52Peter Lindbergh1944-2019PETER LINDBERGHMany photographers are captivated by female
beauty, but no one has captured it in its raw
form quite like Peter Lindbergh. Resolute
in his loathing of retouching and visual
manipulation, the gregarious German photographer, who
died in September at the age of 74, saw power and poetry
in individualism and imperfection. A specialist in timeless
images that nevertheless proved era-defining, Lindbergh
was a prolific contributor to British Vogue. Most recently,
he photographed 15 women for the cover of the September
2019 Forces for Change issue, guest edited by HRH The
Duchess of Sussex. “Peter was the only photographer who
could have executed the vision shared by the Duchess and
myself,” confirms editor-in-chief Edward Enninful. “His
ability to see beauty in real people, and to capture their true
identities with characteristic good humour and energy, was
nothing short of astounding.”Lindbergh himself relished the challenge of lensing a
diverse group. “All the women were different, but they each
had something special,” he told Vogue. “It was wonderful
to photograph this project.” Equally wonderful were the
photographs Lindbergh took in the early 1990s of a group
of women that later became known the world over as
“the supers”. The January 1990 cover of British Vogue, for
which he captured Naomi Campbell, Linda Evangelista,
Tatjana Patitz, Christy Turlington and Cindy Crawford in
Levi’s jeans and Giorgio di Sant’Angelo bodysuits on the
street in New York, banished the excess of the ’80s and
ushered in a new epoch of undone style – making the models
household names in the process. Still, Lindbergh remained
humble to the end. “It was a new generation, and that new
generation came with a new interpretation of women,” he
said of the images. “I never had the idea that this was history.
Never for one second.” nTRIBUTE11-19-TributePL.indd 52 10/09/2019 10:21