Peter Lindbergh

Peter Lindbergh (born Peter Brodbeck November 23, 1944) is a German fashion photographer.

Yet in the photographs of Peter Lindbergh/You do see these extraordinary women/In all their glory/Without their disguises/Without the ‘front’/Stepping right out from behind the shiny surface/They are used to showing us.

Those words were written by Wim Wenders, who recently handed his close friend Peter Lindbergh a Lucie Award, colloquially known as the photographers Oscar. Someone once described Peter’s work as a collection of love letters to women he considers beautiful, be they fashion models or actresses like Gena Rowlands and Jeanne Moreau. It is an elegant salute to Peter’s essential romanticism but he has also photographed a lot of men and male icons, including James Coburn, Kirk Douglas, Samuel L. Jackson and Mick Jagger, to name just four.

Moreover, Peter’s romanticism has always been underscored by an element of evocative authenticity, redolent in some cases of the work of Dorothea Lange, or August Sander, or even the recently rediscovered Viennese photographer Rudolf Kopplitz, hence its appeal to a wider public outside the world of fashion. Peter Lindbergh is already extremely collectable: a print of his famous portrait of Keith Richards realised $120,000 at auction a few years ago and even signed working prints have been known to fetch over $40,000.

In 2001, he was appointed Chevalier de l’Ordre des Arts et Lettres, one of the French Republic’s most prestigious honours, and one of the few that really has to be earned. Another distinction of which he remains particularly proud is his election in 1995 as Honorary Member of the Year by the highly exclusive German Art Directors Club. That year also brought him the Raymond Loewy Design Award. Inner Voices won the IFTC Best Documentary award at the International Festival of Cinema in Toronto in 2002. Lindbergh also carried off the awards for Best Fashion Photographer in Budapest in 1990, Barcelona in 1991, Paris in 1994 and 1997 and 2008 in Madrid.

Peter Lindbergh did not become a fashion photographer until he was in his mid-thirties. Lindbergh, or the man behind the pseudonym, was born late in 1944 in the German province of Posen, now in Poland. Escaping westwards at the end of the war, the family was taken in by relatives in Duisburg, who had a sheep farm on the open land across the Rhine from the Krupp steelworks.

At seventeen, Peter went to Switzerland in 1969 as an apprentice shop window designer and worked there and in Berlin until 1964, when he enrolled in the Berlin Art Academy. Tiring of endless still life classes, he hitchhiked to Arles where he hung out for eight months: “I preferred actively seeking out van Gogh’s inspirations to painting melons. The roof of the house I lived in can be seen in one of van Gogh’s paintings. I remember shaving off little slivers of a wooden bridge in another of his paintings and sending them to friends in Berlin. Well, I was young and didn’t know any better! I only found out years later that the bridge was a replica. The original bridge was destroyed in the war”.

Returning to Berlin, the young artist had various casual jobs in 1964 and 1965, including a stint at the Berlin Telegraaf newspaper, before taking off for two years, hitchhiking around southern France, Spain and North Africa. Returning to Germany in 1967, Peter enrolled in the Krefeld art school. Leaving a year before graduation because of strikes by staff and students, his work was exhibited in the cutting edge Düsseldorf gallery run by Hans Meyer and Denise René: “My work was very voluptuous, painting great big things that were…um…very big. At one point, I lost interest in the sauvage expression thing and I became a big admirer of Joseph Kossuth and the concept artists, which took me in another direction. It was intellectually logical but not exciting for me”.

So Peter began his photographic career in 1971, assisting the Düsseldorf photographer Hans Lux: “It was accidental. He needed an assistant. I suppose the real reason was that I preferred working in groups to being the lonely artist in the atelier”. By 1973, Peter was working in his own right as an advertising photographer. Some 70% of his already powerful images were black and white, which was unusual in a decidedly colour milieu: “The real world is in colour so if you use black and white, you take it out of the real world, out of the banal. The fact that it’s in black and white makes you wake up and think”. Peter’s work was noticed in the late 1970s by Willi Fleckhaus, Art Director of the legendary magazine Twen, who remarked that Peter’s advertising images did not look like advertising and commissioned a fashion editorial over several pages. The Twen shoot led to a fourteen-page fashion editorial in Stern in 1978, after which Peter Lindbergh made the logical move to Paris.

Peter has shot many memorable advertising campaigns for, amongst others, Armani, Prada, Calvin Klein, Donna Karan, David Yurman, Comme des Garçons, Jil Sander, Revlon and Hugo Boss. His Revlon campaign, with Julianne Moore, Halle Berry and Eva Medes, occupied a Times Square billboard for a year. He has also directed some outstanding fragrance commercials, such as Lancôme Trésor, with Isabella Rossellini, Karl Lagerfeld’s Sun Moon Stars with Daryl Hannah, Jil Sander No. 4 with Linda Evangelista, Guerlain Champs-Elysées with Sophie Marceau and a host of others like Armani’s Gio. In 1996, the American workwear label Hanes paid him record fees for a print and television campaign featuring Tina Turner, who then invited Peter to direct her Missing You video at Paramount Studios.

This year saw Trésor with Kate Winslett and Lancôme Magnifique with Anne Hathaway. Reese Witherspoon starred in Peter’s Avon Films in the USA and Peter also shot the Comme des Garçons H&M film and print campaign, twenty-two years after the Pompidou Centre in Paris staged his first solo exhibition Peter Lindbergh for Commes des Garçons in 1986; Lindbergh’s now-iconic 1980s advertising campaigns for Comme des Garçons are widely seen as having re-established prêt-à-porter in the public consciousness.

There have, of course, been dozens of exhibitions featuring Peter’s work around the world since his photography was included in the Victoria and Albert Museum’s Shots of Style in London in 1985. Peter Lindbergh “Smoking Women”, first shown in the Galérie Gilbert Brownstone in Paris in 1992, travelled to Tokyo’s Bunkamura Gallery in 1994 and the Schirn Kunsthalle in Frankfurt in 1996. The same year, prompted by the reaction to the 1994 show, the Bunkamura Museum of Art accorded Peter Lindbergh a retrospective, which broke the previous attendance records set by their Henri Lartigue and Leni Riefenstahl retrospectives.

In 1997, Berlin’s Hamburger Hof museum staged a new show, Peter Lindbergh: Images of Women, which toured Hamburg, Milan, Rome and Vienna in 1998, followed by showings at the International Fashion Photography Festival in Japan in 1999 and 2000. Dr Irina Antonova brought Images of Women to the Pushkin Museum of Fine Arts in Moscow in 2002, making Peter the first photographer exhibited by the Pushkin. In her foreword to the catalogue, Dr Antonova wrote that “art critics and specialists often underrate fashion photography, attributing it to show business alone. However, Lindbergh is part of an important photography trend that could be called ‘classic post-modernism’”

As the New York Times pointed out in a review of MoMA’s 2004 show Fashioning Fiction in Fashion Photography since 1990, Peter was the first fashion photographer to incorporate storylines into his fashion editorials. His iconic Martian story with Helena Christensen for Italian Vogue in 1990 was the beginning of the narrative in fashion photography, leading to the substitution of the term fashion story for fashion editorial or fashion shoot in fashion magazine parlance. When Peter was put under contact to Harper’s Bazaar by Liz Tilberis in 1992, it cost the magazine’s publishers a seven-figure sum.

Peter is one of the only photographers with two Pirelli Calendars to his name, one of which was the first ever shot in black and white. He is also the only photographer accorded the honour of three prestigious Stern magazine portfolios, numbers 5 in 1996, 29 in 2002 and 47 in 2007. As Stern Art Director Tom Jacobi said at the time “other photographers change their style to the point of incongruity. Peter, in contrast, has remained true to his”. Peter Lindbergh has made a number of films, including the 1991 feature length documentary Models – The Film, shot in New York with the supermodels of the time, and Inner Voices (1999), a thirty-minute drama documentary examining self-expression in method acting, which won the prize for Best Documentary at the International Festival of Cinema in Toronto in 2000. In 2001, Lindbergh directed Pina Bausch – A Portrait, an experimental half-hour film on dance for Channel 4

Shown at Cannes in 2007, his latest film Everywhere at Once, co-directed with Holly Fisher, had its world première at the 2008 Tribeca Film Festival. Narrated by Jeanne Moreau, this haunting, vaguely troubling film consists of refilmed Lindbergh stills, many of them unpublished, interwoven with excerpts from Tony Richardson’s Mademoiselle (1966) as well as a few from Truffaut’s Jules et Jim (1962).

If some pundits feel that Everywhere at Once hints at a dark side to Lindbergh, the same could be said of some of his earlier work from the 1980s and 1990s, inspired not just by Fritz Lang’s Metropolis or Eisenstein’s Potemkin, or Lange’s Depression-era images, but by Lindbergh’s 1950s childhood across the Rhine from the foreboding Krupp steelworks in the industrial Ruhrland city of Duisburg.

Remarking upon the influence of this upbringing in Lindbergh’s work in his foreword to Lindbergh’s 1997 book Images of Women, the British photographic historian Martin Harrison wrote that “the opposition of the bare tree and the electricity pylon is revealed as a symbol of Lindbergh’s autobiography, a clue to the thread which runs through much of his work.”. Reminded of this, Lindbergh said: “It’s unconscious. I thought I was reflecting films like Metropolis but when people like Martin started writing about it, I thought: ‘Man! That’s where you’re coming from!’”

Yet in all of the analyses of Lindbergh’s work, one element is consistently overlooked: Lindbergh’s uncomplicated love of his art and his craft. The Art Director Donald Schneider, formerly at French Vogue and now at Stern, speaks for all of us who know Peter when he says that: "Despite being one of the greatest photographers, despite his many successes, despite being such a big star…behind the camera Peter has the enthusiasm and gusto of a little boy discovering the world anew each time!"

Schneider also recalled a shoot in the Andalusian desert: “One night a chartered bus arrived and drove us to a Rolling Stones concert! Peter had bought tickets for all of us, a team of fifty people, just like that!" For my own part, I will never forget my impromptu, wine-fuelled singing contest with directors of a large Japanese cosmetics firm in a roadhouse in the south of France, with a grinning Lindbergh directing the proceedings. And then there was our two-hour motorcycle ride to a beach party in India but that’s another story…

To date, Peter’s books include Ten Women (1996), with a foreword by Karl Lagerfeld, Peter Lindbergh: Images of Women (1997), introduced by British photography historian Martin Harrison, Peter Lindbergh – Portfolio 1996-1999 (1999) and Stories (2002), with an introduction by Wim Wenders, who wrote that Peter “turns those goddesses into human beings/Without taking any of their aura away !...You look into his friendly eyes/and you might start to understand/how this untroubled and unimpressed gaze/will manage to penetrate and transform/whatever’s in front of them”.

Prosper Keating, December 2008, for Peter Lindbergh

Books

• "Peter Lindbergh: Untitled 116" by Peter Lindbergh (2006), ISBN 3-8296-0179-4 / 978-3-8296-0179-5
• "Peter Lindbegh: Stories" by Wim Wenders, Peter Lindbergh (2002), ISBN 1-892041-64-2
• "Peter Lindbergh: Portfolio" by Dr. Antonio Ria, Peter Lindbergh (1999), ISBN 2-84323-108-6
• Peter Lindbergh: Images Of Women by Martin Harrison, Peter Lindbergh (2004), ISBN 978-3829601436
• 10 Women by Peter Lindbergh (1993), ISBN 978-3823814160

External links

• Official website
• Peter Lindbergh advertising work