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Remembering Gian Paolo Barbieri
20 December 2024
After a long illness, the Italian fashion photographer Gian Paolo Barbieri has died at the age of 89.
Born in Milan to a family of textile wholesalers, he acquired his skills as a photographer in his father's warehouse.
Attracted to the theatre and cinema, his ambition was to be an actor. In his teens, he made costumes and sets with his friends as they experimented with lighting setups to copy their favorite films, among which were Sunset Boulevard and Tobacco Road.
He moved to Rome hoping to get into the film industry. To make a living, though, he took photos of the starlets from the Cinecittà film studio, developing the film himself in his boarding house. While he ultimately pursued photography instead of acting, it was his first great interest, particularly film noir and the dreamlike vision of Fellini, that influenced his work.
After moving to Paris in 1960, he worked as an assistant for Tom Kublin, the Harper's Bazaar photographer. In 1962 he opened his first studio in Milan, where he started working in fashion taking pictures of sample collections and publishing photographic essays in Novità, the magazine that would become Vogue Italia in 1965.
In the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s, Barbieri’s commercial campaigns illustrated the leading fashion brands: Walter Albini, Gianni Versace, Valentino, Giorgio Armani, Gianfranco Ferré, Yves Saint Laurent, and Vivienne Westwood in publications like Vogue Italia, Vogue America, Vogue Paris, Vanity Fair and GQ.
The 1990s found Barbieri on many trips that, joined with his curiosity about faraway places and ethnic groups, about nature and the most disparate of objects, he pursued his inspirations. Later they breathed life into photography books that reflected his impeccable taste.
The recipient of the 2018 Lucie Award for Achievement in Fashion, his works have been exhibited at the Palazzo Reale in Milan, MAMM in Moscow, Erarta Museum of Contemporary Art in Saint Petersburg, and at Shanghai Museum, among others. His works can also be found in the collections of the Victoria & Albert Museum and the National Portrait Gallery of London, Kunstforum of Vienna, Musée du Quai Branly of Paris.
In 2017 Barbieri established his own foundation, whose mission is to preserve, safeguard, protect, acquire, archive, catalogue, authenticate, and promote the archive and the works of its founder, for the purpose of spreading photographic culture in Italy and the rest of the world.
He did finally make it into the movies when a docudrama about his life was released in 2022. Directed by Emiliano Scatarzi and based on a script by Federica Masin and Emiliano Scatarzi, Gian Paolo Barbieri, l’uomo e la bellezza (Gian Paolo Barbieri, the man and beauty) traces over the artist's life and opens a window onto the world he witnessed.