Gian Paolo Barbieri: Tahiti Photogrpahs, Silver Gelatin Prints
Born in Milan, Italy, in 1938, Gian Paolo Barbieri is a self-taught fashion photographer, whose professional career started with a short apprenticeship to Harper’s Bazaar photographer Tom Kublin. In 1963, Barbieri had some images published in the Italian fashion magazine Novità, which later became Vogue Italia in 1965.
As fashion photography had not been fully created in the 1960s, Barbieri had the unique opportunity to create a new style, with its makeup, hairstyles, and jewelry. After opening his own Milan studio in 1964, working both in Milan and Paris, he began to develop creative relationships with fashion designer Walter Albini and Valentino Garavani, who with Barbieri was responsible for innovating modern fashion advertising campaigns. In 1965, Barbieri shot his first cover for Italian Vogue.
An analog photographer who does not retouch his images, Gian Barbieri became a travel photographer in the 1990s. When Vogue magazine sent him to Tahiti for a photographic reportage, he found more than just an exotic island. Like other children who sailed the South Seas through film and books by Melville and James Cook, he saw a dream-like unknown world. Barbieri’s photographs of the Polynesia culture, focusing on their tattoos, became a record of the unspoken language left on the skin of the Tahitian people. These images were collected and published in the photographic hard-cover art book “Tahiti Tattoos”, by Taschen Press in 1998.
Gina Paolo Barbieri was awarded in 1968 the Biancmano Prize as Best Italian Photographer. He was named one of the fourteen best international fashion photographers by the German magazine Stern in 1978.
“An analog photographer who does not retouch his images,”—–quite impressive to me.