Peter Lindbergh (Leszno, 1944 – 2019) was a German fashion photographer who brought a narrative and largely black-and-white approach to high fashion. Born Peter Brodbeck in occupied Poland, he grew up in Duisburg, in western Germany, and moved through window dressing, painting and advertising before devoting himself fully to fashion imagery.
After school he worked as a window dresser for the Karstadt and Horten department store chains. He then travelled through Switzerland, Berlin, Arles, Spain and Morocco, partly retracing the steps of Vincent van Gogh. He studied painting at the Krefeld art academy, where he held his first exhibition in 1969 at the Denise René-Hans Mayer gallery. Conceptual art shaped the final stage of his training, and in 1971 he turned to photography, first as an assistant to Hans Lux in Düsseldorf and then as an independent advertising photographer.
In 1978 he moved to Paris to focus on haute couture. He worked with models such as Christy Turlington, Naomi Campbell, Linda Evangelista and Cindy Crawford, and with designers including Karl Lagerfeld and Giorgio Armani. His photographs appeared in Stern, Harper's Bazaar and Vogue. He preferred minimal make-up and simple hairstyles, and he is associated with the rise of the supermodel in the 1990s. In the early part of that decade he began telling stories through his images; his 1990 Martian-themed shoot with Helena Christensen for Vogue Italia is considered the beginning of narrative fashion photography.
His work was shown in many museums, from the Victoria and Albert Museum in London in 1985 to the Metropolitan Museum of Art in 2009, and in 2002 he became the first photographer whose images were shown at the Pushkin Museum in Moscow. He also made films, including the documentary Models - The Film (1991) and Everywhere at Once (2008), made with Jeanne Moreau. His legacy lies in giving fashion photography a narrative and contemplative dimension and in influencing later generations of photographers. He married for a second time and had four children.