Peter Lindbergh

Peter 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. 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. In the 1990s Lindbergh garnered international acclaim for launching the careers of the “Supermodels”—Cindy Crawford, Kate Moss, Stephanie Seymour, Naomi Campbell, and Linda Evangelista. His images became homage to the new modern women.

Lindbergh was born in 1944 in Leszno, Poland. His work has been exhibited in solo and group exhibitions worldwide, including Images of Women, Bunkamura Museum of Art, Tokyo (1996, traveled to Hamburger Bahnhof, Berlin; Kunsthaus Wien, Vienna; Palazzo delle Esposizioni, Rome; and Pushkin State Museum of Fine Arts, Moscow, among others); Stories Supermodels, Ludwiggalerie Schloss Oberhausen, Germany (2003); Visioni, FORMA Centro Internazionale di Fotografia, Milan, Italy (2006); Beauduc, Les Rencontres d’Arles, France (2008); The Unknown, Ullens Center for Contemporary Art, Beijing (2011); Fotomuseum, Antwerp (2011–12); Berlin, Maison de la Photographie, Lille, France (2013); The Unknown and Images of Women, HDLU Museum, Zagreb, Croatia (2014); and Peter Lindbergh/Garry Winogrand: Women on Street, NRW-Forum Düsseldorf (2017).

Lindbergh lives and works in Paris, New York, and Arles, France.