NEW YORK, United States (Reuters) — The iconic works of legendary sports photographer Neil Leifer and his collection of other people’s prints will go up for auction later this week.
The signed images range from from his early start as a 16-year-old at the 1958 NFL Championship to recent photographs and include his celebrated images of boxing great Muhammad Ali.
“My best known picture is Muhammad Ali standing over Sonny Liston — there’s so much luck involved in that and I’m not being modest, believe me, I’ve never met a modest photographer that’s any good, so without sounding modest that picture was better than fifty percent luck, I’d say eighty percent luck,” described Leifer on Tuesday (November 28th) at the offices of Guernsey’s auction house.
“My favorite sports picture I took a year later when Cleveland Williams fought Muhammad Ali. It’s a diamond shaped picture looking straight down on the canvas and it’s the only picture I took in my career that I wouldn’t change. There’s nothing I would change and I’ve been looking at it for years. I usually look at my pictures and there’s always some little tweak I could make to make it even better. That’s the one shot that I would never change. It hangs in my living room and it’s the only picture, and again it’s my collection of other people’s photographs I have, I still have, in my apartment, the ones I’ve kept. But the Ali-Williams picture is the only one of my photographs that hung in my house all these years,” said Leifer.
Among the highlights of the collection are eleven prints that include Leifer’s original press credentials from the event. From three different Ali bouts, to the first ever Super Bowl, a photograph of John F Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson at Opening Day in 1961, to Secretariat’s win at the 1973 Kentucky Derby, Leifer career spanned decades and ran the gamut of all different sporting events.
“My mother and father, I’m sure, thought they had a young doctor growing up in the house that would get over this – like stamp collecting or coin collecting, you eventually move on to other things. I suddenly began finding people interested in my pictures and one day I just woke up and started pinching myself as to ‘hey, they’re paying me to go to the World Series!’ I mean I was a baseball fan,” finished Leifer on his accidental career choice.
Bu the auction features not just the works of Leifer, but a collection of some of the most iconic images of the 20th century. Early in his career, Leifer began trading prints with other photographers, first at Time-Life and then elsewhere.
“Of the 640 lots in the auction, they’re roughly divided in half — half being Neil’s own prints; half being the prints of other great photographers. When you look at these other great photographers, it’s probably the best, strongest compilation of images of the second half of the 20th century every put up for sale. I can’t say I know a museum in the world that has a better collection than this. And, it certainly covers far more than just the world of sports because it covers war and fashion and editorial photography of every description with names that are recognizable to millions of people,” said Arlan Ettinger, the president of Guernsey’s.
The two-day auction runs from Friday, Dec 2, to Saturday, Dec 3, in New York and also online at www.guernseys.com.