Lempertz will put photography in the spotlight in Cologne on 4 December, with a sale led by Helmut Newton's Parlour Games, Munich, 1991, a gelatin silver print estimated at €25,000 to €30,000. The image shows two women in an elegant interior, one tying the other's eyes shut in preparation for an erotic game, the scene that gives the work its title.

Fashion photography provides the sale's other headline names. Peter Lindbergh is represented by a 2014 portrait of Kate Moss, shot in Paris for Vogue Italia and estimated at €12,000 to €15,000, while three platinum-palladium prints by Horst P. Horst, the master of the elegant pose, carry estimates starting at €4,000.

About 30 early works come from the collection of Arno Henseler, the Munich dealer in non-European art who died in 2025 and once exhibited his photographs at the Munich Art Association. The group ranges from two allegorical photographs by Julia Margaret Cameron to Edward S. Curtis's North American Indians series, a Brassaï night scene in Paris, an industrial landscape by Emil Otto Hoppé and a window image by Josef Sudek. A set of small hand-tinted vintage prints by Hans Bellmer, from his Les Jeux de la Poupée series, arrives with a notable provenance: they belonged to Lotte Pritzel, the Berlin doll artist who helped Bellmer make his dolls.

Contemporary photography joins the programme in a day sale on 5 December, led by Candida Höfer's large-format view of the monastery on San Lazzaro degli Armeni near Venice, estimated at €18,000 to €20,000. Works from the Margulies Collection in Miami include Erwin Wurm's six-part 59 Positions, Alec Soth's large C-prints of American suburbia and four black-and-white photographs by Thomas Struth. Previews travel through Brussels, Munich and Berlin before reaching Cologne on 28 November.