Too cool for posters?

January 10, 2012 11:07 AM

Where can I get a print/poster of an Annie Leibovitz photo? Specifically the second one on this page. I know it is in a book of collected works, but I'm looking for something a little larger to hang on a wall. It seems a little odd that it wouldn't be available somehow, but that seems to be the case. Is there something about such high caliber photographers' work that I don't know about?
posted by daboo to media & arts (9 answers total)

I have no idea if a poster exists. But if you want a print, and you're not finding online listings for such, you basically need to contact her representatives -- Contact Press Images -- to find out from them if there's an edition available for sale, or if you can commission a print. This would be basically pursuing the fine art aspect of this, and would probably be quite expensive.

(I don't really know about this world, but there's a particular Avedon photo I tried to buy a few years ago. I got a little way into the process...and then he died, which basically meant I was out of luck. YMMV.)
posted by BlahLaLa at 11:22 AM on January 10

There don't seem to be any poster / low-end prints of Annie Leibovitz stuff, which indicates to me that she decided to sell the public via books rather than prints.

An original print would probably be $8k-12k, likely out of your budget.
posted by smackfu at 12:10 PM on January 10

Definitely out of my budget. It just seemed very weird to me that there wouldn't be any affordable versions available. I'm completely outside of the world of photography, and I don't know if this is the norm or not, but it struck me as odd.
posted by daboo at 12:18 PM on January 10

How large a print do you want?

If you can find a relatively high-res digital copy of the image, and you don't want it any bigger than 11x17, you could just print it yourself at a Kinko's or something, frame it, and hang it on your wall.

If you can't find a digital file large enough, you could also potentially check the book out from the library, do a high-quality scan of the image, and print that - it's usually possible to blow up a bit from the scan if you scan at a high resolution. (So for instance if the image in the book is 7x9, you could probably get an 8x10 image out of it, no problem.)

If you want something larger, can't get the book, can't find a jpg, or whatever, try some research on any major museum show it's appeared in and call said museum gift shop to see if they printed a poster? Maybe the Rock & Roll Hall Of Fame or someplace like that? Pete Seeger's people and/or the Clearwater Foundation?
posted by Sara C. at 1:18 PM on January 10

Also, you've followed the links and asked someone at the gallery in question, right? They seem to have done an exhibition of Annie Leibowitz music photography and might have printed up some merch.
posted by Sara C. at 1:20 PM on January 10

I have followed all the links, but I hadn't thought to ask the gallery if they had any posters for sale - like I said, I'm not very familiar with how these things work - but I will give that a go and report back.
posted by daboo at 2:21 PM on January 10

I'm not exactly in the world of photography either, but I think it's pretty common for prints to be unavailable. When I was looking for a poster of Julius Shulman's famous photograph of Case Study House No. 22, I had to settle for buying a TASCHEN book, cutting that page out, and framing it.
posted by synchronia at 4:38 PM on January 10

The book is available used from Amazon (and presumably elsewhere) for about 20 bucks. The book is 9"x12", although without seeing it you can't be positive the print takes up the whole page. This is likely the cheapest way to get a high quality copy.
posted by cushie at 12:25 PM on January 15

For what it's worth, I figured I would update this with what I've found. I grabbed the book from the library, only to discover that the image in question is distributed across two pages, so framing/blowing that up won't really work. The largest resolution image of it I have found so far is 618 x 615, which is way to tiny to print at any size. Not really sure where to go forward with this, just trying up a few ends for anyone else searching.
posted by daboo at 5:53 PM on March 4