This week, Christie's in New York held the most superficially glamorous auction of the year. Hundreds of photographs of beautiful people, captured by leading photographers, were on offer for millions of dollars. Confrontational nudes by Helmut Newton; models snapped by Irving Penn and Norman Parkinson in shoots commissioned by fashion magazines and luxury goods makers; pop stars such as David Bowie caught by Herb Ritts: all came from the collection of film producer Leon Constantiner and his wife Michaela, who had spent the last decade accumulating these glossy portraits of an age of ostentatious consumption. Here is the ultimate archive of the era of excess, the cult of personality, sold just when the world turns to retrenchment.

The dispersal of the collection follows hard on the heels of sales by the Constantiners' leading rival in the field, Gert Elfering, the German lottery tycoon: in April, Christie's auctioned the final instalment of his holding for $4.27m - including a nude study of Carla Bruni (Madame Sarkozy) for $91,000.