Kate Moss photographs at Christie's

Press Release:

“The prices achieved at Christie's for the images of Kate Moss which have been taken by some of the world's foremost photographers, prove her status as a cultural icon and arguably the most influential model of our day,” said Yuka Yamaji, Head of Photographs, Christie's London.

The top selling lot was a complete set of six prints by Chuck Close of a nude Kate Moss which appeared at auction for the first time and sold for more than five times the pre-sale low estimate at £84,000. In W magazine's September 2003 tribute to Kate Moss – where artists and photographers ranging form Lucien Freud to Bruce Weber worked with the model - Chuck Close presented his unflinching daguerreotype studies of Kate's bare face and body. For Close the experience of the shoot was a pleasant surprise: “She wore no makeup; she hadn't combed her hair, and she never even glanced in the mirror. But she said, 'I've had enough pretty pictures made of me.' She understood what it is I do, and she was perfectly willing to comply.”

Taken by one of the world's most successful fashion photographers, Albert Watson, for German Vogue in marrakech in January 1993, the larger-than-life image of a naked Kate Moss measures a massive 96 inches x 72 inches and sold for more than five times the pre-sale low estimate at £54,000. The model's slender frame captured in Irving Penn's platinum print of Kate Moss (Hand onNeck), 1996 sold for £38,400.

Corrine Day's controversial image Kate at Home, taken for their first collaboration for Vogue in 1993, sold for £6,600 and depicts the 19 year old model skimpily dressed in pants and pink singlet and surrounded by fairy lights. The Vogue article moved grunge into the mainstream and became infamous for supposedly promoting heroin chic.