Annie Leibovitz put her Greenwich Village home (a combination of three townhouses with a total of 10,000 sq. ft.) on the market this week for $33m. That should help tame the $24 million she owes for an old $15 million loan that didn’t go as planned–this finance stuff, point and click it isn’t. At least she’s still got the day job. Her latest paying gig is an advertising campaign that puts the meat on the peat for Macallan. A series of four Leibovitz portraits of Scottish actor Kevin McKidd (Dr. Owen Hunt of ABC TV’s “Grey’s Anatomy”) holding two fingers of the luxury single-malt Macallan is included on a series of limited edition (1000) bottles, priced at $2750 each.
The portraits look like regulation product shots. But the settings are interesting. The historic Rokeby Estate, former home of the Astors, was used as a backdrop as was the home of Hudson River School painter Frederic Edwin Church. On what drew Leibovitz to the project, she told Elle magazine, “Macallan really is it. It’s the premiere luxury scotch whisky in the world.” Four bottles of The Macallan 1949 – the year Leibovitz was born – each featuring a signed gallery-size print, are also available for sale at $25,000 a bottle. She’d buy one if only she had a place to put it.