Photographer Annie Leibovitz's lifework is on the line

NEW YORK CITY — reporting from new york city

Annie Leibovitz had two goals for a proposed series of her famous celebrity photographs, enlarged to 5 feet tall, at a price of $25,000 each.

For starters, "She said she would like to make more money," recalled Fifth Avenue gallery owner Edwynn Houk, who devised the plan with her before she took it to an auction house that staged a London exhibition last year with even higher prices for the jumbo photos -- $33,000.

But beyond the bottom line, Leibovitz was intent on solidifying the status of her photos as fine art, Houk said. At those prices, buyers would have to be interested in more than the celebrities: "They were collecting the work of Annie Leibovitz."

That Leibovitz wanted to control how her work is positioned is hardly a surprise. She's the master of the setup shot, the conceptual cover -- meticulously positioning her subjects, whether it's a nude John Lennon wrapped around his wife, Yoko Ono, or Demi Moore, nude and pregnant, Steve Martin as part of a Franz Kline painting, or heads of state such as President Bill Clinton, whom she tried in vain to talk into posing while smoking a cigar in the Oval Office. That's how she's come to define modern celebrity portrait photography during her decades shooting cover photos for Rolling Stone, Vanity Fair and Vogue.

But the 59-year-old Leibovitz soon could lose control of her life's work, for the very reason she needed money, and fast.

Leibovitz faces a Tuesday deadline to repay a $24-million loan from a New York art-finance company. Art Capital Group advanced her that sum last year after the photographer, in "dire financial condition," as court papers put it, posted as collateral basically everything she owns -- not only her two homes but "every photographic image ever taken by Ms. Leibovitz," according to the lender.

She isn't the first creative person to mortgage intellectual property. Lennon and fellow Beatle Paul McCartney dealt their song publishing rights and pop star Michael Jackson, who bought them, later used their catalog, and his own hits, to secure more than $200 million in loans. Representatives of singer David Bowie reaped $55 million for him in 1997 by turning the revenue stream from his old songs and recording masters into bonds -- "Bowie Bonds," they're called.