The Bite Magazine Issue 17

“I like [black and white photography] better because it was [an] interpretation of reality, a more privileged connection to truth than colour” – Peter Lindbergh bite book review where “their natural look in Lindbergh’s photos without an overdose of cosmet- ics made my generation of women able and willing to identify with them.” It was the way that Lindbergh portrayed the fresh-faced models “ au naturel in honest, large-grain black-and-white photos and caught their personality as it burst from the image” that they were given such a title. As Ansenk so rightly says in the fore- word, there is only one real Peter Lindbergh. No one can imitate the iconic portraits he has created although they have tried, especially with his wealth of technical knowledge in the photographic profession. Having studied at the Berlin Academy of Art, Lindbergh, inspired by the works of Vincent Van Gogh moved to Arles, France in 1968 for a short season before returning to study free painting at the College of Art in Krefeld, Germany in 1969 and worked as a con- ceptual artist. Once he mastered the art of photography as an assistant of Hans Lux, Lindbergh began receiving com- missions from Stern and other German magazines. His sources of inspiration came from everywhere, such as the early German Expressionist films with Asta Nielsen and Marlene Dietrich; in the Russian ballet of Sergei Diaghilev, and later in modern dance; the industrial surroundings of Paris (where he settled in 1988); and sculptures and paintings of which his favourites were the Neue Sachlichkeit movement with artists such as Georg Grosz, Otto Dix, Rudolf Schli- chter and the more Expressionist Max Beckmann. Author Thierry-Maxime Loriot explains in his chapter ‘A Different Vision of Fashion: Peter Lindbergh’s Photogra- phy of Truth’ that it wasn’t easy for Lindbergh when he first approached American Vogue’s editorial director Alexander Liberman and editor-in-chief Grace Mirabella. He had taken images of six unknown models: Linda Evangelista,