The story begins, as the best stories do, with someone buying something they didn't fully understand. A young man at a New York yard sale on the northern shores of Lake George is drawn to a wide wooden frame. He pays for it. He takes it home. And only then, looking more closely, does he notice a faint signature in the lower corner: Steichen.
Thankfully, he knew enough to know that mattered. He contacted Sotheby's. The work was confirmed as an original print of Balzac, The Open Sky, 11 P.M., made by Edward Steichen in 1908. It sold that spring for $53,400: a record for the photographer at the time, and among the highest prices ever paid for a photograph.
