The choice of Peter Lindbergh for the 2014 Reporters Without Borders 100 Photos album may come as a surprise to some.
However, during a fascinating discussion organized by Peter Lindbergh at the Silencio in Paris, he revealed himself to be an avid consumer of the news, spending his nights on the internet, trying to understand the issues behind policy decisions, searching for truth, as he does in his photographs. Lindbergh, who was born in 1944 in a German region that became Polish again in 1945 and who grew up in the Rhineland, is by nature sensitive to accurate information and the movements that govern conflicts. He is also sensitive to propaganda and lies, which he says are, “created to manipulate everyone and everything, to weaken journalists. The result is that it’s become more difficult to hold those who govern us accountable.” He concludes by paying tribute to the freedom of the press and to the journalists tracking an elusive truth and putting themselves at risk, hence his involvement with Reporters Without Borders, which can also be explained by his generous personality.
Lindbergh became a photographer by accident, he says. “One of my friends needed an assistant,” he told Harper’s Bazaar in 2009. “I could just as easily have been a baker or a florist.”
The album, whose cover is the iconic picture of Kate Moss in overalls, features 100 of his beautiful portraits of women, actresses and models laid bare: from Isabelle Huppert, Charlotte Gainsbourg, Charlotte Rampling, Nastassja Kinski and Naomi Campbell to Géraldine Chaplin, Isabella Rossellini, Laetitia Casta and many more.
It is supplemented by essays on Lindbergh, a tribute by Anne Nivat to the photographer Camille Lepage, who was killed earlier this year in the Central African Republic, new articles on the status of freedom of the press in different countries, and portraits of people fighting to preserve it in dangerous areas.
BOOK
100 Photos pour la liberté de la presse de Peter Lindbergh
Reporters Sans Frontières
148 pages
9,90 €
