Award-winning German photographer Peter Lindbergh has been described as a ‘poet of glamour’, a fashion photographer with an eye that captures the intrinsically human elements within an image – those that are so often surpassed by the opulence and excesses of adornment and decoration in fashion. With a strong history in black and white film, Lindbergh has positioned himself amongst the world’s top fashion photographers over the past two three decades, toeing a line between the commerce of luxury campaigns and the more avantgarde worlds of more daring fashion – working with Japanese designers such as Comme Des Garcon’s Rei Kawakubo, and the curator of A#2, Yohji Yamamoto.
Peter has contributed a series of stills to Yohji’s magazine, taken from a series shot in Beckley, West Virginia in the USA. These are not fashion images. The photos evoke a quiet, sleepy town – snaking powerlines through a cloudy sky, lonely reflections through window panes, shadows cast long in an empty street – all images support a harmonious narrative of peace, stagnation and melancholy.
“Beckley, in West Virginia USA, was probably the saddest town I have ever seen, but there was something interesting about it..”
