The photo doesn’t have any ropes around it. In fact, you might likely overlook it among all the art on display at the Dennos Museum Center at Northwestern Michigan College (NMC). But it is the rarest and most valuable item in the entire museum collection.

The modernist nude study photograph by Edward Weston (at top in photo) was a gift to the museum in 1989, before the Dennos even opened. Judith March Davis had given the image, part of her father’s estate, to NMC art instructor Jack Ozegovic and his wife Ann. They, in turn, passed it on to NMC. “They wanted to give it to the new museum-to-be. I said, ‘Are you sure? Do you know what this is?’ They said yes,” says Museum Executive Director Eugene Jenneman, though even he had no idea what he'd just received.

Weston is one of the most celebrated American photographers. Over the course of his 40-year career in the first half of the 20thcentury, he photographed everything from landscapes and still lives to nudes and portraits. His style shifted over that time from the soft-focus pictorialism popular when he began to highly detailed and crisply focused images.

Jenneman knew the photo was valuable, but when he tried to research the print he didn’t have any success – until years later when he turned on his TV and saw a report on CNN about Sotheby’s auctioning another original print of the same image for – wait for it – $1.6 million. “That was the first I’d seen anything,” he says of that April 2008 report.

Jenneman wasn’t the only one who was surprised. Christopher Mahoney, senior international specialist, photographs for Phillips auction house, was then working for Sotheby’s. When Jenneman contacted him, Mahoney was flabbergasted. “Yeah, I was incredibly surprised. It was a remarkable phenomenon,” says Mahoney. “It underscores one of the most interesting aspects of the photography market.”

That’s the fact that it’s difficult or impossible to determine how many prints of some photos there are in existence. “We do our legwork to try to track down how many (there are). You’re as diligent as you can be. Then you put what you know into the catalog,” says Mahoney. “Sometimes you get a call from someone who says, ‘Hey, I’ve got that print.’”

“Weston did not make lots of prints,” he continues. “So it was not unusual for there to just be two, three or four prints. Even if it’s a fantastic image.”

The nude owned by the Dennos was not in pristine condition then; there was a blemish on the woman’s thigh. Jenneman sent it to the Detroit Institute of Arts for restoration.

While the other print of the image fetched $1.6 million, Mahoney is reluctant to estimate the Dennos print’s value today.

But regardless, Jenneman says he has no intention of trying to sell it. Not then, and not now. “At the time they made a substantial offer,” says Jenneman of Sotheby’s, on behalf of the runner-up bidder.

And it would not be Jenneman’s decision to make. “The president would have to approve it, and take it to the Board of Trustees. The Board would have to approve it. It’s college property in the public trust,” Jenneman adds.
 
And because it was a donation to the museum, any sale proceeds would have to go into procuring new works for the museum. “So we could go out and buy all the photos every other museum has,” Jenneman says, “Or we could have the rarest Weston.”
 
The Weston photo is on display at Dennos Museum Center now, but not for long – Jenneman adds that it can only be in the bright museum lights for certain periods until needing a “rest” in Dennos’ storage, before returning for display again down the road.