Avant-garde Fashion Photographer ‘Gus’ Peterson Spotlighted in New Exhibition
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In the pantheon of fashion photographers, the late Gösta Peterson remains largely unheralded — but that could be changing.
The first posthumous show of his imaginative, go-with-the-flow work debuts Thursday at Deborah Bell Photographs at 526 West 26th Street in Manhattan. “Gösta Peterson Photographs 1960s-1970s” brings into focus the Swedish American talent’s progressive elan. Peterson, who died at the age of 94 in 2017, prized his independence and elements of surprise, whereas the photography of his contemporaries Irving Penn and Richard Avedon was generally more studied. Bell compared the freelance-focused Peterson to the late sports photographer-turned-fashion photographer Martin Munkacsi, who was quick to capture not only motion but a spirited moment with a great eye for composition.
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“His talent is equal to those, who were better-known than he. It’s true that some people decide they want to live their lives differently and in how they work. Some of the photographers that are better-known like Avedon and Penn had contracts with fashion magazines,” Deborah Bell said. “He was just more independent in every way, and in spirit. Sometimes people make these lifestyle choices. Either they don’t want a full-time job or having people tell them what to do. Gus was very much like that.”
Without question, the stylish images stand the test of time. Unlike current digital photographers, who can correct their images, the self-taught Peterson had to figure things out himself and submerged himself into his darkroom to do so. Known simply as “Gus,” he was stimulated by challenges, not fearful of them, according to his wife Patricia. A former Henri Bendel executive and longtime fashion editor, she often worked shoulder-to-shoulder on location with him.
“I don’t want to sound so boastful but I am amazed how original and unorthodox his photos are, because they are very tasteful. There is nothing vulgar about them. They could run today and look just as fresh and elegant,” his wife said.
After attending the art school Anders Beckman Skola in his native Sweden, he served in the Swedish military and then embarked on a fashion illustrator job at the country’s first modern ad agency, Gumaelius Annonsbyrå. Top-drawer in his performances, Peterson was given a Rolleiflex camera as a farewell present before picking up stakes for New York in 1948. Interested in art and jazz, the trombone-playing Peterson arrived Stateside with a mission. “He went straight to The Met to look at the Rembrandts and then he went to Harlem after that to hear jazz,” his wife said. “There was always jazz in his studio.”
Improvisation also surfaced in his work with Harper’s Bazaar, Mademoiselle, Esquire and other magazines. In that pre-digital era, editorial assignments also had to be quick turns. His wife, the New York Times’ former fashion editor, recalled having only half an hour for Twiggy’s first U.S. shoot. “I only had one outfit and a hat. He created a composite. He was just able to solve things. He did things in a very original way in the studio and on the street.”
The creatively symbiotic couple also teamed up in the summer of 1967 for a New York Times magazine cover shoot with the then-relatively unknown Black model Naomi Sims — a first for the news outlet. During a fashion career from the ’50s through the ’80s, Peterson was pretty much assistant-less. Cycling to his assignments in an Abercrombie & Fitch safari jacket with a light meter in one pocket and film in the other, he preferred to go solo.
Not interested in working with models who were known faces “who did their one, two, three poses,” Peterson applied his dexterity Henri Bendel ad campaigns and Mademoiselle’s college issue, his wife said. “He wanted to be the director. And there was no digital. He built his own darkroom and the studio itself.”
Highly aware of his surroundings, Peterson once captured a trio of girls roller-skating in loose-fitting skirts on a handball court. “Young Sophisticates,” a group portrait of bespectacled boys in Boy Scout uniforms with two precocious girls, is faintly Wes Anderson-esque. Far-flung with his subjects, the photographer captured a solarized Rudi Gernreich look, Salvador Dalí, Duke Ellington and non-models too. At an editorial shoot at Marymount College with a model, who had been styled by then-fashion editor Deborah Turbeville (whom he later encouraged to pursue photographer),” all of a sudden, these nuns came out for one minute on this beautiful staircase, and he just snapped right then and there. It was very quick, just one shot,” said Peterson’s wife, who prefers “Pat.”
Pat first met Peterson at a party in West Hampton, New York, where he had been camping with fellow photographer Fernand Fonssagrives, whose wife Lisa was a Swedish model and artist. “I noticed him and thought, ‘That’s a strange thing. A man is watering the flowers.’ He was very much into nature — the Swedes particularly are.”
Another curiosity was the Volkswagen Beetle — a rarity in the U.S. at that time — in which Peterson drove her back to Manhattan. Bell described his great taste for clothes as similar to “a gentleman farmer dandy,” often wearing a hat and mid-length boots pedaling through the streets of New York. Losing steam standing over a drafting table all day as a Lord & Taylor fashion illustrator, Peterson started spending his spare time walking through the streets of New York taking photographs. That led to freelance work with fashion magazines and “taking models out of the usual context to make them seem so independent and free,” Bell said.
She first caught sight of Peterson’s work as a 10-year-old Minnesotan in issues of Mademoiselle and Harper’s Bazaar. Years later her intrigue was so strong that she ferreted out his address before relocating to New York in 1978 and wrote a postcard asking to meet him. True to his spontaneous way of working, he photographed Bell for the American edition of L’Officiel — “I’m definitely not model material.”
Friendly with Pat, and the couple’s Turn gallery owner daughter Annika and filmmaker son Jan, plans for an exhibition were shelved by the pandemic until they “could have a real ta-da,” Bell said. She also freelanced for Peterson for a bit, assisting on set and in the darkroom. “As Arthur Elgort once said, Gus worked very off-the-cuff. When I saw him work, it was all improvisatory. He had an idea for a set, and maybe a setting and a story in his head. For one of the Bendel’s campaigns, he put a swing in his studio against the seamless paper for the model to swing back and forth. It was all very take-it-as-it-comes within a framework that he had in mind.”
However bittersweet the new show is for Peterson’s daughter Annika, she said there couldn’t be a better person than Bell. Her stint as an assistant led to great trust and a decades-long friendship with the family. Her father’s streamlined low-key style created a small inner cycle. “Anyone, who was in the studio, was kind of a family member. When people were there, it was a matter of ‘This is what we’re going to do today. We’re going to eat a piece of salmon together,'” his daughter said.
That was a time when photographers were just doing jobs, not necessarily saving negatives. “This was a trade like a cobbler. It wasn’t thought of as, ‘Oh, that’s my precious art collection.’ That’s the irony. When Gus was making these things, I think it’s fair to say, a lot of them were more artistic than fashion photography now. They were just thought of then as a job. He just enjoyed what he did,” his daughter said.
Launch Gallery: Inside Avant-garde Fashion Photographer 'Gus' Peterson Spotlighted in New Exhibition
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