Where Collections Begin: Works $5K & Under

This photograph by Herman Leonard captures that lesser-known side of Miles Davis. In the final decade of his life, Davis turned to visual art with the same intensity he brought to music. He began sketching and painting around 1980, during his hiatus from performing music, using the practice to fill the silence between performances.

Prentice Herman "P.H." Polk photographed Tuskegee resident Mildred Hansen Baker in his studio in 1937, reportedly wearing her senior-year gown. The photograph comes from the collection of Lee Beasley, who wrote a 1980 article on Polk for the Atlanta Journal-Constitution Magazine; its publication coincided with the release of Polk's first book, a 1,200-copy monograph published by Atlanta's Nexus Press.

Ruth Bernhard was a German American photographer celebrated for her masterful black and white images, particularly her studies of the human body and still lives. After immigrating to the United States in 1927, she became associated with the West Coast photographic movement and developed a style defined by meticulous composition, dramatic light, and rich tonal range. Bernhard found the subject of this photograph crushed in the street in San Francisco's Chinatown, struck by a passing truck. She recognized it immediately as her own teapot and kept it for years before finally photographing it. The image is often cited as her final exposure — a quiet, deliberate close to a career built on patient attention to ordinary objects.

Doris Ulmann studied under photographer Clarence H. White, a founding member of Alfred Stieglitz's Photo-Secession and a leading figure in the Pictorialist movement. Throughout her career, she worked with a large-format view camera and a soft-focus portrait lens, favoring platinum printing for its long tonal range and matte, velvety surface. Stairway, South belongs to her early work, a body of abstract and architectural studies exploring shadow, texture, and geometric form. The image reflects Ulmann's interest in pattern and the play of light and shadow, finding Cubist, geometric structure within an ordinary architectural subject.

Born and raised in New York, Helen Levitt has made most of her photographs in the city's streets. She was especially inspired by the photographs of Walker Evans and Henri Cartier-Bresson, both of whom became friends of hers. Following Cartier-Bresson's lead, Levitt bought a 35-millimeter camera and settled on the subject matter she would pursue for the next forty years— community street life, especially the activities of women, children, and animals. Levitt's photographs create a palpable sense of place. Her familiarity with the subjects and scenes she photographed imparts a unique candor to her observations.

Weegee was an Austrian-born American photographer who is known for his raw, often sensational photographs of New York City at night during the 1930s and 1940s. He worked as a freelance press photographer, covering murders, fires, accidents, arrests, and other breaking news, but he also photographed nightlife, celebrities, children, theatergoers, and ordinary New Yorkers. He called himself "Weegee the Famous," which derived from Ouija, the spirit board, because he cultivated the mythology that he possessed an almost supernatural intuition about where news events were going to happen. The more practical explanation was that Weegee lived across the street from Manhattan Police Headquarters and had a police radio, allowing him to hear about incidents almost immediately. He would race to the scene, often arriving before other photographers.

Graciela Iturbide's Juchitán series, published as Juchitán de las Mujeres (Women of Juchitán) in 1989, is widely regarded as one of the most important documentary photography projects of the late twentieth century. Created over nearly a decade, from 1979 to 1988, the series explores the daily life, rituals, traditions, and social structure of the Zapotec community in Juchitán de Zaragoza, located on the Isthmus of Tehuantepec in Oaxaca, Mexico. The photographs from this series depict ordinary moments of work and commerce while emphasizing the grace, resilience, and authority of the women who sustain community life.

Mike and Doug Starn are identical twins who have worked collaboratively as artists since their adolescence. Across four decades, the Starns have moved fluidly between photography, sculpture, printmaking, and architecture, incorporating unconventional materials such as Plexiglas, wood, nails, tape, encaustic, and transparency film, directly into their photographic works. Alleverythingthatisyou is an ongoing body of work consisting of photomicrographs of individual snow crystals. The Starns have described the crystals as, "Simple and complex, they are all the same and all are different, hexagonal crystals growing outward in branches from their six-sided molecule of H2O." Unlike Wilson Bentley's pioneering 19th-century snowflake photomicrographs, which sought out symmetrical, textbook specimens, the Starns deliberately photograph damaged and incomplete crystals, flakes with ragged edges, missing arms, or that have partially melted or fused with a neighboring flake.

Yamamoto Masao is a Japanese photographer known for his intimate, contemplative images that explore memory, nature, and the fleeting beauty of everyday life. Usually small in scale and delicately toned, his photographs possess a dreamlike, poetic quality. Masao frequently incorporates hand-applied techniques and unconventional materials, emphasizing the tactile nature of the photographic object. His photographs are often tea-stained, creased, or torn at the corner, as if each one had been carried in a pocket for years before finding its way to the wall.

Candida Höfer is a German photographer known for her meticulously composed images of grand interiors, including libraries, museums, theaters, and other public spaces. Working with a large-format camera, Höfer photographs these architectural environments without people, drawing attention to their scale, symmetry, and intricate details. Her quiet, precisely structured images explore the relationship between architecture, history, and the ways in which spaces shape human experience. This photograph was produced as part of the second Elton John AIDS Foundation Portfolio, a portfolio of ten photographs by contemporary photographers whose sales supported HIV-prevention programs in underserved communities.