Loan deadline looms for Annie Leibovitz

US photographer Annie Leibovitz faces losing her entire life's work as well as her three New York townhouses if she fails to pay back a $24m loan by a deadline today. Leibovitz must pay back the loan to Art Capital Group, a company that issues loans against fine art and real estate.
 
The 59-year-old has several multimillion-dollar mortgages despite earning millions from her iconic images of famous people such John Lennon, Demi Moore and Queen Elizabeth II, shot for the likes of Vanity Fair and Rolling Stone magazines. In 2008 she consolidated her debts with Art Capital, using her Manhattan homes and the copyright to her entire collection of work, said to be worth $50m, as collateral.
 
In July Art Capital sued Leibovitz for breach of contract, claiming that she had blocked the firm from selling her photographs and refused to allow real estate agents to value her properties. Art Capital already has thousands of Leibovitz's negatives in storage.  
 
It was Leibovitz's plan to renovate the three historic townhouses she bought in Greenwich Village in 2002 that landed her in trouble in the first place. The extensive - and expensive - project in which she aimed to combine them into one property saw her mount up $15m worth of mortgages by last year, according to New York magazine. It also landed her with a $15m lawsuit from a neighbour.
 
To add to her woes, this week it was revealed that an Italian photographer was suing Leibovitz for using his photos without permission.
 
Paolo Pizzetti is seeking $300,000 for copy infringement, claiming that Leibovitz used photos he took in Venice and Rome and passed them off as her own in a 2009 calendar for the coffee company Lavazza. Pizzetti says he was hired in April 2008 by Leibovitz to scout locations in Italy for an ad campaign for Lavazza, but was later informed she would not be travelling there for the photo shoot.

When the calendar came out in October, he claims that two of his photographs - one of Rome's Trevi Fountain and one of the Piazza San Marco in Venice - had been used but with models superimposed on them. Pizzetti is also requesting that the photographs be destroyed. ·