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Girls in the Windows is a 1960 photograph by Ormond Gigli (died 2019). It depicts 41 colorfully dressed women standing in the windows of a brownstone building on East 58th Street on the Upper East Side of Manhattan, and two other women on the sidewalk near a Rolls-Royce car. It has been estimated to be the most commercially valuable photograph and one of the most collected, on account of the great number of signed copies that have been sold at auction. [1]
Ormond Gigli, a freelance photographer aged 35 in 1960, created the image on his own initiative. He wanted to preserve the memory of the distinctive brownstone houses across from his home studio that were slated for demolition. [1]
Just days before this was to happen, Gigli arranged for 40 models from an agency. They were paid $1 each (equivalent to $10in 2023) for the entire shoot, and told to bring their own dresses and arrange their own hair and make-up. [1] To these, he added two more women: his wife, Sue Ellen Gigli (in the second row, far right), and the wife of the demolition supervisor who allowed Gigli to use the building in exchange for including her (on the third floor, third from the left). Shouting through a bullhorn, Gigli arranged the women from his studio across the street, telling them to "pose as if they were giving someone a kiss". [1]
The photograph did not become commercially available until 1994, when Sue Ellen Gigli offered it to a gallery. Since then, more than 160 signed prints have been sold at auction at a total price of around $12 million. [1]
Auction house experts have estimated it to be the most-collected and highest-grossing photograph of all time. [1] Unlike most other fine art photographs, of which few reproductions are sold in order to create scarcity, Ormond Gigli made and signed dozen of prints of the photograph in each of 12 sizes. About 100 remain to be sold as of 2023, according to Gigli's son and estate manager, Ogden Gigli. [1]
In a 2016 feature for Artforum magazine, artist and photographer Laurie Simmons described "Girls in the Windows" as "one of my favorite fashion photos". [2]
Diane Arbus was an American photographer. She photographed a wide range of subjects including strippers, carnival performers, nudists, people with dwarfism, children, mothers, couples, elderly people, and middle-class families. She photographed her subjects in familiar settings: their homes, on the street, in the workplace, in the park. "She is noted for expanding notions of acceptable subject matter and violates canons of the appropriate distance between photographer and subject. By befriending, not objectifying her subjects, she was able to capture in her work a rare psychological intensity." In his 2003 New York Times Magazine article, "Arbus Reconsidered", Arthur Lubow states, "She was fascinated by people who were visibly creating their own identities—cross-dressers, nudists, sideshow performers, tattooed men, the nouveaux riches, the movie-star fans—and by those who were trapped in a uniform that no longer provided any security or comfort." Michael Kimmelman writes in his review of the exhibition Diane Arbus Revelations, that her work "transformed the art of photography ". Arbus's imagery helped to normalize marginalized groups and highlight the importance of proper representation of all people.
Edward Jean Steichen was a Luxembourgish and American photographer, painter, and curator. He is considered among the most important figures in the history of photography.
Richard Prince is an American painter and photographer. In the mid-1970s, Prince made drawings and painterly collages that he has since disowned. His image, Untitled (Cowboy), a photographic reproduction of a photograph by Sam Abell and appropriated from a cigarette advertisement, was the first rephotograph to be sold for more than $1 million at auction at Christie's New York in 2005. He is regarded as "one of the most revered artists of his generation" according to The New York Times.
Alberto Díaz Gutiérrez, better known as Alberto Korda or simply Korda, was a Cuban photographer, remembered for his famous image Guerrillero Heroico of Argentine Marxist revolutionary Che Guevara.
Ellen von Unwerth is a German photographer. She began her career as a fashion model, before becoming a fashion, editorial, and advertising photographer.
Albert William Thomas Hardy was an English documentary and press photographer known for his work published in the Picture Post magazine between 1941 and 1957.
Steve McCurry is an American photographer, freelancer, and photojournalist. His photo Afghan Girl, of a girl with piercing green eyes, has appeared on the cover of National Geographic several times. McCurry has photographed many assignments for National Geographic and has been a member of Magnum Photos since 1986.
Jean Rosemary Shrimpton is an English model and actress. She was an icon of Swinging London and is considered to be one of the world's first supermodels. She appeared on numerous magazine covers including Vogue,Harper's Bazaar,Vanity Fair,Glamour,Elle,Ladies' Home Journal,Newsweek, and Time. In 2009, Harper's Bazaar named Shrimpton one of the 26 best models of all time, and in 2012, Time named her one of the 100 most influential fashion icons of all time. She starred alongside Paul Jones in the film Privilege (1967).
Eric David Kroll is an American photojournalist, fetish photographer, erotica historian, and book editor.
Steven Meisel is an American fashion photographer, who obtained popularity and critical acclaim with his work in Vogue and Vogue Italia as well as his photographs of friend Madonna in her 1992 book, Sex. He is now considered one of the most successful fashion photographers in the industry. He used to work regularly for both US and Italian Vogue, and W and now exclusively for British Vogue.
Breakfast at Tiffany's is a novella by Truman Capote published in 1958. In it, a contemporary writer recalls his early days in New York City, when he makes the acquaintance of his remarkable neighbor, Holly Golightly, who is one of Capote's best-known creations. In 1961 it was adapted into a major motion picture of the same name.
Identical Twins, Roselle, New Jersey, 1967 is a noted photograph by photographer Diane Arbus from the United States.
The Tennis Girl is a British poster of a female tennis player without underwear that has become a British pop icon.
Daphne Diana Joan Susanna Guinness is an English fashion designer, socialite, actress, film producer, and musician.
Laurie Simmons is an American artist best known for her photographic and film work. Art historians consider her a key figure of The Pictures Generation and a group of late-1970s women artists that emerged as a counterpoint to the male-dominated and formalist fields of painting and sculpture. The group introduced new approaches to photography, such as staged setups, narrative, and appropriations of pop culture and everyday objects that pushed the medium toward the center of contemporary art. Simmons's elaborately constructed images employ psychologically charged human proxies—dolls, ventriloquist dummies, mannequins, props, miniatures and interiors—and also depict people as dolls. Often noted for its humor and pathos, her art explores boundaries such as between artifice and truth or private and public, while raising questions about the construction of identity, tropes of prosperity, consumerism and domesticity, and practices of self-presentation and image-making. In a review of Simmons's 2019 retrospective at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago, critic Steve Johnson wrote, "Collectively—and with a sly but barbed sense of humor—[her works] challenge you to think about what, if anything, is real: in our gender roles, and our cultural assumptions, and our perceptions of others."
Jimmy DeSana was an American artist, and a key figure in the East Village punk art and New Wave scene of the 1970s and 1980s. DeSana's photography has been described as "anti-art" in its approach to capturing images of the human body, in a manner ranging from "savagely explicit to purely symbolic". DeSana was close collaborators with photographer Laurie Simmons and writer William S. Burroughs, who wrote the introduction to DeSana's self-published collection of photographs Submission. His work includes the album cover for the Talking Heads album More Songs about Buildings and Food as well as John Giorno’s LP, You’re The Guy I Want To Share My Money With.
Pier 24 Photography is a non-profit art museum located on the Port of San Francisco directly under the San Francisco–Oakland Bay Bridge. The organization houses the permanent collection of the Pilara Foundation, which collects, preserves and exhibits photography. It produces exhibitions, publications, and public programs. Pier 24 Photography is the largest exhibition space in the world dedicated solely to photography.
Marla Hamburg Kennedy is an American art curator, dealer and publisher specializing in contemporary art and photography. She is also an author and has published 30 photography and fine art books. She is the founder and owner of Hamburg Kennedy Photographs, HK Art Advisory, and Picture This Publications located in New York City.
Martha Joan Swope was an American photographer of theatre and dance.