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Best of ... Horst Diekgerdes -One of the Most Eccentric Visual Creators of the Past Two Decades

Not many fashion photographers get to see their pictures become part of the pop-cultural mainstream. The cover the German photographer Horst Diekgerdes created for the Britpop band Pulp´s album This Is Hardcore was that rare stroke of genius: under the guidance of the legendary art director Peter Saville, Diekgerdes captured a young woman -she might well be a porn star-in a sexually explicit pose. The album became a smash hit. Diekgerdes has been working in the scene since the 1980s, also creating pictures for the world´s coolest fashion magazines, led by AnOther Magazine, as well as numerous fashion brands including Sonia Rykiel and Chloé. His technical proficiency is widely regarded as second to no one´s. Arranging the lighting, discussing image definitions and focal lengths, selecting locations, choosing models-he leaves nothing to chance and is not above perfecting a model´s hairstyle and makeup. After many years in Paris, the fashion capital, where he regularly attends fashion shows, Diekgerdes is now based in Zurich but travels the world for work. His pictures have been on view at the Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston, the Fotomuseum Winterthur, and the Deichtorhallen in Hamburg. Publications including Purple, the British, Chinese, and Japanese editions of Vogue, Numéro, AnOther, GQ Style, and Dazed & Confused are among Diekgerdes´s regular clients. He also created pictures for advertising campaigns by Sonia Rykiel, Louis Vuitton, Lacoste Polo, MiuMiu, Chloé, Joop, Kenzo, Levi´s, Thomas Burberry, Rochas, Hermès, and Victoria Beckham. His first monograph is a celebration of life, fashion, and photography in the form of a photographic journey from the mid-1990s to the present combining fashion photographs with pictures from his personal diaries, observations of everyday life, and previously unpublished works. Jefferson Hack, Anastasia Barbieri, Véronique Leroy, Jina Khajjer, and Jean-Pierre Blanc contributed essays.

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