11.08.10
Fashion Photographer Vincent Peters
The cinematic, sexy and very distinctive work of Vincent Peters is iconic. Those unfamiliar with the man himself see his work and recognise it immediately.
Yet the man behind the lens, whose stunning black and whites portray film greats and models the world over in sumptuous poses that hark back to the days of old Hollywood, is somewhat allusive. Born in Germany and kicked out of school, he threw himself into the early 1990s New York scene with great energy, but to no avail. Unable to get work and down to his last cents, he moved back to Europe. Things changed and through ambition, drive, sheer faith and good luck, he is one of today’s greats with a future in film almost assured. As we chat, he talks of his move to the island of Ibiza, his friendship with Italian actress Monica Bellucci and how his distinctive images came about.
“I didn’t train at all,” he tells me. “I’m more the learning-by-doing kind of guy. I left Germany when I was 18 because I didn’t know what to do. My mother thought the best thing was for me to leave the country and start over, so I moved to New York and tried to be an assistant, but nobody wanted me.”
Despite not getting work as an assistant, Peters decided to leapfrog that stage and go straight into being a pro photographer. “I think within the context of my photography the word artistic is extremely pretentious. But obviously my ambition was just taking images. It wasn’t about being commissioned or being rich and famous.”
He describes New York in the early nineties as being a very product-driven market, so he moved back to Europe, to Paris, and became an ‘art photographer’, as he says. “It was pretty weird stuff andI like it when I look back. This was the pre-computer age and I started to work on a series of double exposures – I think today it looks not that interesting because now it would be easy to do on a computer but then I could make two arms grow into each other so the person had no hands.”
Peters is animated as he explains the lengthy and complicated process with which he created these images, aware that today such a thing could be done quickly, though not by him apparently. He describes himself as totally incapable with a computer and just about able to send an email, so it seems his foray into photography, before the evolution of computers, was timely. “It was very expressive but today it would be very simple. Back then it was very technical.”
Despite working for more than five years, he says: “I didn’t make a dime. I was dirt poor, couldn’t have a coffee, couldn’t see a movie, and at some point I knew it was going nowhere. Some friends told me that if I went to a model agency I could get paid for test shots. So I took some of my images to an agency and that’s how it started and look at me now!”
Those final words are said with a sense of surprise, as though Peters himself still can’t quite believe how well he has done. He is an extremely likable person, interesting and grateful for such success, though approachable and very down-to-earth with it. His accent is soft and still has a strong German undercurrent but hints at a life of great adventure and travel the world over.
Now his website contains recent images of Kylie Minogue, John Malkovich, Clive Owen, Matt Dillon, actor-director Ed Burns, Christian Bale, David Beckham, Maggie Gyllenhaal, Charlize Theron, actress and model Leighton Meister and even Angelina Jolie, who has only a very small group she will allow to photograph her. The images are all shot in Peters’s distinctive, cinematic, classic vintage Hollywood lightingand compositional style but with a very sexual contemporary edge.
He claims that he had a few clear moments of “career breakthrough”, the most significant of which seems almost unbelievable. Deciding to take a chance, he took a book he had produced to the office of leading agent Giovanni Testino, brother of celebrity photographer Mario Testino. At that time, he explains: “I had this girlfriend in New York so I was over there and I dropped my book off in his office and obviously they didn’t even look at it. So I was a little cocky and asked the girl at the door if we could go over my book together, I just wanted a comment.”
Apparently she wasn’t blown away. “She told me it wasn’t really commercial but suddenly the door opened and Giovanni Testino walked out and asked her if she knew Vincent Peters. And I was standing right there. So her attitude changed and she made me tea and suddenly I found myselfin Giovanni’s office and he told me he wantedto represent me.”
Apparently an art director friend of Peters had been on the phone to Testino moments earlier talking up Peters and his work. “It was right time, right place,” Peters muses. Whether it was fate or luck or something greater, he suddenly found himself in LA shooting a campaign for Miu Miu, Prada’s high-fashion line.
“I realised in that moment I was going to make money with this thing. To be honest I had no idea what I was doing, it was too early.” He credits his youth and raw passion for taking great shots in the early days of his career. “I remember being asked to shoot in front of white and I was, like, ‘I don’t do white backgrounds, I don’t do this commercial bullshit.’ The truth is, if you asked me today, I’d be, like, ‘you want white? Sure. You want off-white? Pale white? Platinum white?’”
He admits having mellowed: “I think my attitude was a lot rougher then. I would never fight with a client today. You gain a lot and you’re more calm and more sure of yourself but youlose the attitude [with age].”It is hard, while speaking to this placid, gentle-mannered man to imagine that he could be so defiant in his attitude to work but he compares his approach then to one’s differing approaches to relationships with women throughout life. “It’s like when you fight about relationships and you can’t believe you left a girl over something and you realise how difficult it is to maintain a relationship and how difficult it is to find somebody you get along with and how complicated the whole procedure is. But when you’re younger you’re passionate and raw, andit’s all or nothing.”
I find it interesting that Peters claims he wouldn’t insist on a certain vision for a client today, because I would imagine that he would be given free rein on the back of his success, or that he would be booked to create a certain look for clients. However, I’m wrong. “No. Nobody gives you carte blanche.” Although his agent complains sometimes that he is too specific, he realises that, more often than not, Peters is booked for a style that is all his own. “I don’t remember the last time I did a job that didn’t require passion. It sounds like I’m selling something but it’s true. I get booked for a very cinematic style and for a very particular girl and I’m interested in a mix of both.”
I’m interested in how Peters’s cinematic style developed and he explains in a reflective and thoughtful manner. “When I grew up in Germany we had three TV channels. The first TV channel on a Saturday night had one black-and-white movie on and it was usually old because the rights weren’t expensive. That was my visual education.” He believes seeing such images at that age had a huge impact on his creative style. “I think you feed yourself out of a particular aesthetic that grows on you very early. You don’t realise it but you will always be a child of that particular aesthetic that came to you when you were making your first decisions.”
Having written a few film scripts and continually worked with actors and actresses, he gets approached quite a lot to discuss and create films, something which seems to baffle him slightly. “I understand fashion peopleasking me to do something cinematic but I’m surprised by movie people asking me to do it.” However, his knowledge of film is extensive. “I really love Italian neo-realism. There is a movie, [Vittorio de Sica’s 1948] Bicycle Thieves, which somehow finds aspects in every picture I take. You somehow feed yourself from some reservoir from dead language and this is very present for me.” The link between Italian neo-realism in film and Peters’s work is unquestionable although he credits American films with “that incredible craft they have with lighting”. Lighting plays a key role for Peters, who explains with great gusto how images can vary so much depending on how they are lit. “I think it defines everything,” he says. “You look at the same house, the same tree, the same building in different light and it’s a different subject. Everything can change. A person can change, personality, character, sensuality, everything changes in a particular light.”
Although I ask him about lighting as a photographer he moves quickly back to the topic of film, the two being so clearly interlinked for him. “It’s frightening in a way how much manipulation you can have [with lighting]. What is nice about movies is that they transport you, not just with feelings and the story but the time, the age in which it’s set and who you saw it with. [A movie] colonises your subconscious in a way.”
He admits to finding places such as New York and LA as “ugly as hell” but notes that so many of us glorify them, purely because of how they have been lit and presented in films. He seems to think along parallel lines with film and photography, demonstrating how much of a role the two play in his life.
“This morning I sat down with a producer and they always offer you something and every producer has five projects in his pocket. I used to get really excited. Now I’m a little more, let’ssee if it’s really going to work out.” He describes himself as a rookie in film and finds himself always going back to photography. “I like photography, I really do.”
Just as Peters “learnt” his way in photography, today he is learning his way into films, although he admits to being less intimidated than he used to be and more ready to ask for help when he needs it. “I used to make a film like a film and now I actually start shooting a film more like a photograph and a photograph more like a film. Film is intimidating – I didn’t even use to know what a dolly grip was – but obviously you don’t want anyone to know that.”
He admits he may not have known what he was doing when he shot that first Miu Miu campaign and, today, he thinks a lack of knowledge in certain areas helps him with shooting film. “When I did my best pictures in photography, I didn’t know a lot about fashion photography. There is a rawness and somethinga bit naive I have when I do films that is also kind of fresh and today I appreciate it more.
“Be it film or photography, it’s not about the substance of the story or what you do, it’s the idea people take away from it and you have to be very clear about that.” Talking of film, I ask Peters about his friendship with Bellucci, evident in his book, Monica and Vincent. Their friendship started with Italian Vogue and then they worked together a great deal. Is she a muse? With a characteristic lack of arrogance, he tells me that he wouldn’t consider himself that privileged but her Italian background and his love of Italian and French subjects, coupled with their links to cinema, make their friendship a natural and striking one.
As Peters lives on Ibiza. we wrap up our chat sharing a mutual love of the Balearics. I forget, momentarily, that I am speaking with such an esteemed photographer, and his down-to-earth manner enforces this.
I have one final question. If he wasn’t a photographer what would he do? “Considering my educational options I’d probably be flipping burgers at McDonald’s or offering you an extra shot in your latte at Starbucks. When I was living in England after my first trip to New York it was now or never for my photography. I thought, if I don’t do this, what am I going to do?” Vincent Peters serving coffee? Impossible to imagine.
www.vincentpetersphotography.com
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