‘Girls in Windows’: The World’s Highest Grossing Photograph?
Earlier this week The New York Times published an article on Ormond Gigli’s ‘Girls in Windows’, questioning whether this work is one of the highest grossing photographs of all time. In the last 30 years, approximately 600 signed, limited edition prints have sold at prices between $15k – $30k. More than 160 prints of ‘Girls in Window’ have sold at auction, with seven prints up for sale in 2023 year alone. In this year’s November auction at Phillips in London, the work exceeded its high estimate of £25,000, selling just shy of £30,500.
Art critic David Segal describes how the photograph “wasn’t made by an art world giant, but people keep buying it. And buying it. And buying it… Nobody hired Gigli, a 35-year-old freelance commercial photographer, to create ‘Girls in the Windows.’ He’s working without an assignment because he wants to memorialize those buildings, which stand directly across the street from his home studio. What he doesn’t know is that the image will become one of the most collected photographs in the history of the medium.”
The article describes how Gigli first published the photograph in ‘Ladies Home Journal’, which was followed by a handful of other publications. However, “it didn’t become commercially available until 1994” says Segal, “That year, Sue Ellen Gigli called Sotheby’s and asked if it would sell ‘Girls in Windows’. An in-house expert advised her to find a gallery that would represent her husband. The Gigli’s soon hopped on a subway to SoHo, a copy of ‘Girls’ in hand.”
“It must be the highest grossing photograph of all time” stated Caroline Deck, senior specialist of photographs at Phillips in New York. “It’s hard to know for sure if that’s true”, says Segal. “A few photographs have turned up at auction more times than “Girls”, including Henri Cartier-Bresson’s ‘Rue Mouffetard’… And a number of individual photographs have fetched spectacular sums, including work by Man Ray (‘Le Violon d’Ingres’, which sold for $12.4 million) and Edward Steichen (‘The Flatiron’, $11.8 million.)
Segal poses the question: “How did an otherwise obscure commercial photographer, who spent much of his career photographing celebrities and politicians for magazines like Parade and Life, crash a party filled with some of the most famous artists in the world? The answer starts with the image, of course, which is a brassy, joyful combination of glamour and urban grit with a dash of ‘Mad Men’-era nostalgia. The building embodies a glorious slab of vanishing New York City, and those women look like they’re ready to break into song.”
However, Segal concludes that the photograph’s success also derives from smart marketing and strict organisation. “Starting around 2010, and before his death in 2019, Gigli produced, printed and signed hundreds of copies of the photograph, in a variety of sizes and on a variety of photographic papers. He did so at the behest of his son, Ogden, 63, a photographer who now runs his father’s estate and who masterminded the unique sales strategy that turned the image into a phenomenon. “[I said to my father] Whatever we do, whatever editions we make, I can sell them, don’t worry… I saw that we needed to have inventory for the day my father passed and it was my belief that the appeal of this image would carry on forever.”
Now only approximately 100 copies of ‘Girls’ remain in Gigli’s archive, “including black-and-white copies that [Ogden] describes as so stunning he’s a little reluctant to part with them. But he will, and once everything is sold, one of photography’s most improbable runs will come to an end. Unless it doesn’t. Some heirs of deceased artists produce estate prints, which look identical and simply lack the artist’s signature… Estate prints of ‘Girls’ would surely fetch lower prices, but how much lower is unclear.”
