Peter Lindbergh, who passed away on Tuesday at age 74, will always be remembered for his images of the supermodels who owned the 1980s and ’90s.
There were Nadja Auermann and Tatjana Patitz — both German, like Lindbergh himself. Add Cindy Crawford, with her golden girl smile; a brooding, Nordic Helena Christensen; Wonderbra’s poster girl, Eva Herzigová; and Karen Alexander, with her glistening, dark skin, always as striking as when Peter had shot her in a plain white shirt back in 1988.
For his fashion lifetime, Lindbergh’s photographic vision was unvarnished. He stood firm as post-production took over as a new tool of today’s beauty trade by tidying hair, computerising the smoothing and removing of wrinkles. The industry called it “enhanced reality”, but refusing to bow to glossy perfection was Lindbergh's trademark — the essence of the images that looked into each person's unvarnished soul, however familiar or famous the sitter.
“A lot of actors get re-done — but it's just the façade that has changed,” Lindbergh told me in 2015. “When you see them on the day you shoot them, it's not them. But you don't shoot the architecture of a person — you shoot what comes out of them to you.”
Most recently, he worked with the Duchess of Sussex on the September 2019 issue of British Vogue that she guest-edited, photographing 15 inspiring people the former Meghan Markle personally picked.
The photographer’s childhood landscape was by the sea, where he would holiday with his parents, escaping the industrial German city of Duisburg that he called “so ugly that it makes everything else seem beautiful”.
“My view of beauty is probably a little bit tougher because of that,” Lindbergh said. “If I came from Venice, I would be different. No?”
In spite of close personal relationships with designers, as a photographer, Lindbergh cared little about who created the outfits and focused rather on reaching the still centre of the character of the models who wore them.
His work and vision came under the scholarly eye in 2016 during an exhibition at the Kunsthal Museum in Rotterdam, curated by Thierry-Maxime Loriot, who was given carte blanche to go through Lindbergh's efficiently stored archives. Every last detail, from the client to the location, was listed methodically — except for the definition of the outfits themselves. Loriot, therefore, had to undertake the hefty research of putting names to the clothes.
“The idea was to tell the story through Peter's images — but it was not a fashion exhibition, it was anti-fashion,” the curator said.
Lindbergh, who looked like a naughty schoolboy hidden in a bearded face, started his career dreaming of being a painter and followed in the footsteps of Van Gogh by buying a house in Arles. The photographer's images are not, of course, in his hero's vibrant colours, but mostly in black and white.
“I was checking the series that he did for Italian Vogue. Half the pictures are instant classics you will probably see in 20 or 30 years,” Loriot said about his research. “He really is a fascinating character. I think that it is his humanist approach that we like the best. He doesn't pretend to be something that he is not.”
The late Franca Sozzani, who as editor-in-chief of Italian Vogue regrouped the supermodels in September 2015 over 20 pages, explained to me at the time that “Peter starts from the women.”
Lindbergh was forthright about “Stars who come with their publicists, agents and bring their wardrobes.” They do not inspire him, he said. He was unimpressed when he approached a young actress, “And instead of answering, they looked at their agent.”
Did the overall obsession with Photoshop reach its zenith, making a modern fashion vision ripe for change — or is there a return to Lindbergh’s values?
This article first appeared on VogueBusiness.com
