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Man Ray’s Le Violon d’Ingres holds the verified public-auction record in the sources cited here: it sold for $12,412,500 at Christie’s New York in 2022. A reliable current ranking of 24 photographs cannot be established from the available documented results, so this article gives the verified record and landmark sales without presenting an unsupported top 24.
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What counts as “most expensive”?
This article treats the phrase as a ranking of public auction results, not private transactions. Sale figures can differ depending on whether the buyer’s premium is included; international results also require a stated currency-conversion method. A photograph may exist in multiple prints or editions, so a result applies to the particular physical work sold, not automatically to every print of the image.
The verified auction record
Man Ray, Le Violon d’Ingres (1924)
Christie’s identifies this work as the longstanding auction record for a photograph. It sold at Christie’s New York in 2022 for $12,412,500. Christie’s sale result and its Man Ray artist page document the result.
#1 Best Overall
Landmark auction results
Andreas Gursky, Rhein II (1999)
Gursky’s large panoramic colour print sold at Christie’s New York on November 8, 2011, for $4,338,500 including buyer’s premium, according to Guinness World Records. Guinness describes the glass-mounted print as 185.4 × 363.5 cm and one of an edition of six. The 2011 result was a landmark record at the time, but it was later surpassed.
Cindy Sherman, Untitled (1981)
Christie’s reports that this work sold for $3,890,500 in 2011, then setting a world auction record for a photograph. The result is documented on Christie’s sale page.
Rank #2
Why Peter Lik’s Phantom is not in an auction ranking
TIME reported in December 2014 that an unnamed private collector bought Peter Lik’s Phantom for $6.5 million. That is a reported private-sale figure, not a public auction result in the cited account, so it should not be mixed into an auction-only ranking. TIME’s report is the source for the claim.
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Why a current top-24 list cannot be verified here
A January 2019 article from Photography At Auction lists 20 auction results, adjusted to US dollars and presented in ascending order. It is a historical secondary ranking, not evidence of a current top 24. Among its entries are Gursky’s Rhein II ($4,338,500), Richard Prince’s Spiritual America ($3,973,000), Sherman’s Untitled (1981; $3,890,500), Gilbert & George’s To Her Majesty ($3,759,607), Jeff Wall’s Dead Troops Talk ($3,666,500), Gursky’s 99 Cent II Diptychon ($3,332,000) and Chicago Board of Trade III ($3,296,385), Man Ray’s Noire et Blanche ($3,118,950), Prince’s Untitled (cowboy) ($3,077,000), Sherman’s Untitled Film Still 48 ($2,965,000), and Edward Steichen’s The Pond – Moonlight ($2,928,000). These are figures and ordering from that 2019 list; they should not be treated as a freshly verified sequence. See Photography At Auction’s historical ranking.
Rank #3
A defensible expanded list would need each candidate checked against its auction-house result, with the sale date, location, currency, premium treatment, and specific print or edition recorded. Without those checks, filling out 24 entries would imply a level of completeness and current accuracy the cited results do not support.
Quick Recap
Rank #4
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