A Damn Fine Cup of Culture

Welcome to Six Damn Fine Degrees. These instalments will be inspired by the idea of six degrees of separation in the loosest sense. The only rule: it connects – in some way – to the previous instalment. So come join us on our weekly foray into interconnectedness.

“This should be the responsibility of photographers today: to free women, and finally everyone, from the terror of youth and perfection.” ~Peter Lindbergh

As we drove into Stockholm, the road trip through Sweden had been a long time coming, the Fotografiska museum was already firmly scribbled onto my little wish-list. Because the few days we would be spending in the city happily coincided with a Peter Lindbergh exposition. So I told my partner I’d really like to go and he, as he does, shrugged and said: “If it’s important to you, we shall go.” Aided somewhat by the fact that we hit Stockholm precisely on Midsommar, so there were few venues open for visiting, we spent a leisurely afternoon looking at the photographs which, whether I liked to admit it or not, had shaped me.

Frankly, my partner’s throwaway remark had blindsided me. Important to me. Was Lindbergh, really? He did famous covers for Vogue, but I was never much into fashion. He made films, none of which I have seen. But also, in a way, how could he not be? His images defined what physical beauty was for me during my teenage years, as they did for many women of my generation. The pack of young models he captured, for Vogue, for example, were the ones later termed Supermodels. Campbell, Evangelista, Patitz, Turlington, Crawford. They were everywhere. They were the faces that defined an era. They featured in George Michael’s music video for the 1990 hit Freedom ’90, the lyrics of which I still know by heart, more due to a kind of osmosis, than through actively seeking out the song.

Describing Lindbergh merely as a fashion photographer would be an injustice. A quick Google should lead you to some of his pictures. In severe black and white, the famous faces scrutinise the viewer. Intimate and direct, looking back at you as you look at them. There are theatrical ones too, from his films and filmsets, or just ones that tell a story. The familiar faces and rail-thin figures got up in modernist costumes, hair moulded, poses severe and mannequin-like. And these are the images that make Lindbergh important. He could, and did, make glamourous images of immaculate and unattainable female beauty. But it was clear, to me at any rate, that what he was looking for was the humanity behind them. These women who forever defined, for better or worse, what beauty was, staring pensively into the camera: posing the question of what it is we see when we look at them.

Wim Wenders, a great friend of Lindbergh’s, asks in his in memoriam: “I include all of you who knew Peter and worked with him, in my question so you can all answer it for yourselves: ‘What were his greatest gifts?’”

The fashion industry, any industry whose mainstay is looks and models, can be an ugly one. It titillates us with the idea that we could all join in, we all wear clothes after all. Then shows us in the most merciless way possible that we will never be this beautiful. Never be so frighteningly thin. And, naturally, as that it the way of things, we will not be forever young. It is a world which is by definition exclusive, it includes no one. Not the scarred, the chubby, the middle-aged. Not those who cannot force themselves to fit into this stark gender binary. Not even the women in the photographs themselves. It is easily done, to set your heart against it. It’s unhealthy, this idea that the paragon of female beauty is essentially a void: something we can project upon but never inhabit. An image of womanhood mainly geared, if we were to be simplistic about it, towards the desires of men. Casting women into an ideal mould that can only inevitably lead to disenchantment.

But this is not what Lindbergh stands for. This is not what he does. The women in his images defy us, and the ideal they are supposed to represent. They sometimes present as casually androgynous. Looking elsewhere, indifferent, or obstinately resisting the standards the image wants to impress upon them. They are captured in medias res, not airbrushed, or meticulously finished and barely made-up. With his images Lindbergh re-opens a door normally closed. Telling us, not that we might be them, but that they are us. And it hit me, while I was making my hundredth round, that yes they are important to me. That I am grateful for these images. That this was Lindbergh’s gift: via these pearlescent black-and-whites, he gave us back to ourselves.