Powerful and fragile, straightforward and playful, emancipated and sensual – Peter Lindbergh's photographs are far more than artistic, coolly remote fashion photographs. His melancholy, unembellished photographs of mostly female models reveal, behind the artificial styling and makeup, an intimate glimpse of their inner essence. With subjects including Sharon Stone, Madonna, Linda Evangelista, Tatjana Patitz, Naomi Campbell, Jeanne Moreau, Penélope Cruz, Catherine Deneuve, and Uma Thurman, Lindbergh employs sensitivity and a reduction to the essential to find the individual behind the star cult and to present her in all her strength and fragility.

Naturalism is Peter Lindbergh’s maxim. He breaks with the perfect artificiality of the theatrically exaggerated, ostentatiously bored model pose, and in so doing injects new dynamism into fashion photography. Even when his photographs are carefully staged, they often look like casual snapshots or documentary photos, with a dismal, almost surreal atmosphere and purist aesthetic.