A true master and innovator throughout his career, Peter Lindbergh has produced some of the most iconic photographs in fashion. As a photographer Peter Lindbergh is a synonym of style, black and white portraits and exhibitions all over the world, London, Paris, New York. His last beautiful works were made for the Gagosian Gallery, Paris, where he now lives. There are the black and white images that he shot for Vogue in 1988, for example, of a group of relatively unknown models in white shirts on the beach, including a young Linda Evangelista, Christy Turlington, and Tatjana Patitz. There is the January 1990 cover of British Vogue: a shot of Evangelista, Turlington, and Patitz, along with Naomi Campbell and Cindy Crawford, now considered the birth certificate of the supermodel phenomenon. There are the photographs that he took in the 90s of Claudia Schiffer and Kate Moss, and the more recent ones of Gisele Bündchen and Cara Delevingne. His famous editorials are already a milestone of fashion photography, a must-see for fashion-enthusiasts and not.
And then there are the two Pirelli Calendars, the first in 1996 and the second in 2002, when for the first time actresses were included in the cast. For the 2017 Pirelli Calendar, Peter Lindbergh goes beyond the camera with the idea that “talent is more important
than beauty.” The fashion photographer didn’t use supermodels as subjects, instead he chose big screen celebrities from various nationalities to convey his personal idea of glamour. To do so he recruited 15 actresses – Kate Winslet, Penelope Cruz, Nicole Kidman, Dame Helen Mirren, Uma Thurman, Robin Wright, Lupita Nyong’o, Alicia Vikander, Julianne Moore, Rooney Mara, Jessica Chastain, Charlotte Rampling, Zhang Ziyi, Lea Seydoux – plus Anastasia Ignatova, a professor of political theory in Moscow Lindbergh met last year. However, the Calendar is not the only Pirelli project the photographer worked on this year. While he was scouting locations for the calendar, Lindbergh visited the Settimo Torinese technology hub, the most advanced factory in the Pirelli world. The photographs resulting from the visit were initially supposed to
be part of the Calendar, but because of the beauty and the relevance of the images, the photographer and Marco Tronchetti Provera, Executive Vice President and CEO, decided to make them into a future exhibition on innovation, which will be held in 2017. The exclusive setting, the great ability to cast poetry upon inanimate objects in motion, make these photos the best example of Lindbergh’s great, kaleidoscopic talent. Here, Peter Lindbergh talks about his visit to the Settimo Torinese technology hub, his new interest in inanimate objects, and the future of fashion photography and art. An in depth exploration of Lindbergh’s vision, his artistic poetic.