Kevin Abosch: Potato #345 (2010)
A work by Irish photographer Kevin Abosch featuring an organic potato has sold for one million euro (approximately $1.5 million Australian dollars). The potato earned more than the photographer’s famous images of celebrities including Johnny Depp and Yoko Ono.
The sale of the photograph Potato #345 was brokered over a few glasses of wine by a European businessman at the artist’s Paris home in 2015, The Sunday Times has reported following an interview with Abosch.
As a private sale the one million euro price tag does not have the verification of an auction result but if it is counted in the league tables it will make the spud the 15th most expensive photograph ever sold.
Wikipedia lists the most expensive photograph as Andreas Gursky’s Rhein II, which was sold by Christies in New York for $US 4,338,500 ( $AU 6,130,249) in 2011.
Like Abosch’s potato, it is a simple image taken from life with extraordinary fidelity but no artifice.
Andreas Gursky, Rhein II
These simple but beautiful works stand in stark contrast to the constructed images of other top-selling photographers engaged in social commentary​. Cindy Sherman uses costuming and sometimes prosthetic limbs and mannequins to construct her comments on the gaze turned upon women. Jeff Wall’s constructed images such as the iconic Dead Troops Talk are complicated productions involving cast, sets, crews and digital post-production.
What is it about such a mundane image that gives it such extraordinary value?
Of course the work is extraordinarily high definition, able to show us physical truths beyond what the human eye usually notices. There is an aesthetic appeal in the magnification alone. In its solitary expansion, this potato is like a planet, expanded to an entire world.
But magnification is something anyone with the right equipment can achieve. It surely does not to justify the price tag on Potato #345. No doubt some of that comes from the opportunity that comes when a wealthy business person and a famous artist have a few drinks together.
But it is also important to see this potato in the context of the artist’s work as a portrait artist. Abosch, who began his working life as a biologist, is known for his iconic black backdrop portraits, charging fees of up to $500,000 to celebrities and business people in the tech industries, where an Abosch portrait is a status symbol.
Kevin Abosch, Yoko Ono​
Between artists and Nobel prizewinners, Yoko Ono and Malala Yousafzai, he has turned his intense lens on a glass of milk and a picked-over Christmas goose.​ He has photographed hundreds of potatoes.
‘Kevin likes potatoes because they, like people are all different yet immediately identifiable as being essentially of the same species,’ his studio told the photography site PetaPixel. ‘He has photographed many potatoes. This one is one of his favorites.’​
Like the portraits, Abosch’s potatoes are simple single images, luminous in a solid black background.
His famous subjects may be alarmed to learn that he does not see a dramatic distinction between celebrities and the most mundane spud or poultry carcass.
Kevin Abosch, Christmas Goose
‘I see commonalities between humans and potatoes that speak to our relationship as individuals within a collective species,’ Abosch told CNN..
‘Generally, the life of a harvested potato is violent and taken for granted. I use the potato as a proxy for the ontological study of the human experience.’
This work then is not so much a still life as a portrait of an ordinary object and, it might be noted, an object of considerable resonance in a culture where the potato has long been the staple and the country’s modern history was spawned by the Great Potato Famine.
Abosch said in a TED talk that he did not think of himself as a photographer so much as ‘an anthropologist trapped in the body of a visual artist who just happens to work with a camera’.
He notes that in the current era we are all both photographers and subjects, sometimes behind the camera and sometimes constructing ourselves for it. Indeed, one might add that in the selfie era many do both simultaneously.
In addition to celebrities his portraits include Faces of Ireland, a series of 250 portraits of Irish citizens which was displayed at Dublin airport where, he points out, more people pass through in a month than through all the galleries in the country in a year.
‘I am an opportunist and I will hold up the citizen wherever I can to serve as a mirror in which we can hopefully see ourselves in the images of others,’ he said of that series.
Perhaps the appeal of this potato is that it, too, is a mirror. Just as he does with his celebrities, Abosch has stripped away the surface to find the earthy and elemental within us all.
For someone with the cash, that’s worth a million euro.
