PETER LINDBERGH

"An Ecounter with Peter Lindbergh in the Hans Mayer Gallery in Düsseldorf" by Roland Gross, March 2002

AN ENCOUNTER WITH PETER LINDBERGH IN THE HANS MAYER GALLERY IN DÜSSELDORF

He came in through the front door this time: Peter Lindbergh (58), star of fashion photography for many years already. We are referring to the gallery door of Hans Mayer in Düsseldorf, directly across from the state art collection of North Rhine-Westphalia. At the beginning of the seventies, still before that in Krefeld, then (after 1969) in Düsseldorf, a certain Herr Brodbeck used to help Mayer out with the every-day work of the gallery. Born in 1944 on the border with the Poland and made a refugee shortly thereafter, settled in Duisburg and still today exuding a characterestic Ruhr-valley charm, he certainly had not yet found his final form of expression as a trained display-window dresser and student at the Krefel art school. Mayer introduced him to the public as a conceptual artist in 1968. Then in 1971, the Düsseldorf fashion-photographer Hans Lux was looking for an assistant - an opportunity that grew into a two-year apprenticeship. After that came years as a free-lance advertising photographer, followed by his "coming out" in 1978, as "Stern" published a series of fashion photos. The rest is legend: from Vogue to Marie-Claire, from Linda Evangelista to Tatjana Patitz, from ad campaigns for Comme des Garçons (Rei Kawakudo), Prada, Calvin Klein and Donna Karan to Armani, Jil Sander and Lagerfeld.

Now he is once again teamed up with his old (thouhgh in reality contemporary) mentor and comrade Hans Mayer, and has once again landed in the dimension of the art space, which for Lindbergh is so important because it is so multi-layered. And "landing" is a keyword that binds together the roughly 25 large-format photos presented for the first time in the Hans Mayer Gallery. They make up three series in the style of picture stories, created under the title "Invasion" in the year 2000 and published in Italian Vogue, Lindbergh's expressly favored magazine. So now it's D-Day for Lindbergh? Perceivable on the surface is an uncanny encounter of the fashionable kind, created in the Mojave desert and in steaming, run-down street scenes made up of mountains of scrapped cars and draped with dramatic/clownesque people on the verge of a nervous breakdown. The crash landing just took place. Amber Valletta as alien with a white formed hair-do-helmet from the clone laboratory that would wring sentimental tears from the eyes of Eva Pflug of "Space Patrol". Little men with antennas on their ears among high-heeled beauties with perfectly applied lipstick -- and in the background the wrecked space ship. The society of immediate-gratification in culture shock. Milla Jovovich's enviably flawless face stares into the heavens. The rebirth of fashion out of the spirit of Bunuel and Fellini, and facial personalities that are evocative of Chekhov, Ibsen and Bergmann?

The story, the creative thrust of the entire thing -- an encoded narration of an outlandish production made up of shrill atmosphere and of a lifestyle sensibility that in the case of "Invasion" swings between threat, mannered world-weariness, and the hunt for extreme and exalted states -- is Lindbergh's primary interest. He nearly leaves out the dynamically lit representation of exclusive women's outerwear. Says Lindbergh, "I always have the story in my head first, the magazine makers pick out the appropriate fashion. I could'nt care less whether the things are from Gucci or Jil Sander". After September 11th, Lindbergh surely would not have produced this pictorial mixture of terror and shock over an unheard-of event, over the breaking-in of a catastrophe into the rythm of every-day life. Even so -- in the same way as robert Longe placed an FBI-commando in front of the silhouette of the World Trade Center as early as 1997 and Rainer Fetting added an airplane between New York's skyscrapers even earlier, a sense of the fear of a real public catastrophe plays along in Lindbergh's "Invasion" project. Thus the question: will fashion photography take up this contemporary mood as atmospheric background, as decorative trim more often in its productions? Says Lindbergh, "That would be terrible. Fashion photography must be fiction. Fashion photography has always shown the reality of women in certain epochs. At the same time, I consciously never watch fashon shows, in order to be as uninfluenced as possible when developing my stories. The Invasion-stories represents an exception anyway. I am primarily focused on the image of the independent woman". How does Lindbergh judge the position of woman in fashion now? "My classic, rather peaceful projects stand in the forefround. In light of current fashion photography, woman seems to need a little definition. The huge make-up and widly styled hair remind me of scarecrows. My women should make an impression of trength and independence and not be the product of flipped-out stylists. for me, it's about finding great women and maybe only documenting how they are -- always without any retouching, by the way. With my photos, your first thoughts are seldom about skirt-length. At the same time, I absolutely refuse to do that caked-on wretchedness".

Roland Gross

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