He was the man that took the photograph that ‘gave birth to the supermodels’ of the 90s, Peter Lindbergh. A simple shot that was taken in the Meat Packing District of New York in 1989, that did away with all of the relative excess and glamour of the 1980s and helped defined a more natural aesthetic for the coming 1990s. The image helped propel these 5 models to pop culture stardom and it became one of many images that helped define Lindbergh’s incredible creative career.
‘The Birth of the Supermodels’ - The image shot by Lindbergh was used as the cover of British Vogue in January 1990 featuring Naomi Campbell, Linda Evangelista, Tatjana Patitz, Christy Turlington, and Cindy Crawford.
BTS shot of Lindbergh and the models on set - Image copyright unknown
Sadly in September of this year, Peter Lindbergh passed away at the age of 74. Famous for shooting for Vogue and Harpers Bazaar for nearly 30 years as well as countless high-end brands including Calvin Klein, Dior and Lancome. Peter Lindbergh leaves behind a legacy of photographs that will live on as defining images of an era.
I grew up on these images in the pages of my mother’s Vogue magazines. She had a subscription to Vogue (and still does!) so every month one would land on the doorstep and I would always flick through the pages looking at the pictures. I look back and feel that seeing these images, and the images of many other incredible photographers were the starting points of my photographic journey.
The thing that I always loved, and still love to this day, about Lindbergh’s images was their effortlessness, he had the ability to get his subjects to show their real face to his lens, to reveal their identities without all of the glitz and glamour. This ability can be seen here in this interesting look behind the scenes of the 2017 Pirelli Calendar (see video below) where Lindbergh was asked back, for a third time, to once again, shoot 12 incredible women for Pirelli. These images are some of my favourites from his long career of work
The Pirelli Calendar has been traditionally known as an art/fashion nude calendar that is shot by some of the best photographers in the world, but in 2017 the world had changed and Lindbergh wanted to show women and their beauty in a different way and without the subjects being ‘nude’ in the traditional sense of the word. The subjects included Uma Thurman, Helen Mirren, Penelope Cruz, Nicole Kidman and Lupita Nyong to name a few.
In an age where our definition of beauty is becoming more and more warped, these images stand out as some of my favourites of Peter Lindberghs. Long famous for his ‘no retouching’ stance to photography, I think this body of work encapsulates all that I feel Lindbergh believed in terms of defining beauty and showing that beauty on camera in its truest form without all the glitz and glamour. Something he started in the late 1980s and carried on throughout his whole career.
“My aim was not to shoot a calendar about perfect bodies but to capture sensitivity and emotion, laying bare the souls of the women in the images, rendering them more naked than a nude.”
R.I.P PETER LINDBERGH 1944 - 2019.
“I look at women for who they really are. Perhaps this is what leads them to trust me. This should be the responsibility of photographers today, to free women, and finally everyone, from the terror of youth and perfection.”
ALL IMAGES SHOT BY PETER LINDBERGH