Episode 24: A Conversation with Denise Bethel, Part I

Denise Bethel joined Swann Galleries in 1980, soon after photographs auctions were inaugurated in New York.  After a decade at Swann, she moved to Sotheby's in 1990, where she rose from senior specialist to Chairman of the Department in her 25 years there. By the time she left Sotheby’s in 2015, she had orchestrated the sale of no fewer than eight of the eleven classic photographs that had sold at auction for $1 million or more, and she had wielded the gavel for all of them.  One of these, Edward Steichen’s “The Pond, Moonlight,” at $2.93 million in 2006, was for well over a decade the world auction record for a classic photograph at auction.

In this episode, Denise and Aimee discuss the first half of her auction career at Swann Galleries, here in New York City.  She transformed what was then known as Photographica sales into Photographs auctions, impacting the way people think about buying and collecting photographs.