Ormond Gigli And The 'Girls In The Windows'

Oct 17, 2024
6 min read

In 1960, Ormond Gigli was a freelance photographer working out of a studio on East 58th Street in Manhattan. Right across the road, at what's now 320 East 58th Street, stood an old Beaux Arts brownstone, empty and awaiting demolition. Gigli kept catching sight of it from his window, and the more he looked at it, the more one image stuck in his head: every window filled with a glamorous woman, right before the whole building came down. That image became Girls in the Windows, and more than sixty years on it's still one of the most talked-about photographs ever taken in New York.

He found out the brownstone, along with the row of townhouses next to it, was booked for demolition, and he had no budget, no sponsor and no studio backing to make the idea happen. So he worked with what he had: he talked the demolition foreman into giving him two hours during the workers' lunch break, then called a modelling agency he'd worked with before and asked for volunteers. They'd bring their own dresses, sort their own hair and make-up, and get paid a dollar each for their trouble (around eleven dollars today). None of them were professional models drawing agency rates, the kind of work Audrey Munson, America's first supermodel, had pioneered decades earlier. They were simply willing to climb into a gutted building for a dollar and the fun of it. Gigli added two more women of his own choosing: his wife, Sue Ellen, and the demolition foreman's wife, invited along as thanks for the favour.

Brownstone building with many women waving from windows, vintage car parked.

The shoot itself was more logistical headache than glamorous production. The building had already been stripped of gas and electricity, and there were holes torn into the pavement out front. Gigli still found time to arrange a Rolls-Royce parked outside for a bit of contrast against all that decay, which meant getting the city to sign off on it too. New York was tearing down blocks like this all over the Upper East Side as its post-war building boom picked up speed, the same vanishing streetscape Todd Webb had been quietly documenting a few years earlier. Forty-one women climbed the old staircases and took their places across the windows, some framed neatly inside them, others standing out on the crumbling sills. Two more posed on the pavement below, next to the car. Forty-three women, all in one frame.

Gigli shot the whole thing from the fire escape of his own studio, directing everyone through a bullhorn and telling them to "pose as if they were giving someone a kiss." He said afterwards he'd been more nervous about the women balanced out on the sills than anything else. The buildings came down for good the next day.

A Photographer Who'd Already Shot Everyone

Gigli hadn't stumbled into this by accident. He'd been building towards a career like this since he was a teenager. Born in New York in 1925, he got his first camera from his father, graduated from the School of Modern Photography in 1942, and spent the war years as a Navy photographer. Afterwards he knocked around Paris for a while, living the broke, bohemian expat life plenty of young photographers did in those years. His real break came in 1952, when a Life magazine editor hired him to shoot a run of celebrity portraits and sent him off to cover the Paris fashion shows. One of those images landed on a centre spread, and that was that: a fashion and portrait career that ran for decades and put him in front of Sophia Loren, Gina Lollobrigida, Marlene Dietrich, Judy Garland, John F. Kennedy and Richard Burton, among plenty of others. None of it, in the end, made him as famous as one unpaid lunch hour on his own street.

Demolition worker swings sledgehammer, man with camera cheers from adjacent window. — Ormond Gigli – Demolition begins at what is now 320 East 58th Street, New York, 1960.

The logistics of the shoot were not simple. Since the building had already been gutted, leaving behind a shell devoid of gas or electricity, Gigli had to work around structural obstacles like gaping holes in the sidewalk. Determined to make the image as iconic as possible, he even arranged for a Rolls Royce to be parked on the sidewalk in front of the building, adding a sense of elegance and contrast to the urban decay. The models were placed in the windows – some standing boldly on the window frames, others posing from within – while three more models were strategically positioned on the street level.

From a fire escape attached to his studio, Gigli shot the image using a wide-angle lens. The result was a photograph that brought vibrancy and energy to a building on the brink of erasure. Even today, over 60 years later, the image retains its vitality and uniqueness, capturing a fleeting moment of beauty and creativity before the building disappeared forever.

A Legacy Beyond Time

The photograph, later titled Girls in the Windows, sat mostly unseen for over three decades. It wasn't until 1994 that Sue Ellen Gigli offered it to a gallery, and from there it took off in a way almost nothing else in fine art photography does. By 2023, more than 160 signed prints had sold at auction for a combined total of around $12 million.

New York Times reporter David Segal wrote in a 2023 feature that it might be the single highest-grossing photograph ever produced, a genuinely strange thing to say about an image nobody paid to make in the first place. Part of that comes down to Gigli's own approach. Rather than limiting reproductions to keep the image scarce, the way most fine art photographers do, he signed prints in twelve different sizes. Even with all that supply on the market, around 100 prints were reportedly still unsold as of 2023, according to his son and estate manager, Ogden Gigli.

The image has kept finding new admirers among people who make photographs for a living, too. In a 2016 piece for Artforum, the photographer Laurie Simmons named it one of her favourite fashion photographs of all time, more than half a century after it was taken. It's one of a small handful of single-shot photographs from that era that still gets talked about that way. Art Kane's Great Day in Harlem, shot just two years earlier a few miles uptown, is one of the only others that comes close.

Workers cleaning a dilapidated building with missing windows and scaffolding.

Daydreams Realised

For Gigli, Girls in the Windows was a fantasy made real, a decaying building turned briefly into a celebration of colour and nerve before it disappeared for good. This is how he told the story himself, in an interview with Time magazine:

In 1960, while a construction crew dismantled a row of brownstones right across from my own brownstone studio on East 58th Street, I was inspired to, somehow, immortalise those buildings. I had the vision of 43 women in formal dress adorning the windows of the skeletal facade.

We had to work quickly to secure City permissions, arrange for models which included celebrities, the demolition supervisor's wife (third floor, third from left), my own wife (second floor, far right), and also secure the Rolls-Royce to be parked on the sidewalk. Careful planning was a necessity as the photography had to be accomplished during the workers' lunch time!

The day before the buildings were razed, the 43 women appeared in their finest attire, went into the buildings, climbed the old stairs, and took their places in the windows.

I was set up on my fire escape across the street, directing the scene, with a bullhorn in hand. Of course, I was concerned for the models' safety, as some were daring enough to pose out on the crumbling sills.

The photography came off as planned. What had seemed to some as too dangerous or difficult to accomplish became my fantasy fulfilled, and my most memorable self-assigned photograph. It has been an international award winner ever since.

Most professional photographers dream of having one signature picture they are known for. “Girls in the Windows” is mine.

Gigli kept working right up until his final years. He died in December 2019, at 94, at his home in West Stockbridge, Massachusetts, surrounded by family. More than sixty years on, though, it's still that one frame everyone remembers: a dying building on East 58th Street, briefly and deliberately brought back to life.

Quick Questions About Girls in the Windows

Where was Girls in the Windows taken?

At what's now 320 East 58th Street on Manhattan's Upper East Side, a row of brownstones that were demolished the day after the shoot.

How many women are in the photograph?

Forty-three. Forty-one appear in the windows themselves, and two more pose on the pavement beside the Rolls-Royce.

How much is a signed print of Girls in the Windows worth?

More than 160 signed prints have sold at auction since 1994, for a combined total of around $12 million, making it one of the highest-grossing photographs ever sold.

Who was Ormond Gigli?

A New York-born fashion and portrait photographer who worked from the early 1950s until his death in 2019, shooting everyone from Sophia Loren to John F. Kennedy. Girls in the Windows remains his best-known image.