Last week was LA, yesterday was London and tomorrow is New York, but right now Ellen von Unwerth has a moment to speak, and sits slumped in a red 1950s armchair, long legs sprawling out across the parquet floor of her Paris office. Beside her feet are white cardboard boxes with black felt-tip markings that say things like "George Michael St Tropez Sept 99", "Interview Sheryl Crow" and "Vogue Germany Diamond Tiaras".
She's wearing black cords, Reebok trainers and a beige fake-fur cardigan thingy. Her off-white peroxide curls shoot out of dark roots, the blonde frizz giving her a slightly madcap look. Her frame is still girlishly thin, and her conversation is enhanced by her long white hands which flap around like demented puppets. When she laughs (often, and very loudly) you notice the large, goofy teeth which, back in her modelling days, framed by lipstick and shot by Helmut Newton or Oliviero Toscani, metamorphosed into a dazzling smile. And when she stops laughing the overbite gives her a subtle but permanent pout; on little details like this, successful modelling careers are made or broken.
In Von Unwerth's case, most definitely made. German-born, she posed for the world's greatest photographers in the most exotic locations, made a packet and worked continuously for a decade. And then, with infuriating ease, she picked up a camera, started taking snaps of the other girls on shoots, and became one of the top fashion photographers. On the way, she and her French partner Christian, a DJ and radio programmer who also acts as her business manager, had a daughter and moved to New York. But the family soon returned to France where they now split their time between a large apartment in Paris's 15th arrondissement and their country house in Normandy.
You almost certainly know her work, even if you've never consciously studied it. Most recently you would have seen the sly and subversive "Africa- print" campaign for Diesel, featuring only black models loafing around in jeans, jewellery and halter-neck tops, and overprinted with faux African newspaper headlines such as "Africa Agrees to Financial Aid to America".
Over the years you will have seen her sexy, playful images in US, Italian and British Vogue, Vanity Fair, Interview, The Face, L'Uomo Vogue, Dazed & Confused and i-D, and just about any other major fashion magazine you can name. Her advertising campaigns include Guess Jeans, Diesel, Chanel, Katharine Hamnett, Miu Miu, Bluemarine and Adidas. Older male readers may even remember seeing a young Carrie Otis and Claudia Schiffer in the Guess campaign of the late 1980s - both shot, of course, by Von Unwerth.
But wait, we're getting ahead of ourselves. We haven't even talked about the circus yet! As if her life didn't already read like a teen girl's fantasy, at the age of 18 Von Unwerth saw the Circus Roncalli in Munich, fell in love with the ringmaster, and joined the troupe. It was a "very poetic" and arty type of circus, created by a bunch of Austrian singers and poets. "As soon as I saw it, I said, `I have to join!' It was so romantic." Her duties included assisting the clown and handing the blades to the knife-thrower. It was while working in this circus by night and studying by day that she was spotted - aren't they all? - walking along the street, minding her own business. She'd just come out of college when a photographer rushed up and said... well, you get the picture. And, of course, until then she'd never dreamed of becoming a model, right?
"Actually, I was already thinking about it that time, dreaming about it," she says with refreshing honesty. "People had started to say I should go into modelling. But I didn't expect anything. It was Bavaria, and when you're skinny in Bavaria, well, that's not beautiful. In Bavaria they like the girls to be..." Her hands cup a pair of large invisible breasts, "...you know, quite round, big ladies." Her laugh goes off like a firecracker.
But in Paris they like their girls slim and leggy. So Von Unwerth, born in Frankfurt, moved to the French capital, where she signed for the Elite agency, which in those days lived up to its name. It was 1974. She was 20.
"I wasn't one of those young ones like they have now. They're too young these days. I sometimes think they should be playing. They should be with their friends, having fun. Not in that harsh environment."
Aha! So, as a photographer and the mother of a 12-year-old girl, she would agree some of the girls we see in magazines today, girls in their mid-teens, are too young to be sexy?
"No, a girl can be sexy when she's 14."
But surely we shouldn't be looking at girls and saying they're sexy when they're so young?
"You shouldn't say it to them, but they can be. Often they are. That's natural, they see that everywhere. They want to see what other girls look like, they want to be sexy a little bit, like the girls in the videos and the magazines."
But is that natural?
"Well, I think girls grow up much faster now, but I think it's natural. But I wouldn't want my daughter to be a model... I don't think it's a very fulfilling job. I think it's not creative. I was doing it for 10 years and I wasn't very happy with the way that people judge you just for your outside, the surface. It's kind of... a bit of a waste of time. It can be fun, too. But, basically, I'd rather she does something that is more creative."
"I think she could. But she grew up with it, so she's not really interested at all. Because her mother was a model, and for a while I was doing lots of pictures at home so there were always models coming to the house, so modelling is a very normal everyday thing for her, she doesn't find the idea exciting. Actually she's a little bit against it. When she sees models on TV she says, `Oh, you know, modelling is really a stupid profession, isn't it?'"
How do you feel, I ask, when she says that?
"Well, I have to agree a little bit you know. I love fashion, but seen from the outside there is something a little bit ridiculous about it when you see the girls going down the runway," she says brightly, not at all phased, "looking like soldiers. And you know, they have to do that silly walk..."
She didn't have to walk like that in her modelling days, she says, because it was a different era and modelling was more relaxed. "I was dancing up and down the runway. It was more fun then, the whole thing was less mediatisee. The supermodel thing made it very serious. But actually, now the supermodel thing is almost finished again. Apart from Kate Moss, who else is so famous and still working on the runway? I mean, someone who really touches the public in the same way, like Claudia and Linda did?"
One of Von Unwerth's great talents is her ability to spot a future star. In 1992 she made a short film called Inferno! which featured a largely unknown Kate Moss. Either side of that, she brought Claudia Schiffer and then Eva Herzigova to public attention almost single- handedly. Most recently she was the first to find Natalia Vodianova, the top girl right now, and the first to do a really big campaign with her. How does she pull it off? It's always accidental, she says, there's no systematic search. "Something always pushes us together. With Claudia Schiffer some magazine called me and asked me shoot her. I wasn't so excited about her. But when I looked at the pictures - wow, she looked like Brigitte Bardot! Yeah! And then we did a session to push that look, and people went crazy about her. But I didn't expect that."
Another of her gifts is the way she can get pretty girls to open their legs for the camera and appear blissfully unselfconscious while doing it. They're usually wearing underwear, so the pictures could hardly be described as obscene or pornographic, though some are undoubtedly provocative and, sometimes, unsettling. Generally, though, it's all good clean fun, a sanitised hedonism with lots of black stockings, high heels and lacy panties, lashings of champagne, masks and other elements of erotic fancy dress, and the occasional swish of a riding crop to keep the senses keen, the flesh alert. All of this is often played out amid the faded grandeur of hotels or chateaux or Parisian boudoirs, on sweeping lawns or in vintage limousines.
This is certainly the case with Revenge, her latest photo book, with images revolving around a camp tale of feisty but naive young lovelies falling into the clutches of a sadistic baroness, who makes them do vile things like clean out the stables wearing only their undies. The text, based on an idea of Von Unwerth's, but written by novelist Harland Miller, borders on the farcical: "Extract from the secret journal of Emily: it has all been a horrid trick, our invitation here was one into slavery. The beastly chauffeur whose attentions I can't believe I encouraged, smirked as the Baroness ripped off our clothes. Now we are forced to work in shameful underwear and very high heels that make a dash for the road impossible. Also the locals are all in-breds and to throw oneself on their mercy wearing only frou-frou bra and panties is to invite disaster. One would rather stay here and be whipped!"
Less assured hands would make a pig's ear of this silk purse, but what elevates Von Unwerth's photos above tasteful smut is the sense of playfulness in her work; her models look at ease with themselves, relaxed. This loose, unstructured, yet very intimate approach is seductively easy on the eye (and the conscience, for that matter), and devoid of the grasping, possessive quality found in so many of her male contemporaries - who often photograph women with a butterfly collector's eye, as if pinning exotic specimens to a board.
"Yeah, I know what you mean, I see those pictures all the time. I don't know, maybe they don't enjoy their work," she says, flashing that smile again. "I enjoy photographing people. I try to make them feel comfortable and relaxed. It works - most of the time."
Her favourite working method, she says, is to invent a loose storyline and work fluidly, using the standard fashion photographer's equipment: a Mamiya, Contax or Nikon M6. She prefers black and white because of its "magical" properties, finding it more "emotional" and "dreamy". Her trademark blurriness is often a happy accident.
"My pictures are quite instant, I don't have people posing, I try to capture something," she says, snapping her long fingers loudly. "So you have to feel it, anticipate it, know when something's going to happen. That's why I like girls who move, who come up with things, who play and enjoy themselves and have fun, not just sitting there thinking, `Oh, I'm so pretty.' I want to be surprised, I want to follow something, some energy or emotion. When it's too static I get bored in a matter of seconds. It's like, OK, I got it. Now what?"
Often, she says, a special picture will present itself in the last few seconds, when the day's work is officially over. "At the end of the session the models relax and it's often then you get the best shot. You have to wait until they let their guard down." And when your life story reads like Von Unwerth's, you can probably rest assured that something magical will happen, sooner or later.
The Independent on Sunday
Dec 8, 2002
by Alix Sharkey
http://findarticles.com
