SEX AND VIOLENCE WERE THE TWO PRINCIPAL INGREDIENTS FOR GERMAN PHOTOGRAPHER CHRIS VON WANGENHEIM. THE MASTER OF GLAMOUR'S SHOCKS DEFINED THE 1970S BY SHOWING ITS TEETH
“For me, a good fashion photograph makes a promise it can never keep,” Chris von Wangenheim stated in 1980, at the height of his photography career. And, boy, did his images make some outrageous promises. During a period in the ’70s, when fashion photography was focusing on overtly sexual, and often violent, subject matter—a response to the Women’s Lib Movement, and, to a lesser degree, the rise of punk—von Wangenheim’s dangerously seductive photos stood out as some of the most decadent.
Shot in slick, low lighting and showered with designer goods, his images revealed a more sinister side of glamour. Take, for example, his work in the February 1977 issue of Vogue—a quite literal spread of a woman’s legs, her crotch covered by a ferocious hound sitting in front of her and bearing its fangs. “Does the picture say that women are sexual killers?” asked a Time magazine reporter that year, deeply concerned by the pervading misogyny in fashion photography. “Well,” joked von Wangenheim, whose boyish good looks and affable smile gave him instant appeal, “it works better that way.” As the model Donna Mitchell, who posed for him early in his career, tells it: “He had a wonderfully dry sense of humor. People were always taken aback.”
Born in Breslau, Germany, in 1942, the son of an aristocratic German officer, von Wangenheim first picked up a camera at age 11. His model? His mother, whom he styled, much to her dismay, in a leopard coat outside their mountain house in Bavaria. “The only reason it didn’t work,” he recalled in the 1980 art book Fashion:Theory, “was her sour face. And from that time on I realized that getting my picture was more important to me than the discomfort of someone not understanding or someone’s opposition to my goals.” Perhaps a better retort to Time’s salty questioning. Karin Nelson
TO READ THE FULL STORY, CHECK OUT V48,
ON NEWSSTANDS EVERYWHERE JULY 20, 2007
Photography Chris von Wangenheim
Courtesy Staley-Wise Gallery, NYC
