expo fashion photographer Peter Lindbergh visits Brussels
The images of Peter Lindbergh, the German who redesigned fashion photography, sometimes exude a gloomy detachment. The extensive review Untold stories in Brussels, it mainly shows its technical perfection.
You can’t miss it in the Brussels street scene. Banners with the ravishing models of Peter Lindbergh (1944-2019) in the King’s Gallery of countless acquired posters at bus stops. The city of Brussels and the Lindbergh Foundation joined forces for the traveling expo Untold stories to the Vanderborght building. There she can occupy four floors, with about 150 photos, mostly in large format. Mayor Philippe Close is quick to praise his example of city marketing in a video in the entrance hall. It is already the eighth international stop of this crowd pleaser.
Untold stories Lindbergh curated himself, in the last three years before his unexpected death in September 2019, at the request of Felix Kremer, director of the Kunstpalast Düsseldorf. But anyone who expects an overview exhibition is a preparation for the effort. “When fashion photography becomes art” is the leitmotif. Lindbergh makes triple jumps through forty years of career, with often spectacular-looking fashion images, occasionally crossed with lesser-known work. It is not for nothing that Lindbergh catapulted supermodels such as Naomi Campbell, Tatjana Patitz, Kate Moss, Karen Elson, Helena Christensen or Linda Evangelista to world fame in the eighties and nineties – alongside Moss, they can be admired here one by one. Lindbergh was soon friendly at home strict (where his career began), Vogue, Harpers Bazaar, Rolling Stone NL Vanity purse. He would be responsible for the famous Pirelli naked calendar no less than three times.
“There is a timelessness to my father’s photographs because he never followed trends,” said his son Benjamin Lindbergh, director of the Lindbergh Foundation. “Fashion was his mode of expression but not his main subject. The model is central to him.” That is why he prefers to speak of “an introspective” rather than a retrospective.
Dictatorship of beauty
Lindbergh prided himself on always revealing someone’s personality through his intensely contrasting black-and-white photographs, influenced by German Expressionist film between the wars. From the fragile sensibility of his model actresses who were shown. “I hate retouching, I hate makeup. I always say, ‘Take off the make-up!’” he once told the British Fashion. “Refusing to make a statement of perfection is Peter Lindbergh’s trademark. The essence of his images is to enter the unvarnished soul of every person who looks, no matter how famous,” said British fashion journalist Suzy Menkes. Would it? You might see that earlier in Uma Thurman’s portraits of actresses like Jeanne Moreau, Charlotte Rampling, which date from his later period. Black and white allowed him to escape “the dictatorship of beauty,” according to Lindbergh. “As paradoxical as it may sound, I often find black and white more authentic than colour. Portraits are much stronger because of that reduction.”
Lindbergh, born as Peter Brodbeck to German parents, in the then-occupied Polish Leszno, spent his childhood in Duisburg. Is it surprising that the gray industrial decors of the Ruhr area sometimes resonate in his work? He incorporated them into his eightys-style: models on fire escapes, abandoned factories, abandoned platforms of dilapidated studios – just that now looks a bit dated. As a young man he worked as a window dresser for a department store chain and for a while Lindbergh was firmly captivated by abstract art. But from the 1980s bordering on the affable Lindbergh focused on photography, especially from the 1980s onwards, especially when he moved to Paris.
In the Vanderborght spaces, Lindbergh confronts fashion photos with other types of images: fairly classic (studio) portraits or outdoor shots, cinematic stills, or even landscape elements. Technically they are often mercilessly perfect. You hardly notice when Lindbergh switches from analog to digital from 2006 (although he edits them for the sake of ‘authenticity’). Lindbergh had a second sense for elegance. But his photos also radiate something desolate, gloomy and distant, as his models carry a core of empty, deep sadness. His oeuvre is less frivolous than that of fashion icons such as Guy Bourdin’s Helmut Newton.
Child killer
“Beauty is being kidnapped by commerce these days,” Lindbergh said in 2016 Time. “We’re starting to believe that all those magazine pictures of women and clothes are beautiful. I don’t think so. Those over-retouched monsters, they all want to be perfect.” A contradiction? Because rest assured, most of his models were otherworldly handsome and polished, okay, we’ll see Claudia Schiffer’s freckles or a scar on Karen Elson. But the general edges of his mannequins he keeps under lock and key, whatever he himself might suppose about it. It is striking how all prints are not behind anti-reflective glass, so that you are constantly stuck with the reflection of the fluorescent lamps or that of the visitors. A missed opportunity? No, Lindbergh’s wish to “lose” every viewer in his photographs.
A surprise awaits on the fourth floor. Lindbergh goes all out for color, with a series of poignant portraits from 2013 of American death row inmate Elmer Caroll, who raped and murdered a ten-year-old girl. Two months after this photo shoot, Caroll was executed. In twelve ghastly close-ups, this hard face stares back. Supposing you don’t know this killer is, what would your afterthoughts be, Lindbergh seems to understand?
‘Untold Stories, Peter Lindbergh’, until 14 May, Vanderborght building, Brussels.