FASHION PHOTOGRAPHER PETER LINDBERGH DIES AT 74
The fashion world is mourning the death of one of its founding fathers with the passing of photographer Peter Lindbergh.
“It is with great sadness that we announce the passing of Peter Lindbergh on September 3rd, 2019, at the age of 74,” his official Instagram account announced Tuesday.
The German photographer, who’s often credited with the rise of the supermodel, was born in German-occupied Poland in 1944.
He spent most of his youth in Germany. After studying fine arts in Berlin, and abstract art in Krefeld, he worked as an assistant to the photographer Hans Lux, before opening his own photography studio in 1973 in Düsseldorf.
He also joined the family of photographers at the renowned German magazine Stern, before moving to Paris in the late 1970s.
Influenced by street photographers and photojournalists such as Dorothea Lange and Henri Cartier-Bresson, his stark, romantic style celebrated a humanistic take on fashion.
Amid the glossy, colorful and exaggerated pages of fashion excess in 1980s magazines, Lindbergh introduced a complete reversal of the era’s beauty standards. His minimalist black-and-white portraits of models with little makeup became symbolic of a new era in fashion photography.
His cinematic approach to beauty catapulted the careers of some of the world’s original supermodels, including Naomi Campbell, Christy Turlington and Linda Evangelista, who best exemplified their newfound place in culture in 1990, during an interview with Vogue: “We have this saying, Christy [Turlington] and I…. we don’t wake up for less than $10,000 a day.”
It was his January 1990 cover of British Vogue featuring Evangelista, Turlington, Naomi Campbell, Cindy Crawford, and Tatjana Patitz in downtown Manhattan that arguably solidified the model-as-a-superstar phenomenon, which is still a prominent part of popular culture, nearly 30 years later.
Lindbergh’s most recent assignment ― 15 portraits for the September issue of Vogue, which included Jane Fonda, Selma Hayek, and the climate change campaigner Greta Thunberg ― was guest-edited by Meghan Markle, the Duchess of Sussex.
