Icons and designers

Ellen Von Unwerth and the Untamed Glamour of Fashion Photography

“Creativity is thinking up new things. Innovation is doing new things”.
Theodore Levitt

Fashion photography, like calligraphy (see Letters, Lines and Limitless Creativity: The World of Nicolas Ouchenir here), is an art form adjacent to the world of fashion designers, shows and models. One of the most legendary fashion photographers is Ellen Von Unwerth. Her innovative perspective and philosophy reinvented fashion photography as an art form. We often know the names and follow the lives of the models in front of the camera, but how much do we know about the person behind the lens – even one as famous as Ellen Von Unwerth? When offered the opportunity to meet and work with this renowned photographer, I immediately accepted.

Ellen’s beginning certainly did not support any notions of her future success and accomplishments. As an orphan she was brought up in the Bavarian foster care system (she was born in Frankfurt, Germany in 1954). However, these circumstances certainly did not suppress her natural inventive, creative and exuberant personality. She joined the circus as a magician’s assistant and a sometimes teenage performer. One need look no further to explain her sense of fun, the inane and the dramatic! A photographer suggested she could be a model, so, at age twenty, off she went to Paris to give it a try. She did indeed have a career as a model – and disliked it. She objected to the boring, stiff poses, the insistence on perfection, the lighting and lack of control. When a camera was presented to her as a gift, she found she much preferred to be behind the camera. She began to experiment with her own ideas of what photography could be. She captured real people expressing themselves in moments of natural movement. Her work built a following and in late 1989 she was asked to create a short series of images for Guess? jeans using the then unknown Claudia Schiffer as her model. What Ellen produced was unlike anything seen before in fashion photography: a black and white picture of Claudia in a bra and jeans (only the waistband visible) reading a cookbook. It instantly captured the imagination of the fashion world and the public.

From soft, sexy, glamourous to frivolous and playful.

Ellen’s approach was revolutionary. In her photographic philosophy, the model must be expressive, move naturally, comfortably, suggest a story. As a photographer, she is compelled to draw out the hidden personalities, reveal the feminine in all its shades and manifestations. Ellen plays ringmaster and magician to her subjects. She collaborates on the clothing, the settings, creates a storyline complete with music to set the mood and then pulls out the hidden-in-plain-sight alter egos of her subjects. She and her team are tight and professional but know how to create an easy, freewheeling, comfortable environment in which to act, move, improvise and to take risk. For Ellen taking risk is equal to freedom and the adventure of self discovery. Her approach produces a provocative, mysterious, surprising fantasy for both the subject of her camera and the viewer.

Ellen Von Unwerth catches some of the moods of Mona: joyful, serious and defiant.

Ellen’s joy and enthusiasm is infectious. She whirls in bursting with energy and ideas. She is able to quickly scope out settings, angles and vignettes to suggest a narrative for the viewer to imagine. Her style is glamorous, dramatic, catching her subject in the act of self revelation and highlighting the moment with extraordinary lighting. Ellen’s finished photos are pure, polished perfection but not in a static, stodgy manner. It is this slick perfection that reveals something about the subject. Her camera catches the fleeting expressions her staging elicits — sly, coy, flirty, come hither, innocent, playful, dangerous, challenging, knowing, surprised, in short, she captures the gamut of female expressions, moods, sexuality and sensuousness. There is a pin-up quality to her work that captures attention; provocative and revealing but not exploitative. She uses clothing, hair and makeup to expose the hidden makeup of the subject’s personality.

Her style quickly had her in demand for more then clothing (Chanel, Dior, Miu Miu, Diesel, Ferragamo, Jimmy Choo are but a very few example). She has worked for every high end brand across genres: Mercedes Benz and Aston Martin, Baccarat, Rolex, Absolut and Veuve Cliquot (again an extremely abbreviated list). She has created short films, music covers and videos, magazine covers for every notable fashion publication and has published a series of her own books and published her own magazine, VON. Her imagination and creativity fuels her drive and energy, expresses and expands the facets of her subjects personalities, shows the world the broad range of human expression and enlightens the viewer and viewed alike.

Her innovative style and the risks she takes along with the risks she encourages her subjects to take were rewarded in 1991 with taking first prize at the International Festival of Fashion Photography, the prestigious LUCIE award in 2019, the 2020 Editorial, Advertising and Fashion Photography award given by the Royal Photographic Society (UK), the Iconic Photographer Influencer Award in 2021. Additionally, her work is exhibited in galleries worldwide. Ellen Von Unwerth demonstrates the power of creativity and innovation important in every woman’s Purely Personal life.