Strauss & Co May Auctions Lead with Unmissable Photography Collection

28 Apr 2026

• May online sales lead with special section drawn from prominent designer’s single-owner photography collection
• May Art Club in Cape Town stages a photography competition and lecture 
• Affordable collecting highlights the 500-plus lots of modern and contemporary art

Photography as a medium is faced, across all global markets, with a collecting challenge. The medium’s accessibility and reproducibility give rise to a perception among audiences that it is possible for anyone to do. This has been exacerbated by the rise of now ubiquitous smartphone cameras and an image culture rooted in social media. As a result, photography as fine art has taken different directions, with its best practitioners using performance photography, landscape, composition and framing, among many other approaches, to move the medium away from its documentary roots. In South Africa we have a unique heritage of brilliant photojournalism and social documentary, as well as some of the finest practitioners globally of different forms of fine art photography. Despite the creativity to be seen in the best examples in the medium, it still lags some way behind more traditional mediums like painting in terms of market value – which makes for accessible collecting!

Strauss & Co’s May online sale leads with a single-owner collection of photography,  and other properties, that showcase much of the incredible work being done in the medium, especially from a South African perspective – and offers collectors incredible bargains. Titled Framing a New Nation: The Garth Walker Photography Collection and Other Properties, the sale presents a selection of photographs from the personal archive of acclaimed graphic designer and photographer Garth Walker. Walker emerged as an influential figure in South African graphic design and visual culture in the 1990s through his design firm Orange Juice Design. In 1995 he launched the benchmark print magazine i-jusi as a platform to showcase new graphic design, typography and illustration. Later issues were sometimes exclusively devoted to photography. The magazine often showcased photographic artists like Roger Ballen and David Goldblatt, and the magazine portfolios have been exhibited in over 25 countries and are held in the collections of the Museum of Modern Art, New York, Victoria and Albert Museum, London, and Bibliothèque Nationale de France, Paris.

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Walker began acquiring contemporary South African photography some 20 years ago, guided by his own interest in South Africa’s rich documentary photography tradition. He was an early collector of Pieter Hugo, Zanele Muholi and Guy Tillim, as well as documentary work by the award-winning photojournalists Jodi Bieber and Greg Marinovich. In addition, his collection extends his interest in documentary photography with the inclusion of American artists Stephen Shore and Rosalind Fox Solomon.

A highlight of the auction is the inclusion of i-jusi Portfolios #1, #2 and #3, produced to sustain the magazine’s independent publication and featuring seminal works by South African artists. The collection offers a rare opportunity to acquire works from a defining moment in the evolution of post-apartheid visual culture. For photography enthusiasts this is a unique opportunity to acquire many of South Africa’s most famous photographic artists and works on one sale – including younger contemporary practitioners like Mikhael Subotzky, the Essop twins and Athi-Patra Ruga.

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The May ART timed online auction (closes on 11 May from 2pm) is once again organised by medium, and astute collectors will find a wide range of accessible work in most mediums. Works on paper feature standout works by a roll-call of South Africa’s best artists, including Penny Siopis, William Kentridge and Cecil Skotnes. The painting sale, similarly, offers collectable work by everyone from the tried and tested mid-century modernist painters Coetzer and Naude, to edgier, more contemporary work by artists like Simon Stone and Wayne Barker.

The May sale also includes the Patricia Fine Art Collection, an eclectic single-owner collection curated by a former Mayor of Cape Town. Patricia Fine (née Sulcas Kreiner), famously welcomed Nelson Mandela to the City Hall balcony in 1994 and assembled an art collection that reflects well the spirit of transformation and hope that presided in South African political and civic life at that time. Featuring significant works by modern and contemporary South African artists, the collection highlights Fine’s deep connection to the Cape’s cultural landscape and her role as an arts benefactor.

May Art Club takes place in Cape Town on the 5 May at 6pm. Led by art specialist Leigh Leyde and social media manager Amy Coningsby, will take the form of a workshop focused on the technical and aesthetic elements that define a significant photographic work, in light of the focus sale in May coming from the Garth Walker Collection. Beyond the theory, attendees will participate in a hands-on photography workshop to sharpen their own visual eye. A competition will be held during the event, with the creator of the standout image receiving a Strauss & Co gift voucher to put towards their future collection.

Please bring a fully charged mobile phone.