Peter Lindbergh

Peter Lindbergh shaped the look and feel of fashion in the early 1990s with his iconic photographs. Drawing on the history of street photography, he eschewed carefully calculated styling and poise in favour of fleeting glances, creating elegant pictures of models that celebrated the female form through movement and dance.

Lindbergh’s breakthrough was his cover for the January 1990 issue of British Vogue. Depicting the little-known models Naomi Campbell, Linda Evangelista, Tatjana Patitz, Christy Turlington and Cindy Crawford in downtown New York, it heralded the beginning of a modern, liberating era for women, and took the careers of Lindbergh and the five ‘Supermodels’ to new heights.

Born in 1944 to German parents in Nazi-occupied Poland, after the war Lindbergh’s family moved to Duisberg, an industrial town that would come to have a great impact on the realism that framed his work. He first studied abstract art, but was drawn to photography by the work of Henri Cartier-Bresson, Dorothea Lange and Garry Winogrand — documentarians who believed in shooting their subjects casually and candidly to create ‘pure’, untouched images. In 1973 Lindbergh opened his own studio in Düsseldorf, building a reputation at the current affairs magazine Stern, alongside Helmut Newton, Guy Bourdin and Hans Feurer.

Following the success of his Vogue cover, Lindbergh became the first photographer to shoot the Pirelli Calendar three times, in 1996, 2002 and 2017. In 1996 published his first book 10 Women.

Lindbergh also worked with musicians, shooting album covers for Beyonce, Tina Turner and Sheryl Crow. Between 1991 and 2008 he directed several experimental films about his life and career. He died in Paris in 2019, aged 74.