Fame and debts: photographer Annie Leibovitz
by Galina Toktalieva
Annie Leibovitz is as famous portrait photographer, but now her genius is close to financial ruin, and she is considered to be a victim of her own obsessive artistic ambition.
Among the qualities making Leibovitz, 59, the most distinguished portrait photographer in the world is her legendary perfectionism.
Lloyd Ziff, a former Rolling Stone designer, remembers Leibovitz , when she was not that famous yet, being sent once to get a simple image of Coke bottle kept in some little museum. “She took 300 to 500 Polaroids of it,” he says.
During her long career, nothing has been too extreme in her pursuit of the perfect picture. Among the portraits she produced, there was a long line of celebrities, from Hollywood stars to Britain’s Queen. Leibovitz’s famous shoots include a nude portrait of John Lennon and Yoko Ono – just before the Beatle was murdered – and nude and pregnant actress Demi Moore.
Leibovits was said to earn a day rate of $250,000 just to set foot in a studio for an advertising job. Also over the years, Leibovitz had bought and sold a small fortune in real estate. Virtually anyone would agree to be photographed by her.
In June 2007, Leibovitz announced she wanted to start selling her prints aggressively. Her portraits of musicians like Iggy Pop and Johnny Cash were offered for $5,500 each, but Leibovitz needed even more. She decided to make Master Set of her most iconic images, printed in a massive 40-inch-by-60-inch format, and sold at $25,000 per print. The total value of the set would come to $35 million.
Leibovitz had built a life that had become extraordinarily expensive. It wasn’t just the mortgages on the homes. It was the Range Rover, the trips to Paris, the chef and housekeeper, the handyman, the personal yoga instructor, the terrace gardener, and the live-in nanny. “She wanted her life to be like a magazine spread,” one of her critics told. “Everything beautiful, nothing out of place. She wanted everything to be perfect.”
The fact that Annie Leibovitz made a lot of debts was surprising for many people. How it could occure to such an estimated artist?
Some newspapers were speculating it’s because she’s been forced to pay the so-called “gay tax.” While married couples can inherit each other’s property upon death without paying taxes, gay couples cannot. So when Leibovitz’s partner, author Susan Sontag, died in 2004, Leibovitz had to pay hefty taxes on the property that Sontag left to her.
But it was only part of the problem. It’s impossible to account all Leibovitz’s expenses, but it was ovbious she lived beyond her means. Despite circulating in glamorous circles, Leibovitz never had a knack for finance. Behind a facade of unlimited financial prosperity, she was spending her way into nightmare.
In what now appears as a disastrous decision to raise funds, Leibovitz took a 24-million-dollar loan from Art Capital Group in December 2008 using her own photographs as collateral. Leibovitz borrowed this money because she was in dire financial straits due to unpaid bills, mortgage payments and tax liens.
That debt is due September 8 and if she can’t pay up, she could lose her life’s work.
The over-leveraged photographer not only risks losing her photo archives, which The New York Times estimates could be worth 50 million dollars, but also her house in the trendy Greenwich Village district of Manhattan and a second home outside the city.
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