PETER LINDBERGH

Introduction by Martin Harrisson in "Images of Women", May 1997

Introduction by Martin Harrisson

It is frequently asserted that the best fashion photographs are photographs of people first and of fashions second, though how many warrant the claim is open to debate. Among Peter Lindbergh’s images, those which outlast their nominal function do possess qualities – concerning the emotional and psychological as much as the physical characteristics of the model – that are probably extrinsic to the basic requirement to illustrate styles. These highlights from the ten most recent years of work by fashion photographer Lindbergh (though he is not only a fashion photographer it is a description with which, reassuringly, he is confortable) confirm that what propels his vision is the rapport he establishes with the people he is photographing.

Studying his photographs, it is evident that his models enjoy being photographed by him. While never cruel or exploitative, Lindbergh peels away some of the artifice of a fashion sitting so that the resulting image, for all of its obvious commercial purposes, often more closely resembles an informal and informative portrait of an individual. « For me the best compliment that can ever be paid to my photographs », says Lindbergh, « is when the models say « we recognise ourselves ». » Moreover – and this is arguably the most important factor in his success – Lindbergh produces photographs with which the women who form the majority of his primary audience – the buyers of fashions and readers of magazines – are able to identify with, to relate to. Ask him what is the key to the affinity he has with his models and he always returns to the word « trust » : « It always astonished me », he said, « when I see how open they are. I do try to make them feel comfortable, and we both believe in the closeness of the relationship while we are working together – and then everyone has their own life afterwards. » For their part the models are confident that they will not, on any level, be abused or misrepresented. As one of his current favourites, Nadja Auermann puts it : « I know he is not going to steal my soul. »

Anyone who has looked at a copy of Vogue, Interview, Allure, Harper’s Bazaar, or Marie-Claire over the last fifteen years will be familiar with Peter Lindbergh’s editorial fashion photographs. At least as widely disseminated are the advertising campaigns he has executed for many of the leading fashion designers, including Giorgio Armani, Isaac Mizrahi, Donna Karan, Jil Sander, Prada, and Calvin Klein, and the 1996 Pirelli Calendar, featuring six very different women he has particularly enjoyed photographing. A logical outcome of his filmic approach to still photographs is that he has now become sought after as a director of television commercials and documentaries. In a period in which it has become increasingly difficult for professional photographers to stand out from the crowd, his personal stamp – his signature style – is immediatly recognisable : starkly dramatic, singularly powerful, and almost invariably in the seductively resonant and deeply saturated black-and-white tones he favours. Armed with this vocabulary he devises around his models a story ; this is not a story in the conventional sense with a narrative thrust or a logically developed plot, but a carefully contrived situation which allows his sitters to perform freely and himself to function in the manner of a film director conducting extemporising actors.

Over the years Lindbergh has refined his photographic technique, not to proscribe or narrow it down but, paradoxically, to allow himself increased freedom to remain open to a nuance of gesture or expression, to the element of chance. But beyond the various technical or inherently photographic reasons, which may account for the wide appeal of Lindbergh’s photographs, the most important factor resides in his depictions of women.

The fashion photographer’s quest will always, on one level, remain unfulfilled, for he/she is chasing a chimera – not a chimera in the grotesque sense, but something equally elusive.

The perception of the modern fashion photographer as someone whose rapid-fire apparatus commits countless thousands of exposures onto film accords exactly with the pattern of a relentless pursuit of an unattainable dream. But Lindbergh’s photographs, in spite of the apparent contradiction, provide some of the most concrete and confident depictions of contemporary women. His models may not necessarily comply with the putative « typical » or « average » women of today, but they nevertheless operate as cyphers for a type of women who has attained a demonstrable degree of freedom and independence. It is an independence they retain in the images ; however improbable the fictional setting Lindbergh creates, there is never the impression that his women are merely being manipulated.

How does the contract between photographer and model operate ? With Lindbergh it is clearly a two-way process, a collaboration. His women are strong ; handsome rather than pretty, they are definitely not pushovers. He, of course, carefully selects his models on the basis of their appearance and personality, which are intrinsic. Equally, though, some of what they project is due to him, and this is evident when one compares the different ways the same women have been interpreted by others photographers. It is far from straightforward to unravel the complex triangular relationship between model, photographer, and the nebulous future audience for the image they create together, but the following observations are an attempt to analyse some of the specific reasons for the impact of Lindbergh’s photographs.

In the majority of Lindbergh’s photographs the model’s gaze is fixed firmly on the viewer. An engagement with the audience is established but the exchange is not completely explained. An open-ended situation has been created, one which offers something for the viewers’own imaginations, the possibility to superimpose their own reading or emotions, a range of intriguing possibilities for rounding off the story, a form of reward for our involvement. The eyes are focused on us – the viewers – our eyes return the look ; we are drawn into the frame and through her eyes into her thoughts. The gaze itself is not simple to define. It is neither passive nor exactly defiant. The enigma is sustained. Is the woman impassive, vulnerable, or is she self-contained, unconcerned, involved in her own story ? Is she, indeed, looking past or through us ? In this sense Lindbergh’s photographs arrived in the 1980s as knowingly « Post-Modern », playing wittily with established stereotypes and protocols from the history of fashion photography. Certainly some traditional notions of « glamour » were eschewed or redefined. Banished, for example, in nearly all of Lindbergh’s early photographs, was the toothy smile, that played-out archetype of seduction, in favour of variety of moods ranging from uninhibited joyfulness to, at the opposite extreme, sulkiness or even outright menace. It should be noted, in this respect, that Lindbergh’s casting of women is resolutely European ; this remains the case even when his photographs contain, for example, references to American culture, and is no doubt an important factor in the enthusiastic reception of his exotic Europeanism in countries such as Japan and the U.S.A. In an increasingly internationalised market, the boundaries of what was acceptable as an appealing image in a high-glossy fashion magazine were being subtly redrawn.

The photographs ask fascinating questions about the role of contemporary fashion photography. Do we see the casting of models-as-performers as a cop-out ? A photograph poses as a filmstill – is it glimpse of the real life of a film extra or even a filmstar ? Layers of meaning are suggested and immediately undermined by the obvious artifice. It is the dissolution of the Shakespearian device of a story within a story – the double divorce from reality. The viewer’s certainties are shattered – all the world’s a stage. Maybe, we wonder, Lindbergh can’t take it straight. Why are the women always dancers, acrobats, actresses, vamps ? Does he ever see a woman as a secretary, a president, or a mother ? In fact he is acutely conscious of the rarefied arena in which he is operating : « I often think about this », he confirms : « What does a « normal » women do ? Does she have hairdressers and make-up artists running around after her changing her appearance every fifteen minutes ? No, she gets dressed in the morning and that’s it – and maybe she manages to look great all day. » Perhaps, too, he is being honest and saying that the models he works with are unusual women – they are special – they are on the page to entertain – this is a dream, his dream – not reality.

Lindbergh’s impulse to make strange his photographs ensures that they resist simplistic interpretations, and their potential to transmit multi-layered meanings is part of their fascination. There are, though, aspects of a Peter Lindbergh photograph that have remained more or less consistent since his major breakthrough in the early 1980s. His women, notwithstanding their individual personalities, conform to certain specific physical types. Tall, slender, they may tend towards androgyneity, and manifestly Lindbergh is anti-‘cute’. Some of the characteristics they share reflect his selection of one model above another, others are intesified in the process of styling. Lindbergh has always been generous in his acknowledgement of the contribution made by his chosen hairdresser and make-up artist, whom he sees as vital collaborators. His models have a distinctive style in which their hair – studiedly natural or even fashionably unkempt, deliberately styled but not fussy or pampered – as well as their accessories and their bold make-up, are all key elements. The result is a modern and fundamentally urban redefinition of sophistication, an important factor when his models are placed in unexpected and nonurban environments : the displacement of these divas – on sand dunes or the prairie – is an essential component in the compelling frisson of the image. The women are on vacation with the wrong wardrobe and their almost surreal presence is one of the principal attractions of the photograph.

In most of Lindbergh’s photographs we are offered more than just a garment and a women. The models are sited before an intriguing backdrop and their relationship to the situations in which they have been located, or dislocated, is central to the reading of the image. In the backgrounds themselves – in the ‘extraneous’ areas of the photographs – a sub – plot unfolds in which the urban landscape of the industrialised twentieth century contains an undercurrent of romantic naturalism, an insistent reminder of its opposite; The shadow of a palm tree is a ghost of nature in the dominating townscape(page 163), a sun-baked city sidewalk is relieved by the filigree pattern of branches (page 262), the technical trappings of an abandoned film set stand waiting to be reclaimed by nature in a deserted, depopulated wasteland (pages 2-3, 20-21).

The collision of man and nature in Lindbergh’s photographs is no accident and has a direct source in his own origins. Born in the east of Germany in 1944, he was raised on an uncle’s sheep farm in the shadows of the mining town of Duisburg. At the heart of the Rurh coalfield, Duisburg was still a flourishing centre of heavy industry when he was growing up in the 1950s. The dramatic juxtaposition of these contrasting environments – the industrial and the rural – left an indelible impression on the future photographer. The opposition of the bare tree and the electricity pylon (pages 108-9) is revealed as a symbol of Lindbergh’s autobiography, a clue to a thread which runs through much of his work. The attraction to industrial imagery is a recurrent theme. Even today, in New York or Los Angeles, he will occasionally seek out the warehouse district that can provide a location that approximates the grey, begrimed Rhineland factories which surrounded him as he grew up. Family holidays on the bleak North Sea beaches of Holland, a two-hour drive from Duisburg, were similarly formative events. The windswept coastlines that are another of his favourite locations, especially those of the northen French resorts of Deauville and Le Touquet, are an evocation of these early memories. The beauty that insinspired Lindbergh was austere, Northern European, and consequently there is little concession to comfort or luxury in most of the settings he recreates : the tense encounters he directs are – this is their ambiguous attraction – the converse of the world of aspiration and leisured relaxation for which they are intended.

Peter Lindbergh was twenty-nine before he became a professional photographer, and he has suggested that his relative maturity when he embarked on his career was helpful in enabling him to stand up for what he believed in :’Perhaps’, he points out, ‘when you start relatively late, your own personality has developed further, and it is not so easy for your ideas to be over-run.’ His life up to that moment had been quite unconventional. At the age of nineteen he moved from West Germany to Lucerne, Switzerland, where he continued to work as a window dresser, the job he had since leaving school at fifteen : « I don’t know if this sounds odd », he now says, « but at that time I thought window dressing was the greatest job ; it was the height of my ambition – you know, in that situation you coudn’t aspire to Picasso ». Less than a year later he was back in Germany, taking a night class in drawing at the Hochschule für Bildende Kunst in Berlin, and supporting himself with a variety of odd jobs. Several unsettled years followed, during which he lived on a farm at Arles and hitch-hiked through Spain and Morocco, occasionally selling his paintings. Finally he studies decorative art and design for three years at the Werkkunstschule at Krefeld, north-west of Düsseldorf. He had always rebelled against the pressures to study traditional academic drawing techniques, and during his years at Krefeld he made a variety of conceptual art works ; he had his first exhibition of these in 1969, at the Galerie Denise Renée/Hans Mayer, in Krefeld. He had never been remotely interested in photography before he first picked up a camera in 1971, but he was instantly enamoured and soon thereafter he began a two-years apprenticeship to photographer Hans Lux in Düsseldorf. Following this he worked for five years on his own account as an advertising photographer, until, in 1978, Stern magazine published his first series of fashion photographs, prompting his almost immediate move to Paris.

In some of the earliest of Lindbergh’s photographs that were to bring him widespread notice, the series he made for Italian Vogue and for Comme des Garçons catalogue of 1981 and 1982, it is possible to discern prototypes for two alternative depictions of women which he would continue to develop for several years. (The Comme des Garçons photographs, incidentally, made a major contribution towards establishing the international success of Rei Kawakubo’s fashion house, and are credited with boosting the spread of modern prêt-à-porter fashion in general). In a 1981 photograph for Italian Vogue (page 11) the models, Patricia Pilotti, balances on one leg in a cluttered studio, the other leg aloft, spreading out the skirt. The odd, doll-like imbalance added to Lindbergh’s growing repertoire of unusual poses and limb positions, which he had already explored to more comical extremes in some of his earliest fashion photographs, such as his blatantly « kooky » pictures of 1979/80 for Marie-Claire. Subsequently the use of exaggerated gestures became less arbitrary, more in line with the point of the photograph. In complete contrast, by 1982, in the photograph of Linda, Nancy, and Katoucha (page 16), Lindbergh was formulating an aspect of his mature style. Gone is the desultory studio tableau composition in favour of a direct confrontation with the models, who sit imperiously, brooding eyes looking straight into the camera. The interest in multiple-model images which began at this time became established as a constant throughout Lindbergh’s career. The use of two and occasionally three female models was not unprecedented in fashion photography, but Lindbergh went on to extend this device of semi-replication, accommodating five or even more models in a single image. In a later Comme des Garçons series the triple studies of Marie Sophie Wilson, Tatjana Patitz, and Lynne Koester (pages 29-31), with their almost grim countenances and carefully dishevelled hair, suggest the Weird Sisters as much as the Renaissance archetype of the Three Graces, recalling the lies from Macbeth :

…so wild in their attire,
That look not like the inhabitants o’the earth…

In 1984 Lindbergh made another leap forward with the first of several essays in which he located models in dramatic situations amid the machinery of heavy industry. His achievement was to integrate the models into the powerful settings in a way that did not overwhelm or diminish them, that maintained the viewer’s engagement with the women (pages 38,39,46-51, 53-57, 59-61). Significantly, the location he chose was Duisburg. Again , this was not the first occasion on which elegant models had been placed in « incongruous » industrial locations (Helmut Newton had similarly co-opted an electricity plant as a backdrop in 1958), but the twist that Lindbergh gave to the prototype was to return the control to the women ; now they operate the machinery themselves (pages 56-57, 58), or stand defiantly, the chief engineers, casually indifferent to the noise and steam (pages 60-61).

The Duisburg essay was also one of the first series of Lindbergh’s photographs to demonstrate an overt connection with the cinema. The obvious parallel in this instance , both in terms of the sweeping scale of the futuristic technological vistas and the occasionally robotic figures, is with Fritz Lang’s Metropolis (1927), though the psychological tension communicated by the models is equally reminiscent of the films of G.W Pabst.

The re-emergence of specifically German sources occured at a significant moment in Lindbergh’s career. He recalls when he left Germany in 1978 : « I headed straight for Paris. It was the one place I wanted to work. You know, you can only go as far as you can see ; it was still at the centre of the fashion industry and at that time Helmut Newton and Guy Bourdin were both producing their greatest photographs in Paris. » It would be two or three years before he found his own voice : « when you come from Germany », Lindbergh comments, « you have your own culture, and it takes time to get used to your new freedom. » If the Parisian milieu was a catalyst in freeing and widening his approach, once these lessons had been learned he was in a position to incorporate more personal elements into his work. These would be manifested not only in visual metaphors of his childhood recollections, but also by the influrence of a broad sweep of German art of the twentieth century.

Lindbergh’s photographs have continued to reflect, consciously or unconsciously, and possibly only for a brief period, a current obsession that is usually with an image from the history of film or photography. The references to photography may take the form of a direct homage, for example when the model Mathilde defies vertigo on the upper stages of the Eiffel Tower in a conflation of famous images by Marc Riboud and Eric Blumenfeld (page107), in Giselle’s re-enactment of André Kertesz’s Satyric Dancer (pages 156-7), or the 1994 Harper’s Bazaar photograph of Kate Moss, drolly quoting Paul Strand’s Young Man, Gondeville, France (page 13). More generally, Lindbergh’s inspiration remains rooted in the culture of his narative Germany, most noticeably in the work of the Neue Sachlichkeit artist whose neo-realism emerged in the context of the Weimar republic’s embracing of modernism and industrialisation. The expanding advertising industry’s appropriation, in the 1920s, of the « new objectivity » strategies of photographers Lazslo Moholy-Nagy and Albert Renger Patzsch has been turned full circle in Lindbergh’s photographs of Marie Sophie Wilson (pages 63). The stark, frontal composition, the unusual lighting and the tight framing all recall the methods of his avant-garde precursors Helmar Lerski and Max Burchartz.

The allusions to movies are generally more indirect. Lindbergh’s 1993 photographs for Harper’s Bazaar, in which Amber Valletta was cast as an angel who had unaccountably landed in New York, formed one of the most tender and warmly received series he has made. Any initial inspiration from Wim Wender’s Wings of Desire was sufficiently remote in the resulting photographs to be of marginal consequence (page 273). Lindbergh’s enchantment with the cinema is most clearly evinced in the movie-making paraphernalia that he likes to litter as Fellini’s 8 1/2 that are self-referentially films about film and parallel his own interest in process, in the act of making a photograph.

A particularly idiosyncratic development in Lindbergh’s work in the 1990s resulted in some of the more surprising images to appear in recent fashion magazines. At the root of these photographs is the recoding of theatrical body language pioneered in the 1920s by German Expressionist dancers such as Mary Wigman and Valeska Gert, and continued today in Pina Bausch’s choreography of the struggle of the genders. The arrival of Lindbergh’s translation of these skewed, almost awkward, sinewy women on the magazine page had considerable shock value. But their presence was timely, and their strengh – the skilled use of the body-as-geometry, as a finely-honed piece of equipment – clearly has a powerful resonance for many women today. Mary Wigman’s use of exaggerated and distorted gestures in reaction to the « prettiness » of contemporary ballet found a direct echo in Lindbergh’s rejection of « pretty » fashion photographs. In his portrayals of Madonna (opposite, and pages 182-3), Kristen McMenamy (pages 166-7) and Nadja Auermann (pages 222-3) the vocabulary of angular, tensioned limbs and clawing hand gestures is redolent of the grotesquely satirical cabaret mimes of Valeska Gert, whose resolutely anti-establishment ethos as much as her dancing initially attracted Lindbergh.

What Lindbergh is achieving in photographs such as these is the expansion of the language of gesture in fashion photography. In all of these retrospective excursions he is translating imagery and representing it to an audience that is largely unaware of its origins. It might be noted that the German fashion photographer Horst P. Horst, who first worked for Vogue in 1931, would, at that time, have had any such expressionist non-conformity censored by the magazine’s strict moral code : he once reminded me of the rule, that was not relaxed until much later, forbidding models to stand with their legs more than 30 cm apart and effectively eliminating the possibility of exploring extreme or sexually suggestive poses.

To describe an image as a fashion photograph is to consign it into a slippery category. In some of his most recent photographs Lindbergh appears to be operating in an alternative idiom, as though (accepted that a measure of deceit is entailed) he is seeking to remove entirely fashion photography’s veil of deception. The 1994 series of La Caïta at Beauduc (page 127-30), though made on commission for French Marie-Claire, is not selling a product. Either the definition of a fashion photograph must be broadened to encompass a wider range of imagery than is normally admitted , or these photographs can only be accurately described as portraits. And yet the tightly framed heads of Linda Evangelista (page 115) and Lorraine Bracco (pages 203), or the affectionate study of one of the great models of the 1960s, Verushka (page 43), might equally, on the same terms, be described as portraits. The sitting with La Caïta came about in a typically Lindbergh way. The fashion world’s fascination with gypsy dress and culture had been at a premium since Emir Kusturica’s film Time of the Gypsies (1989). But, Lindbergh explains : « those pictures of La Caïta – I saw her in a movie, Latcho Drome, made by Tony Gatliff, about the origins of gypsy music – and I knew I had to photograph her – it was my dream. She lives in a village near Seville and had never been outside of Southern Spain, so we had to arrange for her passport so she could come to the shoot near Arles. Although her village is only 80 km from the coast, she had never seen the sea before. She came with two guitarists and they were all like kids going crazy and running on the beach. I don’t speak Spanish, but somehow we communicated. She sat on a chair, wearing men’s clothes – she’s a lesbian. I was on my knees, almost sitting on her lap to take the photograhs – it’s totally different when you move close in. « The infectious excitement and energy of the sitting is brilliantly conveyed in the photographs, which ushered in a new phase in Lindbergh’s work ; the absorption of Latin cultures was further exemplified recently in his striking photographs of the dancer Joaquin Cortés (pages 188-9).

Henri Cartier-Bresson once warned that the attempt to adopt the startegies of realism – of photo-reportage-for fashion photography was an exercise doomed to failure. If he was right then Lindbergh’s recent essays for Marie-Claire and Harper’s Bazaar (pages 277-89) are failures of a dynamic and heroic kind. On sittings like these the model is thrust into a bustling urban site while Lindbergh operates like a cinema-vérité cameraman : it is essential that they are able to work incognito, otherwise the fashion photography becomes the event and the link with « reality » is lost. To maintain the ideal of non-intervention in the scene, to preserve the necessary anonymity, the models are specially selected and must be relatively unknown to the general public ; « I tried the idea once with Nadja Auermann in Tokyo », says Lindbergh, « and it turned into a farce ; she attracted so much attention on the streets it just was not possible to work with the crowds jostling to get a glimpse of a supermodel. » But when this approach is successful it is evident that an added attraction for Lindbergh is the risk involved, the element of chance : « I just walk along the streets with the models. I don’t think I look like a fashion photographer anyway, and you soon find that none of the passers-by care what you are doing. Everything happens so fast – especially with people or vehicles moving in and out of the frame – that you never really know until later if you have the picture. You go « click, click » and still you don’t know. Then you walk a little further and take a few more pictures. There are so many variables and you’re only partly in control ; you have to forget about the background activity, the light, or whether a truck drives by at the wrong moment ».

Consistent with maintaining the openended potential of his photographs, Lindbergh, though normally he continues to work in a serial format of perhaps eight or more images, is at pains to play down any suggestion of a conscious attemps at building a sustained or specific narrative : « what interests me increasingly now could be described as the absence of a story ; these are not novels and I feel, especially in my recent reportage pictures, it is not even interesting to know why. » « Besides, he adds, « in real reportage photography you have a point to the story, whereas style makes it pointless – or style becomes the only point. »

The enlisting of photo-documentary tactics might be described as the latest development in Lindbergh’s career : « It was very important to me », he says, « because after fifteen years you can’t help reaching the conclusion – or at least there are times when you feel this – that everything about fashion photography is fake. » « Then there is the question », he continues, « what do you do if you confess to liking strong women in 1997 ? » I think some photographers feel obliged to produce « ugliness », but that doesn’t come naturally to me. Take Amber Valletta for example : she is a very positive person, so I don’t believe it’s true to her to photograph her looking wasted. » From these extremes – the qualified disenchantment with fashion and the dilemma of representing beauty – Lindbergh evolved his reportage approach (pages 283-91). He regards it as a kind of cleansing process, a form of renewal : ‘It seems more truthful somehow. There are no luxuries – simply the model and me with an autofocus camera and a 35 mm focal-lengh lens. It is not like a philosophy though – I just had to see and do things differently for a while. And afterwards I am sure I shall go back to something else. »

This is Peter Lindbergh’s first retrospective book. He regards it as the beginning of something new as much as the summation of the past and it is appearing at a time when his career has clearly reached an extremely fruitful stage. I spoke with him recently about his thoughts on fashion photography, and his response was, as usual, quite candid : « After all this time I would have to say, to be honest, that I have no idea what the ingredients of a powerful fashion picture are. « If there is a secret it would still seem, for Lindbergh, to lie in the process, the performance : « If you try to think about it beforehand you simply cannot plan a strong photograph. However much pre-planning goes into it, it only becomes powerful when you actually do it. » « I don’t like the idea just to be graphic », he adds, « so I never crop photographs later to achieve a graphic effect – all the cropping, even in the close-up photographs of heads – is done in the camera. » « I try to be truthful in my work, though on consideration I don’t know what truthful means in this context. There are no short cuts – if you set out with the intention of making people ugly to achieve a powerful photograph it is a fake. On the other hand beauty cannot be « done ». Again I come back to this nebulous word « truth » : perhaps more than anything it is trying to explain something truthful about yourself and about your perception of the way the woman sees herself. »

I congratulated him on this year’s Paris spring couture series for American and Italian Vogue, in which the densely saturated colour reproductions were highly effective, but his reservations at being denied several pages of his beloved monochrome were barely hidden. Finally, I asked him if he enjoyed his celebrity : « I never feel I’m famous. At least, since I don’t fit anybody’s preconception of a fashion photographer, I don’t get recognised, which I am happy about. Actually a guy did come up to me on the street last week, and he said : « You ‘re Peter Lindbergh aren’t you – can I ask you something ? « Er…yes… », I replied, apprehensively, and I began to get out my pencil to give him an autograph. But then he said : « You know I have a beautiful grey dog and I think it would look wonderful in your photographs – can I give you my card…. ?

MARTIN HARRISON
MAY 1997

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