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Annie Leibovitz staves off financial disaster in £15m deal
Jonathan Prynn, Consumer Business Editor9 Mar 2010
She is the extravagant "court photographer" to the rich and famous whose demanding excesses are almost as celebrated as her images.
Now Annie Leibovitz, whose subjects have included the Queen, Michelle Obama and John Lennon, has been bailed out for the second time in a £15million deal that will force her to sort out her chaotic finances.
In return for rescuing the 60-year-old New Yorker, private equity firm Colony Capital wants her to raise money by organising touring exhibitions of her photographs and printing fine art copies of her most famous works such as a naked heavily pregnant Demi Moore and Whoopi Goldberg in a bath of milk.
The deal staves off a potential disaster facing Leibovitz, who had "mortgaged" the rights to more than 100,000 photographs and one million negatives to a New York finance house Art Capital, with which she had been in dispute.
Despite earning an estimated £1.3 million a year, the Vanity Fair, Vogue and Rolling Stone photographer had accumulated huge debts, largely through the purchase and renovation of three large houses in Greenwich Village and an estate in upstate New York.
She also built up huge unpaid tax bills. All her creditors will be paid off by a new loan from Colony. Leibovitz, who got her big break photographing John Lennon and Yoko Ono in 1970 for Rolling Stone magazine, is notorious for the extravagance of her shoots and her private life. On one occasion she flew Hollywood actress Kirsten Dunst and a film crew to Versailles to portray her as Marie Antoinette. Friends say Leibovitz is a perfectionist who has never had a good head for personal finances. But the deal with Los Angeles-based Colony almost certainly means the era of unrestrained expenditure is over.
Tom Barrack, founder of Colony, said: "We will be partners in managing her assets and her business so that Annie can spend her time and focus in pursuing her passion as only she can do."
Reader views (1)
This woman is one of the most over-hyped snappers around. Her fame derives from the perverted logic that says her photos must be outstanding works of art because she charges an arm and a leg for them. More fools, the buyers.
- Js, London, 09/03/2010 18:20
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