Until June 1, 2020 Kunstpalast Düsseldorf shows the great exhibition Peter Lindbergh: Untold Stories (the large-scale catalogue: Amazon.com, Amazon.co.uk, Amazon.fr, Amazon.de).
It is the first time Peter Lindbergh (November 23, 1944—September 3, 2019) curated an exhibition of his works himself. It took him two years to select the photographs. Unfortunately, he died in Paris a few months before the opening on February 5, 2020.
In Düsseldorf on display are some 150, mainly monochrome photographs shot between 1983 and 2018; black and white is often more authentic than color, Lindbergh says in the catalogue’s interview. Most works exhibited show portraits of actors and models. Alongside famous photos made for magazines such as Vogue, Harper’s Bazaar, W, Interview, Rolling Stone and The Wall Street Journal, you can find some previously unpublished works.
The exhibition shows a few photographs of ports and industrial ruins. However, the main accent is put on sometimes almost private, intimate portraits as well as some iconic works showing actresses close to the photographer, including Nicole Kidman, Uma Thurman, Robin Wright, Jessica Chastain, Jeanne Moreau, Naomi Campbell, Charlotte Rampling and others. Some large scale photographs are three by four meters in size.
Untold Stories is Peter Lindbergh’s legacy. He chose the photos closest to his heart. During his career, he put emphasis on the human being he was photographing. Therefore, he managed to revolutionize fashion photography with his natural look. Together with fellow German and fashion designer Karl Lagerfeld, he created the supermodel myth; on this subject, check the book Peter Lindbergh: 10 Women, with a text by Karl Lagerfeld (Amazon.com, Amazon.co.uk, Amazon.de). As a photographer, Peter Lindbergh managed to blur the lines between fashion and art photography. He was inspired by dance theater (Tanztheater) as well as Fritz Lang’s movie Metropolis.
This review is based on the exhibition catalogue, which contains a short biography, a 2019-interview by Felix Krämer, the exhibition curator and Kunstpalast General Director, with the artist as well as a forword by filmmaker Wim Wenders. Unfortunately, a detailed, analytical essay explaining Lindbergh’s more than 150 photographs depicted in the catalogue is missing. However, in the interview, Lindbergh says: “Trying to describe this complexity [of his work] would cause you to lose 80 per cent of the content — it would be Lost in Translation, to quote the title of Sofia Coppola’s film.” Of course, Lindbergh photographed Sofia Coppola, for instance for Vogue, but none of those works made it into this book.
In the interview, Peter Lindbergh explains that he selected the photographs for this exhibition instinctively, following his gut. He stresses that his photos do not depict fashion directly, that he has not attended a fashion show in 25 years, that fashion photography is its own cultural contribution, in the same way that fashion is. He underlines that sometimes the best things happen by accident, totally unexpectedly.
Peter Lindbergh underlines the importance of the 1981-meeting he had with the head designer of Comme des Garçons, Rei Kawakubo, who brough a breath of fresh air to Paris with her minimalist, conceptual fashion. She gave him totally free rein. He decided not to show what Comme des Garçons or the specific collection stood for; he was just taking pictures freely, which worked well for both the label and the clothes. It confirmed that fashion photography was not not just about depicting something, Lindbergh said.
Peter Lindbergh was born in 1944 as Peter Brodbeck in what is now Leszno, Poland, a town which was at the time part of Germany. Shortly after his birth, the family moved to Duisburg, an industrial city in the Rhineland, where he spent his childhood and youth. In the 1960s, after a short career as a window dresser in Berlin, he attended the art academies in Berlin and Krefeld, studying painting. In Krefeld in 1969, he had his first exhibition at Galerie Denise René—Hans Mayer. It is only back then that he decided to switch to photography.
Peter Lindbergh initially trained with the commercial photographer Hans Lux in Düsseldorf before establishing his own photography studio in 1973, which he soon ran under the professional name of Peter Lindbergh, focussing on advertising photography for five years.
Together with the photographers Helmut Newton, Guy Bourdin and Hans Feuer, he joined the publishing group of the German magazine Der Stern, which became internationally infamous for the publication of the fake Hitler Diaries in 1983; Lindbergh had of course nothing to do with that scandal.
Peter Lindbergh’s breakthrough came in Paris in 1978. With his natural photographs of young women he established the era of the supermodel. A career spanning over 40 years followed. He lived and worked in Paris until his death in September 2019.
His photographs can be admired in major museum collections around the globe, including the Victoria and Albert Museum in London, the Centre Pompidou in Paris, the Metropolitan Museum in New York as well as the Kunstpalast Düsseldorf.
Felix Krämer, Wim Wenders (authors) and photographs by Peter Lindbergh: Peter Lindbergh: Untold Stories. Hardcover, Taschen, 2020, 27 x 36 cm, 320 pages. Order the large-scale book / exhibition catalogue from Amazon.com, Amazon.co.uk, Amazon.fr, Amazon.de.
The exhibition Peter Lindbergh: Untold Stories is on display at:
– Kunstpalast Düsseldorf, Germany from February 5 until June 1, 2020
– Museum für Kunst und Gewerbe Hamburg, Germany from June 20 until November 1, 2020
– Hessisches Landesmuseum, Darmstadt, Germany from December 4, 2020 until March 7, 2021
– Madre, Museo d’Arte Contemporanea Donnaregina, Napoli (Naples), Italy from March to May 2021 (exact dates to be determined)
For a better reading, quotations and partial quotations in this review are not put between quotation marks.
Review added on March 3, 2020 at 17:49 German time.
