelace.

In November, 238 photos taken by Greene, including shots of Monroe, were auctioned in Poland for a total of around $750,000, according to the Associated Press. Maddalena believes the Monroe images being sold in Los Angeles could bring $1m, but “we couldn’t determine a market value, because there are no comparables. The world will decide.”

Source: The Art Newspaper