Fashion photographers

Press Release:
The sale will offer over 120 lots, including a photograph of Angelina and Brad from the Domestic Bliss feature by Steven Klein for W magazine in July 2005; estimates range from £2,000 to £80,000.

“Kate Moss is a cultural icon and arguably the most influential model of our day. Discovered at the age of 14, Kate has been captured by master photographers the world over and we are delighted to be offering a number of images of the supermodel, including an early never-before-seen shot of Kate at a quarry in Croydon, taken by Corrine Day," said Yuka Yamaji, Head of Photographs at Christie's London.

In W magazine’s September 2003 tribute to Kate Moss, where artists and photographers ranging from Lucien Freud to Bruce Weber worked with the model with virtually no restrictions, 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 make-up; 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 that I do, and she was perfectly willing to comply.” The complete set of six prints made after the daguerreotypes appears at auction for the first time at an estimated £15,000-20,000.

Corrine Day’s portraits of Kate Moss for British magazine The Face helped to propel the model onto the international fashion scene. Day’s 1990 portrait Kate taken in Croydon (estimate: £4,000-6,000) has never been published and the print is signed by both Kate and the photographer. Day’s controversial image Kate at Home, taken for their first collaboration for Vogue in 1993, depicts the 19-year-old model skimpily dressed in pants and pink singlet and surrounded by fairy lights (estimate: £5,000-7,000). The Vogue article moved grunge into the mainstream and became infamous for supposedly promoting heroin chic.

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 (estimate: £10,000-15,000). Meanwhile, the slender frame captured in Irving Penn’s platinum print of Kate Moss, 1996 (estimate: £18,000-22,000) is in direct contrast to Helmut Newton’s taste for Amazonian women in Big Nude III, 1980 (estimate: £80,000-120,000) and Panoramic Nude with Gun, 1989 (estimate: £50,000-70,000).

Amongst the other famous faces appearing in the sale is Angelina & Brad #10 (estimate: £6,000-8,000) from Steven Klein’s 60-page story Domestic Bliss for W magazine in July 2005 which depicted Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie in a far-from-perfect version of family life, referencing both the actors’ film lives, and more subversively, the public’s desperation to see Pitt and Jolie as a couple. Taken in Tokyo in 1987 is Herb Ritts’s playful image of Madonna (estimate £6,000-8,000) wearing Minnie Mouse ears. The sale also includes an early work by Cindy Sherman, Untitled Film Still #20, 1978 (estimate: £25,000-35,000) from her provocative and much-discussed Untitled Film Stills series, created between 1977 and 1980.