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Twenty prints, 20 by 16 inches, signed by the photographer. The gallery label is spare. The year it names was anything but quiet for Madonna.
The paperwork is almost bare. On its artnet listing, Staley-Wise Gallery, the New York gallery that represents Patrick Demarchelier‘s work, describes Madonna, 1990 as a gelatin silver print measuring 20 by 16 inches, signed by the photographer and issued in an edition of 20. Other sizes are available on request. The price is not published. The entry logs a single exhibition, a show called Women of Distinction that ran from October 21 to December 5, 2020, and the gallery’s 1stDibs listing adds only that every edition carries Demarchelier’s signature and that the example on offer is in excellent condition.
Across the Atlantic, Atlas Gallery in London offers a print titled Madonna, New York, 1990. According to its Artsy listing, that one is a selenium toned gelatin silver print, also 20 by 16 inches and also from an edition of 20, hand signed and then signed, stamped and numbered on the reverse, sold with a gallery certificate of authenticity and, again, priced on request.
Signal. What happened: Patrick Demarchelier’s portrait Madonna, 1990 remains on offer as a signed, editioned print through the galleries that handle his work in New York and London, four years after the photographer’s death. Exact object: Madonna, 1990 (listed by Atlas as Madonna, New York, 1990), gelatin silver print, 20 by 16 inches, edition of 20; the Atlas example is selenium toned and signed, stamped and numbered on the verso. When and where: Staley-Wise Gallery, 100 Crosby Street, New York, and Atlas Gallery, London, price on request at both. Source: the galleries’ own listings on artnet, Artsy and 1stDibs. Why it matters: the picture comes from a year in which Madonna toured the world, starred in a studio film and released two singles that reached number one on the Billboard Hot 100, and from a photographer who can no longer sign new prints, with Atlas stating that only a small number of signed prints remained after he died.
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What neither listing does is describe the picture. That matters more than it might for most photographers, because Demarchelier did not photograph Madonna just once in 1990. He was, by then, one of the people she kept returning to, and the calendar that year gave him several reasons to set up a camera in front of her.
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The working relationship predates the print. In 1989 Demarchelier shot Madonna for the cover of Vogue in a white swimsuit, laughing over her shoulder in a pool, a frame The New York Times’ obituary likened to a woman caught just after surfacing from a swim. The same obituary, reposted in full by Staley-Wise, said Madonna was drawn to his relaxed way of working, much as Diana, Princess of Wales had been, and that he became one of her favorite photographers.
His method explains the pull. “I like to do the pictures before people get too self-conscious,” he once told Keira Knightley in Interview, a line the Times recalled. That instinct for speed suited a subject who, in 1990, rarely stood still for long.
Tributes published after his death credited him with a broad share of Madonna’s imagery that year. Extra wrote that he made all of the images used to promote Warren Beatty’s Dick Tracy, in which Madonna played the nightclub singer Breathless Mahoney, while Rolling Stone Brasil listed the companion album I’m Breathless among his record covers. A long-running fan chronology, Today in Madonna History, records that Glamour ran a Demarchelier cover of her in December 1990, when the magazine named her one of its Women of the Year, and that he photographed the cover session for the single Justify My Love on September 25, 1990.
The partnership outlasted the year. He shot the cover of her 1994 album Bedtime Stories, CNN noted in its obituary, and Staley-Wise’s own exhibition archive shows a second portrait, Madonna, Miami, 1994, hanging in the same Demarchelier survey as the 1990 print.
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Consider what 1990 held. “Vogue,” rel that March, became the world’s best-selling single of the year according to the figures gather on the I’m Breathless entry, and the Blond Ambition World Tour ran from April to August across Asia, North America and Europe, drawing a call for a boycott from Pope John Paul II over its Catholic imagery. I’m Breathless arrived in late May, a jazz and swing record built around three Stephen Sondheim songs, and Dick Tracy opened in American theaters on June 15. On September 6 she performed “Vogue” at the MTV Video Music Awards dressed as an 18th-century courtier.
Demarchelier was not the only photographer shaping her image that spring. Herb Ritts shot the June 1990 cover of Interview, running alongside a Glenn O’Brien conversation recorded while she rehearsed Blond Ambition at the Disney studios in Los Angeles.
The soundtrack landed especially hard in Japan. It became Madonna’s second number one album on the Oricon chart, finished 1990 as the country’s best-selling foreign album, and brought her Grand Prix honors for album and artist at the 1991 Japan Gold Disc Awards.
Those projects asked for very different versions of the same woman. Breathless Mahoney was a comic-strip showgirl, all period glamour and Prohibition-era styling. The Justify My Love campaign that followed in the autumn stripped that away. The Associated Press obituary, as reprinted by The Macomb Daily, caught both sides of Demarchelier’s 1990 work with her: one image of the star in a bejeweled bustier, another in leather with a cigarette hanging from her lips.
Which of those the editioned print shows is not stated in either gallery listing, and that answer belongs to the galleries rather than to guesswork. The leather picture, though, is the one his obituaries returned to most often.
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The Times described that picture precisely: a black leather baseball cap and vest, arms folded and tucked beneath her armpits, a cigarette dangling from her mouth. The Justify My Love entry on Wikipedia, drawing on the liner notes of The Immaculate Collection, credits the photograph to Demarchelier and the art direction to Jeri Heiden, and describes Madonna leaning forward with her hair pushed up under the cap and a hard set to her face. Carol Clerk, author of Madonnastyle, read the pose as deliberately masculine.
The image traveled. It had already run on the cover of an Interview issue carrying a conversation with Madonna, according to the same entry, and it was later pulled from the French edition of the single.
The record itself was new territory. Written by Lenny Kravitz and Ingrid Chavez with additional lyrics by Madonna, Justify My Love came out on November 6, 1990, on Sire and Warner Bros. as the lead single from The Immaculate Collection, her first greatest hits album. Japan received it on December 10. It became her ninth number one on the Billboard Hot 100.
The sleeve ended up as the calm center of a storm. Jean-Baptiste Mondino‘s grainy black and white video, shot over three days at the Royal Monceau hotel in Paris with her then-boyfriend Tony Ward and conceived as a tribute to the 1963 film Bay of Angels, was rejected by MTV in late November. The network had threatened earlier clips, including “Express Yourself” and “Vogue,” but had always aired them unedited; this time it declined outright. Madonna defended it on ABC’s Nightline on December 3, and four days later released it in the United States as a stand-alone video single at $9.98, a format that went on to become the best-selling video single of all time. Through all of it, the face on the record sleeve stayed fixed: capped, unsmiling, cigarette in place.
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Demarchelier came to that session with close to three decades behind the camera. Born in 1943 and raised in Le Havre on the Normandy coast, he received his first Eastman Kodak camera from his stepfather on his 17th birthday, taught himself to develop film and retouch negatives, and started out photographing friends and weddings, according to his Wikipedia biography. He moved to Paris at 20.
Assisting the Swiss photographer Hans Feurer, who shot for Vogue, brought him to the magazine’s attention, and the Times reported that his relationship with Vogue began even before he followed a girlfriend to New York in 1975. There he learned from and worked with photographers including Henri Cartier-Bresson, and his pictures soon ran in Elle, Marie Claire and 20 Ans.
In 1989 Diana, Princess of Wales asked him to become her personal photographer, making him the first non-Briton to hold an official royal photography role. In September 1992 his cover of Linda Evangelista for Harper’s Bazaar, her arm raised to hold the third A of the masthead across one eye, announced Liz Tilberis’s arrival as editor and opened a 12-year run at the magazine. France named him an Officer of the Order of Arts and Letters in 2007, the same year he received the CFDA’s Founder’s Award, and he shot the Pirelli Calendar in 2005, 2008 and 2014.
He also built a long partnership with the editor Grace Coddington at British and American Vogue, and in 1992 he photographed Vogue’s 100th-anniversary cover, ten of the era’s leading models in white shirts and jeans arranged along a ladder. By 2006 his first name alone was enough for a running joke in The Devil Wears Prada, where securing “Patrick” signals an assistant’s competence.
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For most of his career, pictures like the Madonna portrait lived on newsstands and record sleeves rather than gallery walls. Atlas Gallery notes that his first gallery exhibition did not come until 1995, by which point he was regarded as a portraitist as much as a fashion photographer.
The shift came gradually, through dealers on both coasts. Staley-Wise, which opened in 1981 with an exhibition of Horst photographs, has long handled his prints in New York, while Fahey/Klein Gallery in Los Angeles also represented his fine-art sales, per Fox News. Staley-Wise hung Madonna, 1990 in a two-part Demarchelier survey whose first half was billed as a prelude to his exhibition at the Petit Palais in Paris. That retrospective, dated to 2008 by both galleries, was accompanied by a Steidl monograph of more than 400 photographs with an introduction by Anna Wintour.
In 2015 Christie’s in New York presented a Demarchelier survey titled Photographs 1975-2015, with Madonna, New York, 1990 among the works shown, per contemporaneous coverage. Wintour wrote an essay for that Christie’s presentation, and one line from it, later quoted by Pirelli, summed up his standing: “Patrick takes simple photographs perfectly, which of course is immensely difficult.” Staley-Wise followed with its own show under the same title from December 4, 2015, to January 30, 2016, per L’Oeil de la Photographie, and mounted another Demarchelier exhibition in 2018.
After his death, Atlas worked with his estate and studio on Legacy, which ran from September 22 to November 18, 2023, and was billed as his first major solo exhibition in the United Kingdom. The gallery said only a small number of signed prints remained after he died, and that the works on offer were mounted in a manner recalling Irving Penn’s printing and mounting, each bearing the official Patrick Demarchelier stamp, signed and editioned.
The selenium toning noted on the Atlas example is a long-standing darkroom treatment for gelatin silver prints, used to deepen blacks and improve archival stability. Auction records for Demarchelier’s Madonna prints, including a 40 by 50 centimeter sheet titled Madonna New York, 1990, sit behind artnet’s price database paywall. On the primary market, both galleries still list the photograph at price on request.
