PETER LINDBERGH (1944–2019)
Peter Lindbergh, known for his stripped-down black-and-white portraits, died this Tuesday in Paris at the age of seventy-four. Instrumental in the development of a modern, untouched style of fashion photography, Lindbergh rose to fame in the late ’80s for his photographs of a group of models soon to become, thanks in no small part to his iconic images, the supermodels of the ’90s. “A fashion photographer should contribute to defining the image of the contemporary woman or man in their time, to reflect a certain social or human reality,” he said in an interview for Artforum’s May 2016 issue. “How surrealistic is today’s commercial agenda to retouch all signs of life and of experience, to retouch the very personal truth of the face itself?”
Born Peter Brodbeck to German parents in Poland in 1944, Lindbergh and his family fled the country for the manufacturing city of Duisburg, Germany, when he was only two months old. In the mid-’60s, Lindbergh attended the College of Art in Krefeld, where he studied with hard-edge painter Günther C. Kirchberger and discovered the Conceptual art of Joseph Kosuth, Lawrence Weiner, and Bernd and Hilla Becher. In 1971, Lindbergh moved to Düsseldorf, changed his last name, and began to seriously pursue a career in commercial photography. He later worked for Stern magazine alongside Guy Bourdin, Hans Feurer, and Helmut Newton. Inspired by street photography, early cinema, and the industrial setting of his childhood, Lindbergh sought to highlight natural beauty and innovative movement in images made largely outside of the studio.
Inaugurating a new era at the magazine, Anna Wintour chose Lindbergh to photograph her first Vogue cover as editor in chief in 1988. Two years later, in 1990, his 1989 black-and-white group portrait of Naomi Campbell, Cindy Crawford, Linda Evangelista, Tatjana Patitz, and Christy Turlington, photographed on the street in jeans and minimal makeup, was selected for the January cover of British Vogue. In the 2016 Artforum interview, Lindbergh explained that he “wanted a change from a formal, particularly styled, supposedly ‘perfect’ woman—too concerned about social integration and acceptance—to a more outspoken and adventurous woman, in control of her own life and emancipated from masculine control. A woman who could speak for herself.” His most recent magazine assignment involved shooting the cover for British Vogue’s September 2019 issue, which was guest-edited by Meghan Markle.
In addition to fashion photography, Lindbergh directed a number of films—1991’s Models, The Film and 2001’s Pina Bausch, Der Fensterputzer (Pina Bausch, The Window Cleaner) among them—and made images that graced album covers by artists as diverse as Beyoncé, Jane Birkin, Tina Turner, and Lionel Ritchie. Lindbergh has also produced many books of his photographs, including 10 Women (1996), which features a preface by Karl Lagerfeld, and Images of Women (2008), and has been the subject of exhibitions at the Hamburger Banhof, the Ludwig Museum Schloss, and the Pushkin Museum of Fine Arts. He is survived by his wife, Petra; his four sons; and his seven grandchildren.
