For just a few years, tragically cut short by his death in a car accident in 1981, Chris von Wangenheim was riding high as a fashion, editorial, and advertising photographer. His hard, sexy, decadent images survive among the most exemplary illustrations of the high-glamour look of the 1970s. Von Wangenheim found his form early in the decade. His sensibility precisely matched the new fashion trends, whose most distinguished photographic exponents were Helmut Newton and Guy Bourdin. Born the son of an aristocratic German officer in Berlin in 1942, von Wangenheim infused his work with the strong influence of his German roots. His pictures, like those of his hero and mentor—and fellow Berliner—Newton, carry echoes of the decadent aspects of Weimar Berlin. There are references to German Expressionist cinema in his use of low lights that cast dramatic shadows, and there is a cool, even cruel edge to his scenarios that hints at an element of cultural and personal trauma.
Von Wangenheim’s father was a champion steeplechaser who won a gold medal in the 1936 Berlin Olympics, struggling to the finish after breaking his collarbone in a fall. His feat is depicted in Leni Riefenstahl’s famed documentary film of the Games. Lieutenant von Wangenheim was captured in 1944 on the Russian front and committed suicide, still a prisoner, in 1953. Chris von Wangenheim did not know his father, but the circumstances of the father’s life surely marked the son’s creative spirit. A feature for the June 1975 issue of Italian Vogue casts the models as Olympic athletes. On other occasions horses were brought into the studio for a number of archetypal von Wangenheim images—arguably as surrogates for the absent male figure in his life. He described one image as “a symbolic family portrait.” A cold sexism, often with a sadistic edge, defines von Wangenheim’s preference in depicting women. All these elements come together in a 1975 Italian Vogue “Pelle” supplement cover in which the sleek, groomed model, described as an “intrepid rodeo amazon,” wears a leather-and-metal horse’s bridle by Hermès.
Von Wangenheim was drawn to photography from an early age, but he chose to study architecture. Following his first passion, however, he went to New York in 1965 to learn photography as an assistant. By 1968 he had set up his own studio and had started to work for Harper’s Bazaar. From 1969 he was also making pictures for Vogue, first the Italian edition, then, from 1972, the American. He was a good-looking man, ambitious, with energy and charm, and was soon in regular demand in New York and Europe for fashion and advertising work. Von Wangenheim created strong and memorable images, often with disconcerting ingredients: One for Vogue featured an elegant foot in a high-heeled shoe kicking in a television screen; another, for Dior, showed a model with her arm locked in the jaws of a savage-looking dog.
In 1970s New York he became closely enmeshed in a self-indulgent, hedonistic scene that gravitated around the parallel pursuits of style and thrills—the starstruck world of Studio 54 and Andy Warhol’s Interview. In the winter of 1975–76, the Rizzoli Gallery staged an exhibition titled “Fashion as Fantasy,” which caught the emerging characteristics of this glamour-obsessed moment, and it was inevitable that von Wangenheim should take part, alongside artists as diverse as Richard Bernstein, Jim Dine, Rudi Gernreich, David Hockney, Karl Lagerfeld, Robert Motherwell, and the ubiquitous Warhol. Von Wangenheim photographed key icons in this milieu. He made dramatic portraits of such beauties and divas as Bianca Jagger, Grace Jones, and Diana Ross for Interview, and a striking cover and set of pictures of Raquel Welch for the December 1979 Playboy. As the magazine explained, “His photos show the dangerous side of beauty.” The 1978 film Eyes of Laura Mars, a sinister New York story of fashion photography and murder, drew ideas from the work of a number of photographers, von Wangenheim foremost among them.
Von Wangenheim brought his personal history, his passion, and his fixations to his work as a fashion, advertising, and portrait photographer. He succeeded in constructing an illusory yet distinctive and persuasive world of brittle, dangerously seductive glamour. “A good fashion photograph,” he wrote in 1980, “makes a promise it can never keep.”
Thank you La bordelique 
