Christies/24″/dt1st/mark2nd

By FRANK SWERTLOW

Staff Reporter

A family from San Clemente is meeting with Rick Wester, senior vice president of Christie’s and director of the auction house’s photographic department. They believe they have something unique to sell.

The family mother, father, daughter and son settle into a conference room and open an aging photo album.

Unique is the right word.

Inside the scrapbook are nearly two dozen aerial photographs taken by Japanese airmen on Dec. 7, 1941 at Pearl Harbor. Battleships are ablaze, bombs are exploding. They are startling, rare shots of the sneak attack. It’s World War II from the other side.

But Wester, 41, who has spent the past seven years at Christie’s, is careful. He studies the photos and the album in which they are contained. Is it propaganda or memorabilia? A number of official markings indicate Japanese censors approved the photos, suggesting propaganda.

But Wester is not sure. The father, a Navy man who served in the Pacific Theater, received the album from a friend after the end of World War II. They have been sitting in a closet for nearly 50 years. It could be memorabilia from a Japanese flyer.

“This may be valuable to someone,” the son says, hoping to stir a possible deal.

Perhaps. But Christie’s may not want to sell Japanese war propaganda. It refuses to auction Nazi war photos.

“We get offered it all the time,” Wester says. “But we have a policy against it.”

Authenticating photographs is only a part of Wester’s day. He and his staff oversee four annual auctions in New York and Los Angeles the No. 1 and No. 2 markets for photography in the country.

The next auction will be April 29 in New York, but he expects plenty of phone bids from Los Angeles. Christie’s will be selling 19th and 20th century photographs taken by such artists as Pablo Picasso, Margaret Bourke-White, Brassai, Walker Evans, Andre Kertesz and Edward Weston.

All of which is a far cry from the Pearl Harbor photographs Wester is now considering. Even without Christie’s policy about accepting enemy propaganda, the album is not in the best of shape. The photos have not worn well in the closet. But they are on quality paper, which is a plus.

“The Japanese make good paper,” Wester says, looking again at the photos. “The processing was made quickly. That usually means it was not for war use, but a souvenir. But I am not prepared to make an estimate.”

“You mean, it might be politically incorrect to sell them?” the mother asks.

Wester demurs. He just needs to see what the company’s policy is toward Japanese World War II photos. If they are forbidden, he will suggest other auction houses.

“I don’t want you to walk away without a good feeling toward Christie’s,” he tells the family, saying he’ll get back to them with an answer.

Christie’s has its credibility to consider. The photographs currently on display in the main gallery range from a few thousand dollars for an unknown Daguerreotype print to more than $150,000 for a 1924 photograph representing Adam and Eve by Man Ray. It features Marcel Duchamp as Adam.

To bolster the April 29 bidding, Wester tossed a cocktail party the previous night for about 200 collectors. Potential bidders were encouraged to scrutinize the photographs at their leisure.

“We invite people to take them out of the frame,” Wester says.

Last year, Christie’s earned $11.1 million from photo sales. If the April 29 sale goes well, Wester estimates that Christie’s will pick up $5.6 million. Backed by the soaring Dow, people are spending money on photography.

In the afternoon, Wester and Leila R. Buckjune, assistant vice president of 19th and 20th century photographs, begin working on an appraisal of a client’s collection of some 300 works from such contemporary photographers as Helmut Newton, Bert Stern and Henri Cartier Bresson.

“This should be relatively easy,” Buckjune says. “The prices will be based on retail replacement values.”

Taking a break from the paperwork, Wester strolls into the gallery. One browser stops at “The Critic,” a black-and-white photograph of a woman stepping out of her limo that was taken by celebrated crime photographer Arthur Fellig, better known as Weegee. It’s one of three for sale.

“He was a paparazzi,” says the browser, Madelyn Morris.

Wester notes that the photo was taken by a Speed Graphic, a large-format camera used in 1930s. The image was made from a contact print, which, he says, explains why the photograph’s details are so sharp.

An historian of photography, Wester explains how Fellig got his nickname, a play on the Ouija board.

“He seemed to have an uncanny knack of predicting what would happen,” Wester says, explaining that Weegee once showed up for a shot of a street in Brooklyn at 2 a.m. At 2:01 a.m., a gas explosion leveled the entire corner. Weegee had heard about a gas leak on the police radio and went to the corner and waited for the blast.