5. Cindy Sherman
Cindy Sherman’s Untitled #96, a 1981 print of Sherman in a pumpkin-colored sweater as a lovesick woman lying on the kitchen floor, sold for $3.9 million or £2.4 million at Christie’s New York in May 2011, more than doubling the work’s low estimate of $1.5 million, or £950,000 and became – at the time – the most expensive photograph ever sold at auction. While the 60-year-old American artist is one of the most critically acclaimed artists working today, at auction she has trailed behind other artists of her generation, including Richard Prince. The artist’s staged conceptual photographs of herself in costume only broke the $1 million mark in 2007 with the sale of Untitled film still no. 48 (1979), a black-and-white image of herself as a hitchhiker on a desolate highway.