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Annie Leibovitz — Elvis Presley's TV, Graceland, Memphis, Tennessee
Annie Leibovitz

Elvis Presley's TV, Graceland, Memphis, Tennessee

2011

A broken television set sits at the heart of this arresting archival pigment print, its cracked screen and battered casing carrying the full weight of a cultural mythology. Photographed at Graceland, Elvis Presley's Memphis estate, the image belongs to a body of work in which Annie Leibovitz turns her celebrated eye toward objects rather than living subjects, treating personal possessions as a form of portraiture by proxy. The television becomes a quietly devastating stand-in for its former owner, evoking the new media landscape that amplified Presley's fame to an almost unendurable pitch while simultaneously suggesting the costs that came with it. Leibovitz brings to the still life the same compositional authority and psychological attunement that distinguish her best portraiture, producing an image that is elegiac, layered, and impossible to dismiss. Leibovitz has long occupied a singular position in the history of photography, her work spanning four decades of cultural life and appearing in the collections of institutions including the National Portrait Gallery, the Brooklyn Museum, the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam, and the State Hermitage Museum in St. Petersburg. This print, dated 2011, is editioned and hand-signed, and is offered through the Watermill Center Benefit Auction. At 77.5 by 101 centimeters, it commands a wall with quiet authority, suited to a collector who values work that rewards extended looking and operates at the intersection of documentary precision and artistic depth.

Medium
Archival pigment print
Overall
Signed
Yes

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About this work

Annie Leibovitz, Elvis Presley's TV, Graceland, Memphis, Tennessee, 2011

A broken television set sits at the heart of this arresting archival pigment print, its cracked screen and battered casing carrying the full weight of a cultural mythology. Photographed at Graceland, Elvis Presley's Memphis estate, the image belongs to a body of work in which Annie Leibovitz turns her celebrated eye toward objects rather than living subjects, treating personal possessions as a form of portraiture by proxy. The television becomes a quietly devastating stand-in for its former owner, evoking the new media landscape that amplified Presley's fame to an almost unendurable pitch while simultaneously suggesting the costs that came with it. Leibovitz brings to the still life the same compositional authority and psychological attunement that distinguish her best portraiture, producing an image that is elegiac, layered, and impossible to dismiss. Leibovitz has long occupied a singular position in the history of photography, her work spanning four decades of cultural life and appearing in the collections of institutions including the National Portrait Gallery, the Brooklyn Museum, the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam, and the State Hermitage Museum in St. Petersburg. This print, dated 2011, is editioned and hand-signed, and is offered through the Watermill Center Benefit Auction. At 77.5 by 101 centimeters, it commands a wall with quiet authority, suited to a collector who values work that rewards extended looking and operates at the intersection of documentary precision and artistic depth.

Medium
Archival pigment print
Dimensions
overall: 77.5 x 101 cm
Year
2011
Signed
Hand-signed by the artist
Seen at
The Watermill Center Benefit Auction

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Collected by

Alex Capecelatro