Writing about the deceased does not make the living feel good, but it is enough to make people rational. At this moment, chaotic as I sat in front of my computer and typed the following great names one by one: Robert Frank, Okwui enwezor, Peter Lindbergh, Michael Wolf, Terry O'Neill... There is a cruel reminder of reality: the number of people in the annual list of the dead can only increase, it cannot decrease, and the soul, no matter how outstanding, cannot resist the laws of time. 2019 is them, and who will it be in 2020?
I like a quote by the Chinese philosophical theorist Sun Zhouxing: People can always start over. This "beginning" refers to the strong subjective initiative of the generation, which is almost revolutionary, suggesting that art is not essentially a fatalistic cycle of end-to-end succession, but a new opening.
In the list of those who died in 2019, they did not take photography with them, instead, they paved more roads for photography. Writing this reminds me of the philosopher Nietzsche, lying on a hospital bed at the end of his life, looking at his sister who was crying for him, but comfortingly saying: "Elizabeth, why are you crying?" Aren't we happy? "Yes, we don't need to cry for these dead, people are gone, but photography can always start over.
Peter Lindbergh (23 November 1944 – 3 September 2019)
On September 3, 2019, the famous fashion photographer Peter Lindbergh passed away in Paris at the age of 74.
Born in Germany in 1944 and attending the Berlin Academy of Fine Arts and krefeld as an adult, Lindbergh may have been influenced by the industrial environment in his hometown of Duisburg and the love of abstract art in his student life, and his artistic niche tends to be concise and symbolic.
After moving to Düsseldorf in 1971, his attention turned to photography across the board, and he continued to refine and develop this artistic tendency in fashion photography.
In January 1990, the British Vogue magazine published several of Lindbergh's supermodels: Cindy Crawford, Naomi Campbell, Linda Evangelista, etc., which changed the aesthetic color style popular in fashion photography and replaced it with a simple and documentary black and white style.
This anomalous innovation pioneered black-and-white realism fashion photography and subsequently earned Lindbergh a prestigious international reputation.
Lindbergh famously said, "It is the responsibility of today's photographers to free women, even everyone, from the fear of youth and the pursuit of perfection." ”
He rejects the later stage, rejects the commercial beauty of over-embellishment and artificial dressing, and strives to pursue the true inner nature of each subject, so that the female stars that people see in Lindbergh's lens are not dazzling in the past, but their faces are tired, and their faces are even covered with wrinkles and stains, but it is this seemingly ordinary and realistic picture that implies a penetrating magic.
Perhaps it's because the best black-and-white commercial photographer on the planet knows that everyone's light actually comes from within.
——End——
This article was first published in the "Deceased" column of China Photography Magazine In the first issue of 2020, excerpted
Yuan Jie
Master of Photography at Beijing Film Academy, author of image culture
He is the author of "The Comedy of Light - Imagination about Photography" and "Come! Learn photography like this
In recent years, he has focused on popular photography education
He is now the founder of Eatfoto, an educational brand for photography