Ellen von Unwerth valuation
Modelled for ten years, then turned the camera round and made fashion photography playful again.
Ellen von Unwerth was born in Frankfurt in 1954 and worked as a model for a decade before taking up photography, which shows in the results: the pictures are made from the subject's side of the lens, and the register is teasing, theatrical and complicit rather than cool. The Guess campaign with Claudia Schiffer in 1989 established her, and the work has run across fashion editorial, celebrity portraiture and a long series of books since.
What trades is editioned photographic prints, and the questions are the standard ones for the field and decisive here: which edition, what size, printed when and by whom, signed or estate-stamped, and whether the paper and process are as described. Vintage prints from the original period and later editions of the same image are separate markets. Colour work carries its own condition risk, since several processes used across this period are not stable under light, and fading cannot be reversed.
What a work by Ellen von Unwerth is worth
Send photographs and whatever paperwork came with it. The first question is what the work actually is — edition or unique, when, and in what condition — because everything else follows from the answer. A valuation is free, made online from the photographs you send, and it commits you to nothing. We act for sellers across the UK.
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Whitebank Fine Art is an art advisory and gallery, not an auction house, and is not affiliated with any auction house or with the artist, their estate or their representatives. This page describes the range we advise on. Nothing here is investment advice.