Prints of photographs from Madonna’s wildly popular 1992 coffee table book Sex will be available for purchase for the first time at Christie’s New York this autumn, part of ongoing projects to mark the 30th anniversary of the controversial publication.

In October, 40 prints first published in Sex will go up for sale as part of a special standalone auction. Each print will be an edition of one and signed by Madonna and fashion photographer Steven Meisel, who shot the 134-page book, with prices ranging from $50,000 on the low end up to $300,000, according to Darius Himes, Christie’s deputy chairman, international head of photographs. Proceeds will go toward Raising Malawi, a nonprofit founded by Madonna in 2006 to support orphans and vulnerable children in the country.

“30 years on, Sex is still somewhat controversial, but it still reads as a very body-positive, sex-positive book,” Himes says. “It was both shocking and titillating and captured so much white hot energy coming off of Madonna in the early 1990s.”

The publication of Sex, which was released in tandem with the pop star’s fifth album Erotica, caused a worldwide commotion in the early 1990s. The book included photographs of Madonna and others in the nude and simulating sexual acts. Sex also featured Madonna’s then-boyfriend, rapper Vanilla Ice, and stars like supermodel Naomi Campbell and socialite Tatiana von Fürstenberg. The Vatican told its followers to boycott the book, which was banned in countries like Ireland and Japan. Still, Sex was an instant hit commercially and sold more than 1.5 million copies.

The photographs featured in the sale were selected by Madonna, Meisel and Anthony Vaccarello, the creative director of Saint Laurent, which released a limited second run of Sex last year in Miami to coincide with Art Basel in Miami Beach. The 800 copies —all signed by the Like a Virgin singer—sold out, and a pop-up exhibition of the photographs was a popular draw.

Himes describes the series of photographs as ”both playful and erotic”, adding that Meisel’s images hold up well, even three decades later.

“The series captures a moment in time of one of the great fashion photographers of his generation and the queen of pop. While there’s playfulness and campiness, there’s also a classical nude study thing going on. I think they resonate across multiple generations,” Himes says.

Sex was released toward the end of the Aids epidemic in the US, Himes notes, and the book featured frank depictions of homosexuality at a time when gay relationships were less accepted in the mainstream.

In an October Instagram story, Madonna said she helped pave the way for other female artists to express their sexuality, though at the time she faced backlash for including images of “men kissing men, [women] kissing [women] and me kissing everyone”.

“I spent the next few years being interviewed by narrow-minded people who tried to shame me for empowering myself as a Woman,” Madonna wrote. “I was called a whore, a witch, a heretic and the devil.”

Sex wasn’t Madonna’s only controversial foray into art. Last year, she teamed up with digital artist Beeple to release a line of three NFTs (non-fungible tokens) based on a 3D scan of the singer in the nude. The NFTs show Madonna giving birth to creatures like butterflies, centipedes and even a tree.

After facing backlash over what some characterized as a vulgar cash grab, Madonna defended herself by saying the project only depicts her doing “what women have been doing since the beginning of time, which is giving birth”.

“We’re always operating and living under the male gaze, and unfortunately pandering to what we think people want us to do,” Madonna said during a Twitter Spaces interview with Beeple in May 2022. “It is often a challenge to create works of art … and it isn’t always pretty.”

Before the auction in October, the photographs will be exhibited at Christie’s London 23 May until 2 June, then in Paris 27 June to 6 July before heading to New York on 30 September, where they will be on display until 6 October.

My series The Spiral of Containment was about translating how people are made to feel after being raped. It tried to express trauma through the realm of the imagination, using the language of magical realism. I met with and talked to survivors to attempt to understand how they thought about their trauma. Then I would sketch potential images that could express their story.

It felt obvious that if I was going to ask somebody to trust me, I had to have skin in the game. I couldn’t just say: “I’m going to translate how that makes you feel. I’ll make a drawing, we’re going to shoot it, and it’s going to work.” I had to be clear: this has happened to me, too. This is why I’m doing it. I’m in it with you.

Naively, I assumed everyone I interviewed would have a similar image they associated with their rape. Mine, for example, was an image of broken wings. But some people talked about being in a cage surrounded by lions. One described a red convertible classic car. The woman in this photo had a strikingly different image, one whose power I felt immediately. “I feel like I’m always going to be standing at the edge of the abyss with a broken dress,” she said. The dress represented her career, her relationships, everything she felt was going well – and everything she felt had been ripped away from her.

I started thinking about how to build the shot. First, I needed an abyss. I hunted through Google Maps and eventually found a giant tower called Ponte City in the Hillbrow neighbourhood of Johannesburg, South Africa. It’s a very unusual building, and not just because of the architecture. It was built for the elite: wealthy individuals who wanted incredible views of the city. But in this deeply fractured country, the area surrounding the tower became impoverished and crime levels soared. Drug-dealers moved in. Several storeys of rubbish accumulated in the belly of the building.

New owners are today trying to restore it. They gave me permission to shoot there but it was a huge task. From the inside, we had to cut through padlocks to gain access via a small window to the inner balcony. I took bolts of fabric – 200 metres of Indian cotton and rope – up to the roof, some 18 storeys higher up. Each had to be dropped down on to the balcony then rigged to different sections of the building’s inner ring.

All the windows in the central tower were fused shut and none were clean enough to shoot through. The building managers had to saw one open to give me my frame. I had very little room for manoeuvre. It was just me, my camera and my tripod. I remember thinking: “I just hope this works.”

As soon as I framed the shot, all the pieces fell into place. The woman looked incredible and I knew I had the image I needed. But the reason I love this photo has little to do with the fact that it was a feat to put together. What mattered most was how it affected this woman. As we walked out of the shoot, she said to me: “Do you mind if we call the image The Kingdom?” I didn’t understand: why would she want to call it that? She explained that, standing there, moving all of these broken pieces of her past represented by the dress, she felt like she was commanding them back into life. “I felt like the queen of my own kingdom,” she said.

That crystallised why I love working in this way. So much of photojournalism feels like taking someone’s story. Witnessing and recording history are important, but this series let me use my camera to forge a symbiotic relationship with the people I was shooting and allow them to take power back. So much of trauma is about power being taken away. These people got to express their story in a way that made them feel more empowered. It was healing – for them and for me.

In making this series, I had heard many different stories from many cultures, religions and genders but I was struck by how little it mattered what culture each survivor came from. The impact was so often the same: there is something universal about the contours of trauma.

But the series also built a community. I’m still in touch with many, including the woman in this image. Late last year, we caught up, five years since the shoot. She told me that creating this image was the moment she felt like she went from victim to survivor.

Elisa Iannacone’s CV

Born: Mexico City, Mexico, 1988.
Trained: York University in Toronto, Canada; City University, London.
Influences: “Ellen Kuras, Tim Walker, Like Water for Chocolate by Laura Esquivel.”
High point: “Every time I get that ‘Yes!’”
Low point: “Trying to get funding for personal projects and finding endless closed doors.”
Top tip: “Everyone wants to put you in a box: if you shoot narrative, you don’t shoot doc; if you shoot conflict, you don’t shoot creative art. I reject that. Everything I’ve ever shot informs the next thing. When I shot weddings as a student, I learned skills I could apply to shooting in conflict areas. And when I shot conflict, I learned about human psychology, which works for narrative work. Also: listen to your gut! You might get hundreds of ‘No’s’, but if you believe in something strongly enough, don’t quit. You’ll find your way to that ‘Yes’ and it will propel you forward.”

Elisa Iannacone is a Canon Ambassador