Soul on Film

As Susan Sontag once noted in an article for British Vogue: “The greatest fashion photography is more than the photography of fashion.” Certainly photographers have given us images as memorable as the clothes they shoot. As the documentarians behind the fashion campaigns, they go beyond the ultrarealistic attention to detail that characterizes much of fashion photography to make a statement. Like the stark images Peter Lindbergh conceived for Commes des Garcons that were inspired by the hulking silhouettes of massive factories in his native Germany. Or when Ellen von Unwerth saw in an unknown model, Claudia Schiffer, a resemblance to the great Brigitte Bardot and wowed the fashion world with her shots. Or the controversial depictions of women by the late Helmut Newton.

Some of the most remarkable photography of this genre has come from the four people on the following pages. Their comments on what they do were distilled from hours of interviews into threads of thought.

Featured are von Unwerth, 49, who worked as a model for a decade before turning photographer. The Paris-based photographer, who has shot for Vogue, Vanity Fair and Guess, rebels against the frozen look by creating a feeling of movement in every frame. Lindbergh, 59, also based in Paris, infuses his often black-and-white cinematic imagery with a heavy dose of documentary realism in his work for Harper’s Bazaar and Vogue. Sixty-year-old photographer Patrick Demarchelier, who lives in New York, has produced spread after spread of beautifully lit, classically posed models for Harper’s Bazaar, and will soon be doing the same for Vogue and Vanity Fair. And, finally, Helmut Newton. The German-born photographer revolutionized the way we see fashion, with dominant women often shown in politically incorrect scenarios.

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Peter Lindbergh

In the 1970s when I began, I couldn’t match my mind with American Vogue’s image of a woman--the perfect makeup, the perfect hair, always in the most beautiful apartment, wearing perfect fashion. I had no interest in the really done kind of a woman. This is not my feeling of a woman. I never made women ugly, but I didn’t overly make them up. I go for the personality, not for the beauty. In terms of clothes, fashion is of course important, but a woman should wear a dress, not the other way around.

Outside of the studio I’ve been doing more and more reportage-style work. I have the camera around my neck and a few rolls of film in my pocket and I just walk around with the model. The editor and an assistant stay on the other side of the street so people don’t notice you. You take newer girls that nobody knows, with a little makeup and normal clothes. If you go with stars it doesn’t work. It can’t be flashy fashion either. They just walk through the streets and click, click, click and nobody looks at you. It’s very exciting to work like this. When you tell the magazine you don’t need the limousines and the big Winnebago and all that kind of stuff, they say, ‘What are you doing?’

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Patrick Demarchelier

By working very hard you develop a style. It’s step by step. You have to constantly improve yourself. You can’t just shoot good pictures today. You have to be good tomorrow. You have to be good all the time. Being a photographer is not like any other job. You’re only as good as your last photograph.

I don’t like to change a picture (such as cross-processing negatives as a positive or positives as negatives). I do occasionally, but not much. An effect is often an escape. A good picture is a good picture. Black and white is more dreamy and more artistic in a way because it isn’t reality. Color is more obvious. That’s why it’s more difficult to shoot in color than in black and white.

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Ellen von Unwerth

While I was modeling my boyfriend gave me a camera. So in Africa on a modeling trip I photographed my model friends and did some reportage. I went to a little village in Kenya and photographed the women and the kids there. At this time there was a magazine called Jill whose art director was a friend of mine, so when I got back to Germany I showed him the pictures. He was like, “Wow!” He couldn’t believe it because everybody thought of models as stupid. I thought it was a very difficult, complicated thing to become a “professional photographer.” I surprised myself by the pictures I had taken. Jill ran eight pages of my pictures. Then I started to do tests with models to build a portfolio.

I always have lots of movement in my pictures. I get bored very quickly if the model is just sitting there. After two frames I ask her to move. I try to capture something spontaneous. I think that comes from when I was a model. I was kind of bored during my modeling days because photographers were always saying, ‘Don’t move! Don’t move.’ I always wanted to do something funny. I like surprises. I don’t like to do something that is just there. I try to discover something. So now I encourage the people I photograph to move, to do things--for them to express emotion, to play little roles, to be sad, to be jealous, for a model to pretend she’s waiting for her boyfriend but it looks like he’s not going to show up.

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In Memoriam: Helmut Newton

On Jan. 23, 83-year-old Helmut Newton died in a car crash in Los Angeles. He had been staying with his wife, June, at their winter residence at the Chateau Marmont. Mark Edward Harris talked with him a few days before his death. Newton was consumed with excitement in the planning of a foundation in his name to open this summer in Berlin. The city government had given him a building in which to house his archives and to serve as an international gathering place for photography.

[In America] the mores are very different, so I have to be more circumspect in my work . . . less free than I am in Europe. And these days, under the present regime, are worse than ever. There are a lot of taboos, although Anna Wintour at Vogue is very courageous and publishes a lot of my pictures that bring quite a lot of mail . . . mostly nasty.

Every good photographer creates his own world. My fashion work has always been about a certain woman. It’s never been a very young girl. A certain woman in a certain social class, whether she’s from the upper 60s in New York or the 16th arrondissement in Paris. Maybe the woman from the 16th arrondissement in Paris is more interesting and freer, though behind the scenes in America it’s pretty wild.

Any photographer who says he’s not a voyeur is either stupid or a liar.

People keep saying, ‘We’re basing our collection on the ‘60s . . . the ‘70s . . . ‘80s.’ It’s a bit nostalgic these days, except the street fashion that’s going on in places such as Los Angeles I find very interesting.