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.
What a work by Ellen von Unwerth is worth
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Bio
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.
The books, and Devotion!
Her books include Snaps in 1994, Couples in 1998, Revenge in 2003, with text by the painter Harland Miller, and Fräulein, published by Taschen in 2009 as a collector's edition and in 2011 as a trade book. Signed collector's editions are collected separately from the trade printings.
Devotion! 30 Years of Photographing Women was made for Fotografiska in Stockholm in 2018 and opened Fotografiska New York in 2019. She has shown with Opera Gallery in Monaco, London and Beirut, and the gallery's certificate, giving the edition, size and print date, is what identifies a print.
Kenya, the album covers and the music videos
She spent part of her childhood in foster care in Bavaria, finished school in Munich and worked for three years as a magician's assistant in a circus. At twenty she was asked in the street whether she had thought of modelling, and she moved to Paris. A boyfriend gave her a camera, and the first pictures she published were of fellow models, taken on a shoot in Kenya.
Her photographs are on many album covers, among them Hole's Live Through This in 1994, Janet Jackson's The Velvet Rope in 1997, Britney Spears's Blackout in 2007 and Rihanna's Rated R, and she photographed Duran Duran from 1994 to 1997. She has directed music videos, among them Duran Duran's Femme Fatale and Electric Barbarella and Salt-N-Pepa's Ain't Nuthin' But a She Thang, as well as short films for fashion designers and commercials for Revlon, Clinique and L'Oréal.
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