Peter Lindbergh. On Fashion Photography

The Library Essay

Beauty Kept Its Lines

Peter Lindbergh photographed fashion in black and white, in daylight, with the grain and candour of reportage, and he refused the industry's retouching on principle; the faces in his pictures are allowed their years. His January 1990 British Vogue cover, five young women in white shirts on a New York street, is generally credited with beginning the age of the supermodel, and the models themselves credited him with photographing them as people.

Taschen published this career survey in 2016 and reissued it in 2020 for the publisher's fortieth anniversary, the year after Lindbergh died. Four decades of work sit inside it with unusual coherence, because the conviction never moved: character is the interesting surface, and the camera should be honest about it.