Mois : février 2025

Peter Lindbergh sadly left us back in 2019, but his huge legacy lives on – and frankly it’s so stimulating to look at his work. It’s not simply the case that he managed to attract some really very attractive women infront of his lens, but more the beauty and sincerity of his images.

I recently received his book « Shadows on the Wall » which came out in 2017. This book is made up of images (some of over 37,000 it seems) taken during shooting for the 2017 Pirelli Calendar.

This image shows the sheer size of the book !

The women photographed are not models in the traditional sense, and they’re not treated as such – no make-up (or at least, very limited make-up) and the images – these are actresses for the most part, people we’re used to seeing with make-up, and hair prepared, wearing beautiful clothes…

The individual comments from each person photographed show the warmth and appreciation of Peters approach to image creation – with the most common reflection that he is never stressed, talks little, and just lets the person a huge freedom, both of movement and expression.

This shows in the images – some obviously ‘stronger’ than others, but all beautiful, textured with terrific warmth – faithful to his wish that he prefers black and white photography to colour.

Peter makes the point (in an video about this shoot on YouTube) that he doesn’t use PhotoShop or any other image treatment on a computer – what you see is what you get, in the sense that we see in this book exactly what he saw looking through the eyepiece of his camera – faults and all! Frankly I can find little fault with anything I’ve seen here…

At the moment of writing, the publisher TASCHEN is offering this work (of art, really) at 49€ post free.

(I’ll keep the post on geo-politics for another day – this is personal)

Here in the town I live, we have a well equiped centre devoted to circus arts. For some years now I have ‘worked’ here for free as a photographer – interesting to note that there are now 388 albums of photos dedicated to Circa on my site (Circa is the name of the association that runs this place)

Up until recently, it was pretty straightforward – the person dealing with the artists at Circa would alert me to the fact that a company was arriving for a residency (usually 10 – 14 days) and I would contact them and visit to photograph whatever it was they were doing.

As a general rule, the companies were in the ‘creation’ stage, which means anything between first steps, and nearly finished, but very often something was missing – lighting, costumes, music etc. As such, many of the photos I took were fine for a ‘history’ of what they were doing, and where they had got to, but rarely useable for publicity. The albums of photos I created were interesting, but I rarely received orders for images.

Sometimes however, the companies request a ‘shooting’ – this is good as it’s A: paid work, and B: usually preparing for publicity, press releases etc. This is much more interesting as we can do a kind of ‘stop-start’ performance where sometimes I ask them to repeat a sequence as I’ve found a better angle etc. Most times the companies go away with a batch of images, and I see my name in lights !

Sadly, the last four rersidencies have simply not gone according to plan – and this is very frustrating.

Either I spend a long time waiting for nothing to happen – one time I waited 4 hours for the artist to suddenly decide he had a sciatica and couldn’t perform.

And on three occasions I’ve sent the link to the albums to the artists – and heard NOTHING in return.

Here are some shots from two different companies who, to date, have not even bothered to thank me for my efforts

The idea of presenting the images like this is actually two-fold – it gives a much better indication of movement, and in the event that the company hasn’t organised it’s costumes at the time of the residency, the fact that they are not clear in the images means that the images can still be used for pre-publicity.

I don’t want to stop doing this – I actually quite like trying to give life to otherwise static performances – but I can’t help thinking that these people are taking the piss….