As you read these lines, thanks to the personal impulse of Marta Ortega, in the Bateria Dock of Puerto A Coruña the inauguration of “Untold Stories”. The exhibition, which will be open to the public until February 28, 2022, is the retrospective journey through the photographer’s work Peter Lindbergh, who along with Helmut Newton, Cartier-Bresson or Richard Avedon, is one of the most important fashion photographers of the last 50 years.
The selection of more than 150 images performed by Lindbergh himself before his passing in 2019 It is one of the most important photographic exhibitions on the international cultural circuit and places our city as the only Spanish stop on a journey through the fashion, society and culture of our generation.
Peter and the kiss
Few humans have caressed such beauty as Peter Lindbergh. The same portrayed the birth of the term “Top Model” by photographing Linda Evangelista, Christy Turlington, Naomi Campbell, Cindy Crawford and Tatjana Patitz for the cover of the British edition of Vogue and for more than a decade, a wink from his camera became the direct passport to the Olympus of the world’s social and cultural icons.
Cinematographic aesthetics and Lindbergh’s use of chiaroscuro, borrowed from photojournalism, offered a hitherto unprecedented way of interpreting fashion and beauty, abandoning the concept of women as an accessory at the service of the brand and making her the total and absolute protagonist of a story in which the clothes were just a blurred part of his stage.
Lindbergh kissed each and every supermodel you can imagine through his goal, including Stephanie Seymour, Kate Moss or Claudia Schiffer, but also artists like Uma Thurman, Nicole Kidman or Penelope Cruz and relevant personalities from society, the economy or culture like Meghan Markle or Marta Ortega herself.
Peter and the truth
There is nothing more attractive than authenticity. Lindbergh fled from the excess of the preceding fashion industry to focus on beauty without artifice. Women with attitude, empowered, with little or no makeup. Candid portraits and, of course, no retouching. As he himself would say: “We are bombarded with idiotic images of identical women that make people unhappy. Beauty resides in the courage to be who you are”.
The aesthetic sincerity of Peter Lindbergh had already been manifested in a series of iconic photographs from 1988 in which Estelle Lefébure, Karen Alexander, Rachel Williams, Linda Evangelista, Tatjana Patitz and Christy Turlington they played on the beaches of Santa Monica dressed only in a white shirt. The snapshots were rejected by Vogue until they fell into the hands of Anna Wintour who, won over by the photographer’s talent, entrusted her with the cover of her first issue of Vogue USA as editor.
–So defender was Lindbergh of naturalness as the basis of beauty that he even managed, in one of his last works, for Rosalía to pose without her extravagant and at the same time identifying manicure for a cover of Vogue Spain in 2019.
–Peter and the daring
Lindbergh changed everything in the world of beauty and did so using naturalness as his best weapon. Portrayed the passage of time (a taboo until then in the modeling world) when 25 years after the famous shooting that begins this article, brought together the great supermodels of the 1990s in a fashion film called “The Reunion”.
Constant innovator, was Peter the fact that changed many of the canons of femininity when he convinced Linda Evangelista to cut her hair and turning it since then into the legend that sentenced: “I don’t get out of bed for less than $ 10,000 a day.” Was he the one had model Rosemary McGrotha sworn in as President of the United States in the legendary 1992 Donna Karan campaign.
–Lindbergh changed everything in the world of luxury, until then anchored in social classicism, and he dared, for instance, to celebrate the joy of love and diversity by immortalizing in 2015 a homosexual couple in their request for a hand to a revolutionary campaign by a firm so stagnant until then as Tiffany&Co.
–Lindbergh changed everything in the marketing world. From his eyes have come out campaigns that are part of the history of advertising and the collective imagination, such as the one starring Christy Turlington y Mark Vanderloo para The fragance Eternity de Calvin Klein in 1995, that of Charlotte of Monaco for Gucci in 2012 or that of Charlize Theron for perfume J’adore by Dior in 2015.
–Lindbergh it is, in essence, beauty and fashion in its purest form, but also contemporary culture and history. It is a kiss, it is true and it is daring.
PS Thanks Marta.
