PHOTO PREVIEW:Peter Lindbergh
When John Keats wrote “Beauty is truth, truth beauty”, he intended that art could sublimate and immortalise beauty and make it eternal, and that truth was to be found in this crystallised idea of beauty. The only place where truth and beauty finally cohabitate is art. From the moment that fashion photography entered the perimeter of both the museum and the gallery, it legitimately stepped inside the art world as one of its branches (one of the most profitable, at that).
By Dimitris Lempesis
Photo: Gagosian Gallery Archive
Over the course of his career, Peter Lindbergh has taken inspiration for his photography from modern dance, early German and East European cinema and photography, as well as his own personal history, resulting in a bold, elemental photographic language. With a minimum of artifice, spare styling, and openness to improvisation, he allows the innate character and natural beauty of his female subjects to emerge. Known for his cinematic lens, Peter Lindbergh is a storyteller in nature, and once claimed that “Fashion photographers are the new painters”. Gagosian Gallery Athens presents the work of one of the most preeminent fashion photographers. In his editorial work for Vogue, Harper’s Bazaar, Interview, and many other international magazines, Lindbergh replaces staged, calculated glamour with a vérité approach, enhanced by his use of high-contrast black-and-white photography. He uses body movement, in particular modern dance, to celebrate the human form in a way that carries elements of both antiquity and modernity. Lindbergh’s now-iconic photographs of women derive inspiration from early narrative cinema and street photography, in their fleeting observations and compositional elegance. His Eastern European heritage can be traced in the stark and guileless realism that frames the feminine beauty of his subjects. “I started my career as a painter and ended up being a photographer and also did movies. I think when you work in imagery, all art forms, whether it is video, photo, painting, cross paths at some point, they inspire one another… It is important to experiment and to make things your own, discover what your identity is through your art form, reinterpret things with your own imprint”. Spanning the last thirty years, the exhibition testifies to Lindbergh’s impact on the world of fashion photography, and his contribution to portraiture in general. The beauty of his female subjects is purposeful, self-possessed, and uninhibited.
Info: Gagosian Gallery, 3 Merlin Street, Athens, Duration: 4/2-23/4/16, Days & Hours: Tue-Fri 11:00-18:00, Sat: 11:00-15:00, www.gagosian.com
