David Yarrow

David Yarrow was born on 8 February 1966 in Glasgow, Scotland. He studied business studies and economics at the University of Edinburgh, and while still a student was named Young Scottish Photographer of the Year at age 20. During his time at Edinburgh he photographed the 1986 World Cup in Mexico for The Times, an early credential that anticipated his later photographic career. After graduating, he moved into finance, working in investment banking and later launching a hedge fund, before returning to photography as his primary occupation.

Yarrow's photographic practice centers on large-format black-and-white and color images of wildlife, wild landscapes, and, increasingly, staged tableaux that combine animals with fashion, vehicles, and pop-culture references. His exhibition history spans galleries and institutions across North America, Europe, and Asia, and his prints are distributed through a large, geographically diverse roster of representing galleries rather than a single exclusive dealer. He lives in London.

Yarrow's reputation has been built largely through gallery programming and press coverage rather than academic art criticism. His exhibition record, including recent solo shows at CAMERA WORK in Berlin, Maddox Gallery in London and Los Angeles, Holden Luntz Gallery in Palm Beach, and Fotografiska in Stockholm, points to sustained commercial and institutional interest across multiple markets. His work sits at the intersection of wildlife photography and constructed, narrative image-making, with titles and series such as The Wolves of Wall Street signaling a deliberate blend of animals, fashion, and cultural iconography rather than strict documentary photography. That positioning, along with his unusual path from finance into photography, is a recurring theme in profiles of him, more than any settled critical consensus on the work itself.

David Yarrow's market is driven primarily by gallery sales of signed, limited-edition prints rather than by a deep or consistent auction record. The clearest publicly reported auction-house sale is 78 Degrees North, sold at Sotheby's London in 2018: one source (Maddox Gallery) puts the price at just under GBP 110,000, while another (Camera Work) reports GBP 81,250 for what appears to be the same title and year, and neither source confirms an exact sale date. A separate, higher figure of USD 200,000 has been reported for The Wolves of Wall Street I, sold at Art Miami in December 2019, but that was a private sale at an art fair rather than an auction-house transaction, and none of these figures should be treated as directly comparable or as a settled record. Given the small number and inconsistency of public secondary-market data points, any single auction result should be read with caution rather than as a stable benchmark.

There is no catalogue raisonne for David Yarrow, and authentication of individual prints runs through his representing galleries rather than a foundation or estate archive. His prints are sold in limited editions across a large number of galleries worldwide, which supports broad availability but also means pricing and edition information can vary by gallery and by print. Public auction data is limited and inconsistent, with the clearest auction-house result well below some reported private sale prices, so collectors should treat any single reported "record" price with care and confirm edition size, print date, and provenance directly with the selling gallery.