David Yarrow: It’s a Beautiful World and I Want to Tell Beautiful Stories

Sorrel Sky Galleries and David Yarrow Share Big Dreams

Sorrel Sky Gallery at 419 West Broadway, New York, NY; 125 West Palace Avenue, Santa Fe, NM; and 828 Main Avenue, Durango, CO places more David Yarrow photographs with collectors than any of the dozens of galleries around the world representing him. It’s a relationship that began when Sorrel Sky Gallery owner and visionary, Shanan Campbell, met David Yarrow while he was in Durango doing a photoshoot, and has developed into a friendship between two people with similar can-do attitudes toward life, impeccable work ethics, and big dreams.

David Yarrow makes photographs. He began photographing when he was 8 years old, printing in a dark room at 15, and on the pitch at the World Cup at 20 capturing Diego Maradona hoisting the World Cup. Then came a career in banking and finance where he continued taking photographs to distinguish himself from his colleagues. When he sold his hedge fund in 2014, the camera was the vehicle that allowed him to reevaluate his life. Today, he is one of the top-grossing art photographers in the world.

“David Yarrow is not just the best photographer I’ve ever met, he is one of the best artists I have ever worked with,”  Shanan Campbell said at a recent three-galleries-in-four-day event featuring Yarrow.

As a teen, the darkroom experience of seeing something come through in the developer tray captured Yarrow’s imagination. In other words, it was the tale’s end rather than the start of the process. Today he is challenged by the bad ideas that become his best ideas and how he can make them come to fruition.

“I think I’m a romanticist, but equally, I’m a pragmatist before I’m a romanticist. Digital photography does make the workflow quicker. It makes my kind of photography easier. There’s more immediacy to it.” David Yarrow

Immediacy, proximity, depth, an unwavering work ethic, and being his own worst critic have propelled Yarrow to the forefront of photography. He recognizes his fallibility and presses on stating that his threshold for what excites him gets higher and higher and higher. “I need more. I’m greedy,” he laughs with his Scottish charm.

Recently he found more in South Africa, the Namibian desert, Positano, Ischia, Capri, Italy, and St. Tropez, France. And he points out that the body of work hanging in any one of Sorrel Sky Galleries, aggregates to less than half a second captured by the camera in the masterful hands of Yarrow. He questions whether reportage and taking pictures are considered art when only 5-6% of the art shown at the big art fairs like Basel in Miami in December will be photography. For him, it's an iterative process of building, refining, and improving the making of pictures.

“Ansel Adams said photography is not about the camera, it’s about the poems you’ve read, the music you listen to, the loves you’ve made, and the loves you’ve lost. In other words, it’s an outer manifestation of your inner soul.” 

If that is the case, then Yarrow’s inner soul is filled with beauty and adventure (and some tongue-in-cheek humor). He is an authentic artist, and his zest for life and living is evident in his pictures, which are meticulously planned and executed, often involving elaborate setups, pulling diverse elements together, and telling a compelling story. Whether photographing wildlife in their natural habitats or staging complex scenes with celebrities and models, David Yarrow's commitment to originality and visual impact is unwavering.

“It’s a beautiful world. I want to tell beautiful stories,” Yarrow tells the crowds who gather to listen to him talk about his work. “If there is life somewhere else and our great-great-great-great grandchildren find it out there, it is never going to be half as much fun as this.”

The love of beauty is the foundation for Sorrel Sky Galleries. Its core values are beauty, excellence, innovation, inspiration, integrity, and passion. The goal for everyone is to create meaningful connections with artists and collectors. Campbell chooses to work with artists who have a passion for their work. With her finely honed acumen for art and business, she leads with a ‘let’s make that happen’ attitude.

“I’m not just selling a mass-produced product, but an artist’s heart and talent. And selling David Yarrow is fun.” Shanan Campbell

Some questions and answers with David Yarrow 

Sorrel Sky: What is the most important word when it comes to photography?
Yarrow: Access. Getting in the position to use the camera. When Jack Ma, the Chinese businessman, approached me because his son is a photographer and wanted an apprenticeship with me, my quid pro quo was having Jack help me get access to Siberia where I could photograph Siberian Tigers in January 2024.
Sorrel Sky: What is your source of confidence, and from where does your authenticity come?
Yarrow: Stephen Spielberg is my hero. And he said that his biggest fear was boring people. If Stephen Spielberg is worried about boring people, what hope do we have? So, my biggest fear is boring people. I’ve got this acute consciousness that there is too much photographic content in the world. If I travel to Yosemite at dawn tomorrow, I’ve got no right to take a photograph that the rest of the world needs or wants to see. It’s been so photographed and there is nothing new that I’m doing. I think that sense of self-doubt about the need for others to be awakened by your work is not something that is shared by a lot of practitioners. They can be very dedicated and strong, but they photograph what they want to photograph rather than what the outside world is going to be grabbed by interest-wise. That’s a very delicate subject. But I’m very driven by the reaction. I think the bedrock of the whole thing is a very rigorous approach toward authenticity. The most exhausting thing for an artist is to be inauthentic. Imagine spending all of your time as an artist copying what other people are doing. How exhausting.
Sorrel Sky: Some key images mark your career. One of them is Jaws, taken in Cape Town. Talk about that image for a bit. 
David Yarrow: I could see that the picture was sharp, which you can’t see on a boat. And it was sharp, and there was no reason it should be sharp. I remember getting quite tearful. And I knew from that moment that I couldn’t go backward. It's worth remembering it was only fourteen years ago, but I knew I couldn’t go back. But it's one thing then to say you're going to continue to do it, but it would only make sense with a plan – a business plan. It took three to four years really for that plan to become one that had credibility and that I could raise money for from backers because the plan was that we were going to invest in content. I had no galleries representing me around the world.
Sorrel Sky: Another key image for you was Mankind taken in 2015 in South Sudan. It’s such a powerful image. 
David Yarrow: I don’t like talking about the merits of my own photographs because it's for others to determine that, but I guess the best pictures are ones to be looked at for a long time and can never be taken again. The best pictures are authentic. I think it was a combination of those key things. It was a haunting Dante’s inferno but had a rather incongruous serenity. It just worked. I remember it was about a week after I had taken it, and I was in America at a gallery that had previously turned me down, and they took me on straight away after that. I think work ethic helped for ten years, but that was probably the tipping point.

Sorrel Sky: Do you have other images that you believe are equally as iconic as those we haven’t talked about, that people haven’t yet recognized, or that you know are the best?
David Yarrow: Sure. I’m very clear about the idea that your best pictures are probably your best sellers. It’s a voting machine. If I look at my ten best sellers over time, they will not be patently removed from what I consider to be my best ten pictures. And that’s not because I’ve got impatient; it’s because you’ve asked the public to vote, and that’s how they voted. If you ask people what their favorite film is and they answer that it’s some Danish art house movie they’ve watched once, but they’ve watched the Shawshank Redemption twenty times, I don’t think they’re being very honest about their favorites. Another way to think about it is if, for some extraordinary reason, the warehouse where all our data is stored spontaneously exploded and I lost everything, which picture would I say I would never get again? And I think it would be The Bills, with the bison in the snow. I’ll never get that picture again, and nor will anyone else. Whereas the pictures in the bars with Cindy Crawford, I could try to get it again. You know, I got a picture of a tiger this year in China, and I think that’s a great shot. I won’t get that again; I’ll just get very cold and homesick. But I think the picture of the polar bear, 78 Degrees North is one. A lot of businesses talk about the old 90/10 world. It’s true for photography as well—90% of our revenue for the last ten years has come from 10% of our pictures.
Sorrel Sky Gallery: We see that some of your photographs are informed and influenced by those other photographers who came before–some of the people you admired or were influenced by. You’ve done some things that echo Norman Parkinson, and there are a lot of Slim Aarons and maybe a little Peter Lindbergh and Ansel Adams. But are there any other photographers that you’ve admired? 
David Yarrow: Harry Benson, my fellow Scot, is one of my heroes and one of my dear friends. And I’ve got enormous admiration for Harry. He's given some photography gems, and he’s a gem of a guy. He photographed every president since Eisenhower and was The Beatles’ photographer. He was with Bobby Kennedy when he was assassinated. He’s an extraordinary man. And his famous saying is that photography is just 2/15th of a second.