When recalling fashion’s golden age of the 1990s, where the names of models, designers and photographers rolled off tongues the world over, Peter Lindbergh might not be the first name to spring to mind. Yet it was at the hands of the visionary photographer that some of fashion’s most iconic moments unfolded.
His January 1990 cover for Vogue magazine (starring Naomi Campbell, Linda Evangelista, Tatjana Patitz, Christy Turlington and Cindy Crawford in oversized white shirts) heralded a new decade fresh-faced stars – in turn inspiring the video for George Michael’s “Freedom,” released the same year, which crystalized the statuses of the “supers” as household names. “Those photographs ended up in a drawer and were discovered only eight months later, when Anna (Wintour) arrived as Editor-in-Chief of Vogue,” Lindbergh recalls. “I would say the photograph in itself was not a revolution, it was just totally different from everything ever printed on a cover of Vogue.”
For today’s Director’s Cut, the photographer enlisted Carlyne Cerf de Dudzeele – the Vogue fashion editor responsible for pairing Lacroix couture with a pair of Guess jeans for Lindbergh’s first Vogue cover in 1988 – for The Reunion, bringing together again Crawford, Eva Herzigova, Karen Alexander, Nadja Auermann and Patitz. “I wanted to do portraits of women, whose faces everyone knows and remembers from when they were 20 years old,” explains the photographer. “Now they are between 45 and 50 years old, and each one of them looks today as beautiful and interesting – I would say more beautiful and more interesting – than 25 years ago.”
Whether shooting Helena Christiansen in the desert with a child-sized alien or suspending Linda Evangelista from a crane above Manhattan’s streets, the photographer became renowned for capturing the same faces time and time again, a relatively unheard of practice in today’s fast-paced grapple for the new It girl. The piercing stares emanating from Lindbergh’s signature black and white portraits come as a result of long-lasting relationships with his subjects, enabling him to strip them of artifice – an approach which perhaps has it roots in Lindbergh’s beginnings as a painter.
You have said that what you love to do is to empower women. What does empowerment mean to you?
Peter Lindbergh: What I am interested in is to show that every woman who believes in herself is beautiful. I don’t want to empower or persuade anyone, I just want to say, “Don’t believe that you have to look younger than you are. Don’t believe those people telling you that every wrinkle in your face is ugly and you need extensive retouching to be beautiful.” The opposite of all this is true. You can only be beautiful as yourself.
Your work is known for its probing approach and the candor of its outcome. What do you look to capture in a portrait or fashion photograph?
PL: For me, every fashion-related photograph is somehow a portrait, however important the fashion; I feel that I am there to photograph portraits of women. A fashion photographer has to contribute to defining the contemporary woman of his time. This of course includes fashion and many other cultural and social aspects of today. This definition should go far beyond women in a dress.
What’s next for you?
PL: The main project is a very large museum exhibition called Peter Lindbergh, a Different History of Fashion at the Kunsthal, Rotterdam, curated with Thierry-Maxime Loriot, who also curated the [Kunsthal's] Jean Paul Gaultier exhibition.