“Girls in the Windows” wasn’t made by an art world giant, but people keep buying it. And buying it. And buying it.
Photo: Ormond Gigli
This is a gift🎁link, so anyone can read the entire article about Ormond Gigli's photograph "Girls in the Windows" (1960), even if they do not subscribe to The New York Times. Below are some excerpts from the article by David Segal:
Standing on a second-story fire escape, a photographer named Ormond Gigli is shouting instructions through a bullhorn. Forty models are posing in the window frames of brownstones across East 58th Street on Manhattan’s Upper East Side, a menagerie of colorful dresses and evening gowns. Two more women stand on the sidewalk, next to a silver Rolls-Royce. It is the summer of 1960 and Gigli is in a rush. Demolition on the brownstones has already begun — that’s why there’s no glass in those windows — and the day after the shoot, the buildings will be razed. But the demolition supervisor has agreed to let Gigli commandeer the place for two hours during an extended lunch break, under one condition: The supervisor wants his wife in the picture. (She’s on the third floor, third from the left.) Nobody has 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. Over the last 30 years, roughly 600 signed and numbered copies have been sold, at prices that typically range between $15,000 and $30,000. The image is offered at galleries around the world — in New York, Los Angeles, Palm Beach, Cleveland, Atlanta, Boston, Santa Fe, London, Paris and, until the invasion of Ukraine, Moscow. Buyers who want to cut out the middleman can buy directly from the artist’s estate.
