David Yarrow

From the touchline to the wild

David Yarrow is a Scottish fine art photographer, conservationist and author, born in Glasgow in 1966 and based in London. He began as a sports photographer while still a student at Edinburgh University, and was named Young Scottish Photographer of the Year at the age of twenty. In the same year he covered the World Cup in Mexico for The Times, and his photograph of Diego Maradona holding the trophy above his head was syndicated internationally.

He did not become a professional artist immediately. After graduating he spent eight years as an institutional stockbroker in London and New York, became director of equities at a securities house, and then founded his own London hedge fund in the middle of the nineties. Photography ran alongside that career for a long time, a double life the financial press noted with some amusement, before it became the whole of his working life.

Method

His guiding principle is borrowed from the photographer Jim Richardson: if you want to be a better photographer, stand in front of more interesting stuff. In practice that has meant the Dinka people of South Sudan, the great predators of Africa, the polar north and, in an entirely different register, supermodels and sporting figures.

The technical signature of the work is proximity and point of view. Where possible he photographs dangerous animals with a remote controlled camera set on the ground, so that the lens looks up at the subject rather than across at it, which gives the animal a monumentality no long lens from a vehicle can produce. He has gone further, coating camera housings in scents researched to draw a particular species towards the lens. The images are usually monochrome, printed large, and built for wall presence.

More recently he has concentrated on staged narrative work, most visibly a series set in the American West, elaborately cast and dressed, in which the photograph behaves like a film still. His collaborations with Cindy Crawford and Cara Delevingne belong to this strand of the practice.

Books, philanthropy and exhibitions

He has published several monographs, beginning with a collection of photographs of the world's most isolated places, followed by a volume of monochrome wildlife and portrait work drawn from three years of travel, and then a book carrying a foreword by the Duke of Cambridge whose royalties went to the conservation charity Tusk. A later monograph carried a foreword by Tom Brady and an afterword by Cindy Crawford.

Philanthropy is not incidental to the practice. He is the affiliated photographer of Tusk and an ambassador for several conservation organisations, and his work has raised very large sums for conservation and for children's health causes. His photographs have been exhibited at the Saatchi Gallery in London and at the global headquarters of Christie's, and he has shown regularly with Maddox Gallery in London, including the solo exhibition Storytelling in 2023 and a dedicated gallery space given over to his work from 2024.

What a specialist examines

Yarrow's market is an edition market, so the edition is the first thing to establish. Each image is issued in stated sizes and edition runs, and the format of the print together with the number of the impression governs value more than the subject does. A specialist confirms the edition size, the impression number, and whether the piece is a standard or a large format release.

Prints are normally issued signed and accompanied by a certificate, and the presence of both matters, as does any studio stamp or hologram. Because these are large photographic prints, frequently face mounted to acrylic and heavily framed, the condition questions are specific: surface scratching on the acrylic, delamination, corner knocks from transit, and any fading from prolonged display. Original framing as supplied by the studio is generally preferred, and the weight and scale of the works make transport and storage history worth asking about.