Quotes from Peter Lindbergh

I go out very rarely in Paris. If it's a fashion party at a nightclub, I wouldn't dream to go. People come to you for your work, not because you go to all their parties.

In 1990, when they asked me to shoot a cover for 'British Vogue' to convey my personal vision of a woman, I explained that I couldn't just photograph one single girl, because what I was looking for was a new purpose, and new feminine determination.

I would love to photograph Angelina Jolie.

When I start thinking about a story, I don't start by thinking about the fashion, but about who I want to photograph and what the story should be about.

People often say, 'You don't go to fashion shows? What kind of photographer are you? What the hell is the wrong with you, man?' But that's what I need in order to be who I am.

You know, as photographers, we do pictures, and people either like them or they hate them.

Fashion photographers are the new painters.

These days, photographers have expensive contracts with actresses, but then the actresses have to have their names written in the column because nobody recognizes them. That's kind of strange.

The idea of beauty today is a bloody mess. It's really awful. You look in the fashion magazines and see all of these retouched people. Some guys called retouchers go on the computer and take away everything that you are and then call it photography. I think it's such an insult.

Photography gives you the opportunity to use your sensibility and everything you are to say something about and be part of the world around you. In this way, you might discover who you are, and with a little luck, you might discover something much larger than yourself.

The most important part of fashion photography, for me, is not the models; it's not the clothes. It's that you are responsible for defining what a woman today is. That, I think, is my job.

With the indiscriminate touching-up of photos, we've grown accustomed to seeing personalities drained of all their humanity, yet we consider them as real.

I have not taken inspiration from the fashion shows. I don't even really go to too many of the fashion shows - and have not for 15 years - because I don't want to be inspired by the same things as everyone else. If everyone is inspired by the same things, then of course, you all do the same pictures.

My first obsession was actually sports. I was a very good handball goalkeeper. With special permission, I played in the premier league in Germany before I was even old enough.

I wouldn't have lasted two minutes as a designer.

Although humans see reality in colour, for me, black and white has always been connected to the image's deeper truth, to its most hidden meaning.

To go somewhere where nobody knows you, and to keep your eyes open... That was a beautiful concept in terms of putting yourself in a place to be inspired.

If you're just a follower, you never know why you are doing something. Then you can't know if something is good or not. How would you know that what you thought is right, if you didn't think it?

Women must be freed from the idea that they always have to stay young and that they must disfigure themselves at a certain age.

You can only really invent something if you connect yourself to the real world - whatever that means.

When I started, art photography, like that of Andreas Gursky, and Thomas Struth, didn't exist.

You cannot say that one woman is 'more beautiful' than another, though people always do. It's so ridiculous to say that.

I was never so attracted to the glamorous world. That never impressed me.

A lot of mainstream photographers seem not to think about what they're doing or feel any responsibility toward anything. By the time they're done, the models don't have any trace of themselves left. This thing about looking young with no wrinkles or expression is all so boring, really.