Amanda Moss / 24 April 2025 / Categories: Photographers, Opinions

Art Auction Houses and Harvey Edwards Posters and Prints

Fame Movie: You've got big dreams, you want fame. Well fame costs, and right here is where you start paying; in Sweat

There isn’t a dancer or lay person for that matter born in the 50s or 60s or 70s who doesn’t remember Harvey Edwards leg warmers poster from 1979 featured in movies like Fame, Sixteen Candles, Annie and later tv shows Will and Grace and Sex and the City. Almost as famous as the Tennis girl scratching her bottom. Leg Warmers was in the changing room of my dance studio growing up hanging on a whitewashed brick wall so I saw it every day pretty much from age 5 to 18.

So I’ve been wanting to buy one for a while. They come up from time to time on auction sites like Heritage, Bonhams, Qart in California, Invaluable and Worthpoint as well as keeping a close eye on EBay. If anyone’s got one out there let me know.

Bruce Marks a principal dancer with the American Ballet theatre was the cousin of Harvey Edwards and it was his tenacity and work ethic that intrigued and inspired Edwards to create some of the most iconic dance photography of the 20th century.

It cannot be understated how omnipresent the poster of Harvey Edwards legwarmers was in the 1980s. Every teenage girls bedroom or college dorm had a picture of it on the wall. The poster sold a staggering 3.2 million copies in 86 countries and and appeared in over 256 movies commercials thumbprint media

The close-up of the dancer’s legs in plié fifth position is actually not a girl, a female ballerina but a male dancer Bruce Wurl who performed with the Los Angeles chamber ballet and toured Europe throughout the 1980s. He died in 1987 following complications from the AIDS virus.

In the 1980s Dance photographer Harvey Edwards worked with the circle Gallery on a limited series of special prints, limited edition cyber chrome prints. Initially it was planned there would be 299 prints in the end only 50 were printed.

49. Excuse me 48 were sold off at the time number 50 was kept by the Harvey Edwards family and number 49 came up for auction somewhat recently at the Heritage auction house in march 2023. Since 2012 the record price for this artist at auction is 3,000 USD for Leg Warmers, sold at Heritage Auctions, Dallas in 2023.

Leg warmers, the last remaining unique chromogenic print actually printed later, personal, and from the collection of the Edwards family signed on ink and pencil on the mount hitherto the only versions of this image were in print form, carried an estimate of between 18,000 - 22,000 at Bonham in NYC on 9th April, 2021. The negatives of the image were destroyed by fire. I don’t know what the final selling price was the proceeds donated to St Jude’s Children’s research hospital at the request of the family.