page_title: Peter Lindbergh
section_title: Early life
hierarchical_section_title: Peter Lindbergh / Early life
caption_attribution_description: English: Portrait of German Photographer Peter Lindbergh, taken by Stefan Rappo (New York, 2016)
context_page_description: Peter Lindbergh was a German fashion photographer and film director.
  He had studied arts in Berlin and Krefeld, and exhibited his works before graduation. In 1971 he turned to photography and worked for the Stern magazine.
  In fashion photography, he portrayed models Linda Evangelista, Naomi Campbell, Tatjana Patitz, Cindy Crawford and Christy Turlington together for the January 1990 British Vogue cover, beginning an era of supermodels. He twice photographed the Pirelli Calendar, made several films, and created covers for music including Tina Turner's Foreign Affair, Sheryl Crow's The Globe Sessions and Beyoncé's I Am... Sasha Fierce.
  His work has been presented at international exhibitions. Lindbergh preferred black & white photography, and noted in 2014: "This should be the responsibility of photographers today to free women, and finally everyone, from the terror of youth and perfection."
context_section_description: Lindbergh was born on 23 November 1944 in Lissa (Leszno), Reichsgau Wartheland, German-occupied Poland. He spent his childhood in Duisburg.
  As a teenager, he worked as window dresser for the Karstadt and Horten department stores in Duisburg. Coming from a part of Germany close to the Dutch border, North Rhine-Westphalia, he spent summer holidays with his family in the Netherlands on the coast near Noordwijk. The vast beaches and the industrial settings of his hometown Duisburg, influenced his work strongly over the years. In the early 1960s, he moved to Lucerne and months later to Berlin where he enrolled in the Berlin Academy of Fine Arts. He hitchhiked to Arles in the footsteps of his idol, Vincent van Gogh. Lindbergh recalled these years: "I preferred actively seeking out van Gogh’s inspirations, my idol, rather than painting the mandatory portraits and landscapes taught in art schools". After several months in Arles, he continued through to Spain and Morocco, a journey which took him two years.
  Returning to Germany, he studied abstract art at the Kunsthochschule (College of Art) in Krefeld, North Rhine-Westphalia, with Günther C. Kirchberger. Influenced by Joseph Kosuth and the conceptual art movement, he was invited in 1969, before graduating, to present his work at the avant-garde Galerie Denise René. These works were exhibited in the Objets ludiques exhibition at the Tinguely Museum in Basel in 2014. After moving to Düsseldorf in 1971, he turned his attention to photography and worked for two years assisting German photographer Hans Lux, before opening his own studio in 1973. Becoming well known in his native country, he joined the Stern magazine family along with photographers Helmut Newton, Guy Bourdin and Hans Feurer.
caption: Lindbergh, New York, 2016
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