“She simply felt like the precise mannequin on the proper time for that. We weren’t attempting to show something,” recollects Patricia Peterson, the journal’s editor at the moment (and Gösta Peterson’s spouse, with whom he regularly collaborated). Certainly, Gösta, who was identified for his fast, usually improvisational type of images, was extra incentivized by the attract of a recent face than making historical past or notions of superstar. Earlier that 12 months, he was additionally the primary of his trade friends to {photograph} Twiggy in the USA. Once more, it was a matter of capturing photographs of the waifish Brit earlier than changing into disinterested by her inevitable ubiquity.
It’s hardly an overstatement to name Gösta Peterson one of the influential, but little-known, style photographers of his time. Regardless of his barrier-breaking work, Peterson, a self-taught lensman with a keenness for jazz and natty tweed fits from Savile Row, has remained a lesser-known determine within the pantheon of nice style photographers from that period: Richard Avedon and Irving Penn, for instance. Lots of his contemporaries, together with the photographer Arthur Elgort and the style stylist and entrepreneur Linda Rodin, each of whom labored as his assistants, attribute this astonishing omission to Peterson’s unyielding resistance towards household-name fashions—the Lauren Huttons and the Cheryl Tiegses of the modeling world. “It was the time of Avedon and Hiro, however Gus didn’t purchase into that. He didn’t shoot Vogue as a result of he didn’t need to work with their fashions,” says Rodin, whose personal visible memoir, forthcoming in early 2024, will characteristic a large choice of Peterson’s images.
