I don't know much about art; but HOW in fuck's name did Annie Leibovitz get loaned $24 million??

[Blue_Tires]

Annie Leibovitz clearly hated what a lifetime-achievement award implied about her—that the best days of her 40-year career were behind her. “Photography is not something you retire from,” the 59-year-old Leibovitz said from the stage, accepting the honor from the International Center of Photography last May at Pier 60. She was turned out in a simple black dress and glasses, her long straight hair a little unruly, as usual. Photographers, she said, “live to a very old age” and “work until the end.” She noted that Lartigue lived to be 92, Steichen 93, and Cartier-Bresson 94. “Irving Penn is going to be 92 next month, and he’s still working.” Then her tone turned rueful. “Seriously, though, this really is a big deal,” she said, hoisting her Infinity Award statuette, her voice quavering to the point where it seemed she might cry. “It means so much to me, you know, especially right now. It’s, it’s a very sweet award to get right now. I’m having some tough times right now, so … ”

The 700 friends and colleagues who had come to share the evening with her knew about the “tough times.” Two vendors had sued her for more than $700,000 in unpaid bills, and in February, the New York Times ran a front-page story reporting that in order to secure a loan, Leibovitz had essentially pawned the copyrights to her entire catalogue of photographs. Even those who had known she was in trouble were shocked by the extent of it. Leibovitz was responsible for some of the world’s most iconic magazine covers—a naked John Lennon with Yoko Ono for Rolling Stone, Demi Moore, naked and pregnant, for Vanity Fair. She had moved from celebrity portraiture to fashion photography to edgier, more artistic pictures; some considered her the heir to Richard Avedon or Helmut Newton.

Despite being a compulsive perfectionist whose shoots cost a fortune to produce, Leibovitz was very much in demand. People spoke of a fabled “contract for life” from Condé Nast, thought to bring her as much as $5 million annually. (The estimate didn’t seem far-fetched; a decade ago, the Times reported that Condé Nast chairman Si Newhouse had instructed Vanity Fair editor Graydon Carter not to “nickel and dime” Leibovitz over the issue of an extra quarter-million dollars in her contract.) She was said to earn a day rate of $250,000 just to set foot in a studio for an advertising job for clients like Louis Vuitton. Over the years, Leibovitz had bought and sold a small fortune in real estate—a penthouse in Chelsea with a photo studio nearby, a sprawling townhouse in Greenwich Village, a compound in Rhinebeck once owned by the Astor family, and a Paris pied-à-terre overlooking the Seine. Virtually anyone (the Queen of England, for instance) would agree to be photographed by her, and she had a longtime relationship with the celebrated writer and intellectual Susan Sontag.

Lately, however, Leibovitz’s life had taken a decidedly dark turn. Her reference to “tough times” was significantly understated. In the past five years, Sontag and both of Leibovitz’s parents have died. Her debts now total a staggering $24 million, consolidated with one lender with whom she is engaged in a lawsuit and due in September. If she can’t meet that deadline, she may lose her homes and the rights to her life’s body of work.

http://nymag.com/fashion/09/fall/58346/?imw=Y&f=most-emailed-24h5

[Blue_Tires]

1. morning kick

[supernova]

2. I think she got caught up

in the real estate market going bad at the same time that she made some kinda dumb money moves.

IIRC, it's something like she sold the bldg where she and her partner lived then turned around and tried to "flip" another building after renovating it. But just like her shoots, costs got out of control. Evidently, she doesn't understand sticking to a budget, even a high-priced one. Then to cover these loans, she put up her work portfolio as collateral. She may lose it all too.

I find it all very sad. She's so talented and should be set for life.

[Auggie]

3. Spending beyond her means...

Leibovitz had also built a life that had become extraordinarily expensive to maintain. It wasn’t just the mortgages on the homes. It was the Range Rover, the trips to Paris, the chef and housekeeper, the handyman, the personal yoga instructor, the terrace gardener, and the live-in nanny. There was only one man Leibovitz deemed qualified to work on anything involving air-conditioning or ductwork at either residence, and he lived in Vermont. “She wanted her life to be like a magazine spread,” Kellum says. “Everything beautiful, nothing out of place. She wanted everything to be perfect.”

<snip>

It’s impossible to account for all of Leibovitz’s line-item expenses, but as surprising as it may be to outsiders, she was clearly spending beyond her means. One close associate of Leibovitz’s theorizes that she identified too much with her subjects. “Photographers aren’t professional athletes, recording artists, or supermodels,” the source says. “Compared to 99 percent of the world, she makes a vast fortune. The problem occurs when a person becomes so famous that they start feeling that they’re more in line financially with Oprah or Madonna.”

In 2004, still in need of money to help pay for the $1.87 million purchase of the damaged Greenwich Village house, Leibovitz took out a bridge loan, a short-term, typically high-interest financial instrument. The loan was intended to tide her over until she could sell her other properties. Later that year, she sold the 26th Street studio for almost $11.4 million; in 2005, she sold the London Terrace penthouse. Those sales must have generated millions in profit, but they still didn’t get her out of the red. Leibovitz, like so many Americans during the boom years, had been taking out additional mortgages, heaping loan upon loan. Before selling her photo studio, she’d borrowed an additional $3.5 million against it, above the original $2.1 million mortgage. The initial mortgage on the Rhinebeck property was about $1.8 million. Eventually, she had some $11 million mortgaged against it. She’d bought the Greenwich Village property with a $1.2 million loan, and three years later tacked on an addition $2.2 million mortgage. By last year, the total value of the mortgages she was carrying came to about $15 million. Assuming she had a 5 percent 30-year fixed-rate mortgage on that amount, her annual outlay just to service the debt on those loans would have come to almost $1 million.

Leibovitz also had tax problems. Because of income taxes the IRS said Leibovitz had failed to pay, the agency attached liens on her properties totaling $1.9 million in 2005 and 2006. Dutchess County records show that she had also neglected to pay more than $92,000 in 2005 property taxes for the Rhinebeck place.