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"Peter Lindbergh's Photgraphs" by Roland Gross, August 1999
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"Peter Lindbergh's Photgraphs" by Roland Gross, August 1999
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| PETER LINDBERGH'S PHOTOGRAPHS |
| For him and for the objects of his professional desires a similar fate: careers marked with an expiration date. Right now Peter Lindbergh, born in 1944, is the fashion photographer of the moment, and everything about his aura mirrors the eternal retun of the same in the fashion sector. He lives in New-York and Paris. Everyone who is anyone in the hight-priced segment of this industry successful at moving fashion and sales messages into the closets of the wealthy (pardon, of "achievement-oriented wearers") -- from Auermann, via Campbell and Evangelista to Schiffer and Turlington - has gathered in front of his lens. End of story? Not quite. There are nearly 200 photographs, not mere fashion photos, to be seen now in the self-aggrandizing "NRW-Forum for Culture and Economy", wich just staged a show on Ungers and the news VW-Beetle like a marketing event. In Lindbergh's exhibit, there is in fact nothing other than purist black-and -white in mostly large format prints. What is Peter Lindbergh interested in? At this point, he can do whatever he wants -- a telling fact that ranks him with the likes of Helmut Newton. This is good for our worn out visual perceptions. Because fashion magazines and clothing labels are merciless. In Duisburg, where he grew up between heavy industry and the sheep-herding idylls of his uncle, poetic-unpretentious contradictions became a trademark of his pictures. The currently 54-years-old Lindbergh, for nearly 20 years in the business of body-surfaces, is much more interested in faces and the language of expressions. His productions, frequently in barren regions of weathered stone formations, now and then in shabby corners of metropoles, often turn into stages where the faces of "his" women perform expressions-dances. In the middle of these "locations", we discover again and again the pure, undisguised essence of "public" faces. This happens, for example, when he composes group pictures evoking in the viewer stories that could end in Chekov's "Three Sisters". In Le Touquet in 1987, two such pictures succeed for him. They show Marie-Sophie Wilson, Lynne Koester and Tatjana Patitz -- but in reality much more. This "more" shows through, even in the repeated cases where he could not completely avoid the type "bulimic child-woman in drug-withdrawal" -- presumaly at the packaging of a star fashion photographer: naturally, Lindbergh did not any way invent body stylization in colossus-contrast to industrial landscapes. Lewis Hine was working on this already in the early 20th century. Also William Klein, and earlier to some extent Irving Penn, had already stood their models in the middle of the dusty street-sewers of the big city, between exhaust fumes and sidewalk-tristesse. Wich pictures came out of this has always been the decisive factor, and whether fashion photography -- structures by both repetition and relenting change -- succeeds in making us remember them. A display-window dresser who bopped around a bit in Berlin, Arles, Morocco, and Spain during his youthful Sturm und Drang years, tried his hand at painting and design in Krefeld's art institute, and only later through an assistantship in Hans Lux' Düsseldorf photo studio succeeded in expressing himself, has thus arguably reached his most important goal. We see women who are supposed to be setting standards for beauty, expression, and presence. And yet Peter Lindbergh is very frequently able to keep them away from mask-pictures, from the usual slickness of the trade. They should learn, as humans at the end of the 20th century, to express themselves and most importantly, to express their faces, over and over again. That is why he is a lot more than a fashion photographer. Roland Gross |