Peter Lindbergh

2005 Honoree / Outstanding Achievement In Fashion Photography

“The poet of glamour,” has been used to describe one of the most widely respected photographers today, Peter Lindbergh. Since 1978, when Stern Magazine published his first series of fashion photographs, his work has been showcased by every major international fashion magazine and commissioned for the influential campaigns of the world’s leading fashion designers.

Born on the Polish border of East Germany in 1944, Peter Lindbergh spent his childhood in the West German town of Duisburg. This stark, grey German landscape has provided a major influential theme throughout Lindbergh’s work.

Shortly after beginning photography, at age 27, he became an assistant to photographer Hans Lux. By 1973, after completing a two-year apprenticeship with Lux, he began working independently as an advertising photographer. Using the art of black and white photography (which continues to comprise 60% of his work), he has been named a master of this medium. Lindbergh generally uses mechanical, industrial backdrops that offer a trademark directness and honesty usually lacking in fashion photography. In 1978, after Stern published his first series of fashion photographs and the demand for his work became overwhelming, he moved to Paris.

Lindbergh’s photographs have since appeared in every major fashion magazine including Italian, French, British and American Vogue, W, The New Yorker, Vanity Fair, Stern, and Rolling Stone. Until January 1997, much of his editorial output appeared in Harper’s Bazaar. In 1992 Bazaar signed a contract with Lindbergh, an unprecedented move at the time. During the last ten years he has photographed advertising campaigns for the foremost designers in America and Europe, including Giorgio Armani, Prada, Donna Karan, Calvin Klein, Jil Sander and Hugo Boss.

In 1997, he was presented with the International Fashion Awards prize for Best Photographer, conferred in Paris by a jury of over 400 of the most important names in the fashion industry. Lindbergh was honored with the same award in 1995, when he also became an Honorary Member of the highly exclusive German Art Directors Club. In 1996, he was granted Europe’s most important design honor, the Raymond Loewy Foundation Award.

Considered one of the great masters of black and white photography, Peter Lindbergh is acclaimed for his cinematic images, which have redefined the fashion image with compelling realism, lack of pretension and ineffable depth of emotion.