ROTTERDAM EXHIBITION | PETER LINDBERGH

A Different Vision on Fashion Photography

When German photographer, Peter Lindbergh, shot five young models in downtown New York City in 1989, he produced not only the iconic 1990 January cover of British Vogue, but also the birth certificate of the supermodels. The image didn’t just bring revered faces together for the first time – it marked the beginning of a new fashion era and a new understanding of female beauty.

Opened September 10th, ‘A Different Vision on Fashion Photography’, the first exhibition in the Netherlands devoted to German photographer Peter Lindbergh, features more than 220 of his images from four decades of emblematic photography. It celebrates his unique and game-changing storytelling and the new romantic and narrative vision it brought to art and fashion. This spectacular overview of Lindbergh’s oeuvre also presents exclusive material, varying from previously unseen material from personal notes, storyboards, props, polaroids to contact sheets, films and monumental prints, in a large-scale retrospective of the photographer’s fruitful career.

The exhibition is an ode to Lindbergh’s multi-faceted body of work starting from 1978 to the present day. Regarded as one of the most influential artists who determined the course of fashion photography, the multimedia exhibition is presented in a thematic approach marking his creative development and focusing on his themes, imaginary world and passions through the years, into nine different sections: Supermodels, Couturiers, Zeitgeist, Dance, The Darkroom, The Unknown, Silver Screen, Icons and an exclusive Rotterdam gallery. The ‘Rotterdam Gallery’, photographed for the October Issue of Dutch Vogue especially made for the exhibition, shows the results of Lindbergh’s shoot of Dutch top model Lara Stone and emerging talent Elisa Hupkes in the Port of Rotterdam.

Whether in striking single portraits or dramatic situations of figure and setting, we trace the photographer’s cinematic inflections and his provocative play with female archetypes, as subjects adopt the guise of dancers, actresses, heroines, and femmes fatales. Raw and seductive at once, we see how Lindbergh’s trademark monochrome pictures also redefined standards of beauty by emphasizing spirit and personality as much as looks, honoring the elegance and sensuality of older women, and privileging natural and authentic beauty in an era of pervasive retouching.

The exhibition ‘Peter Lindbergh. A Different Vision on Fashion Photography’ is initiated, produced and toured by Kunsthal Rotterdam in close collaboration with curator Thierry-Maxime Loriot and Peter Lindbergh until February 12th 2017.

Kunsthal Museum, Rotterdam, Holland

SEPT. 10th, 2016 – FEB. 12th, 2017

Tomorrow's Journal

Published October 2016