"Peter Lindbergh" by Jean-Loup Sieff, Ilford Calendar, 1993

PETER LINDBERGH

Almost every morning I have breakfast at the Café de Flore, very early around 7.30 to 8.00, when Paris is still waking up and everything still seems possible to me. It is there, two or three times a month, that a large lorry comes and parks in front of my empty terrace, blocking my view yet announcing to me the advent of a pleasant meeting. A noria of stylists, assistants, hairdressers, sleepy models with their hair inrollers extricate themselves from this lorry to come and drink the coffe wich will give a sparkle to their made-up or darkly ringed eyes. It is then that a large, black Mercedes arrives, and Peter Lindbergh announces to a slumbering Paris that the day has risen and one is not there for laughs. He, however, does laugh, his carnassial teeth lighting up the early winter mornings and one has the impression that he has already run 10 kilometres in the forest, cut some logs for this evening's fire, chosen his photographs from the day before, taken his three boys to school and had breakfast twice! I timidly offer him my hand, because I know that he is going to crush it while all the time slapping me violently on the shoulder with the other, but how do you resist him? Besides these physical meetings, there are others by way of interposed images, when I sometimes happen to leaf through the fashion magazines I worked for during the time, wich now seems to me to have been childhood. Most of the time I only find boring images of women jumping idiotically into the air, or scratching themselves lazily with the obscure emptiness in their eyes of those who cannot wait to collect their cards at the end of the day. But sometimes, quite suddenly, a miracle occurs and I come to a halt in front of this strong images of masculine looking women with taut breasts. I look for the signature: it is always that of Peter Lindbergh! Contrary to many of the so called "fashion" photographers who only photograph women in order to take their revenge on them or because they have not found any others means of exerting power over them, it is obvious that Peter Lindbergh photographs the women that he loves and who love him back. Moreover, like all good photographs, his exceed their primary function (representation of clothing) and gain emotion and timelessness. Like all true artists, Peter Lindbergh is a sponge absorbing everything he loves: cinema, painting, chidhood memories... in order to re-create them differently, with his warmth, his humour, his code of references and of dedicated tributes. I remember the influence the films of Antonioni, the music of Thelonious Monk or the pictures of Adrew Wyeth had on me at the end of the 50's. With a small leap of generations (we are after all only 12 years apart!) I loe to rediscover in Peter Lindbergh the cinema of Wim Wenders or Fellini, the Germany of Peter Handke, the eternal feminity of the 30's or his loving and ironical tributes to Greta Garbo, Josephine Baker or Marlène. We have all been, and still are, in love with the women he shows us and who are as Professor Hackenbush said "the fragility of steel in a transparent look". If fashion, by definition, is made to become outmoded, his images, on the other hand, will survive the passing of the seasons and the shor-lived magazines, for they are the warm, friendly or wild look a man gives to knowing and blushing women who therby accept his admiration. What characterises the work of Peter Lindbergh is firstly that one recognises it immediately, although this is not enough because one equally recognises bad work, but above all because they are strong, sensual images of flesh and blood people who are much more than mere coat hangers for improbable clothing, and lastly, like all vision which is personal and unique, these images are self-portraits of Peter Lindbergh: they laugh, they cry, they are physical, energetic yet at the same time fragile. I must add that writung this piece has opened my eyes, the discovery of such fragility in Peter Lindbergh has reassured me and resored my faith, and the next time he shakes my hand I will grip tighter than he and perhaps he will shed a tear? Jean-Loup Sieff

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