Flex Mentallo

On a photo shoot in Africa, she covered her skin with black shoe polish to create a startling—but not realistic—native look.

Lehndorff, did her first body painting for a 1966 Vogue layout that showed her splashed with a leopard’s spots. “I always thought it was a little boring to just be the shape of a human,” she says, “so I started to transform myself into different things.”

The make-over worked. She instantly impressed Diana Vreeland, then editor-in-chief of Vogue. “She was charming and had a great presence,” Vreeland recalls. “Her looks, of course, were superb.” Lehndorff’s poses were stark and dramatic; her assignments were sometimes odd. She once rode in a limo to Japan’s remote Snow Country to pose in silver fox and honey lynx next to a sumo wrestler. “I walked in a special way, very slow motion, like I was an animal,” she says. “Fashion isn’t about being beautiful. It’s about never being forgotten once a photographer has seen you.”

During her late teens Lehndorff studied art for three years in Hamburg, then in Florence, where she was stopped on the street by a fashion photographer who asked her to model. In 1963, after only a few assignments, she decided to try the big time in New York. Unable to get a job, she returned to Europe briefly, then hit New York again, this time with the name Veruschka and a more striking wardrobe of leotards, miniskirts and high boots. “I invented a whole story about this person Veruschka who comes from Russia,” she says. “Veruschka in Russian ironically means ‘little Vera.’ ”

The hardships of Vera’s teen years were heightened when she reached her current 6′ at 14. “I was quite ugly,” she says. “I fell all the time because I had no control over my body.” Her passion for mimicry developed around that time. “My mother would see me going into the woods and embracing the trees. I thought if I held one very strongly I would merge into it.”

The second of four daughters born to Count Heinrich von Lehndorff, Vera spent her early years at the family castle near what is now Kaliningrad, U.S.S.R. During World War II, when the region was part of East Prussia, the Count became a German army reserve officer. So horrified was he by Nazi atrocities that he helped stage the July 20, 1944 plot to assassinate Hitler at the Wolf’s Lair. He was arrested the day after the conspirators’ bomb fails to kill the Führer. “I have done this because I consider Hitler to be a murderer,” Von Lehndorff told the court at his trial. He was convicted and hanged. Vera and her sisters were separated from their mother and taken to a labor camp. “You will change your names and Hitler will educate you and you will never see your mother again,” the girls were told. Vera was five, her eldest sister seven. The story has been dramatized in [yet another] Tom Cruise vehicle, 'Valkyrie'.

The part was only a cameo, lasting no more than five minutes, but it made her a superstar.

When the director Antonioni came to London in 1965 to film Blow-Up, the fashion movie that defined the decade, he cast Veruschka as the model who cavorts in front of the lens of the ­character based on David Bailey. Here I am. That was the only line she uttered.

She was the first superstar model of the Sixties. Her six-foot frame, with its improbably long limbs, was revolutionary, ­following as it did the more womanly shapes of the models that came before her.

It’s no exaggeration to say that Veruschka changed ­fashion for good.

Vogue heralded her as “one of the great wonders of our time” and ran her on its cover 11 times.

She was “the most beautiful woman in the world,” according to fashion photographer Richard Avedon.

Chamelion

After being largely forgotten for decades, he became extremely fashionable, and expensive, from the 1970s and good works now fetch prices into the millions of dollars or pounds at auction.

Unlike many other Orientalist painters who took a salacious interest in the women of the Middle East, he "never painted a nude", and his wife modelled for several of his harem scenes.

His very careful and loving representation of Islamic architecture, furnishings, screens, and costumes set new standards of realism, which influenced other artists, including Jean-Léon Gérôme in his later works.

He lived for several years in a traditional mansion in Cairo, and after his return to England in 1851 he specialized in highly detailed works showing both realistic genre scenes of Middle Eastern life and more idealized scenes in upper class Egyptian interiors with little apparent Western influence.

Lewis lived in Cairo for 10 years, and "went native" in adopting Egyptian dress.

But something else is transmitted from his surfaces: empathy.

At the simplest level, the world he shows is a happy one, filled with sunlight, people, animals, flowers, food.

"Lewis's truth, expressed in colour and brushstrokes, was a truth about the spirit of the place." Ahdaf Soueif

Of all the British artists who went east in the 19th century only Lewis looked beyond colonial stereotypes to capture its true spirit.

Knowing this, I am even more fascinated by these pictures, and I can also identify with the adventurous spirit of those artists who set out to make their reputations in distant lands. Along with Roberts, the artist who for me stands out with integrity is John Frederick Lewis.

As with the luxurious coffee table books like the one of The Omo People, once one understands the context, (in the case of the Omo that they themselves are faking a cultural identity for the sake of the tourist dollar) one sees them very differently. So is it the same image? The evolution of ideologies is often initially embedded in the language,and above all art is language, and so are photography,advertising, and all forms of media; and over time this language continues to ripple through the fabric of society by taking over the culture, economy and political sphere. Wittgenstein argued that thought and language are so intricately intertwined that they are impossible to separate. So we now see Twitter weaponised. So when one looks at the exotic and romanticized pictures of the Orientalists, one cannot merely set aside the history that came after, and that casts a shadow into the present. It is easy to demonstrate that oriental subjects gave artists a perfect excuse to portray the naked slave, less obvious that this voyeurism is true of every oriental image and represents another sort of enslavement. As Jean Genet remarked, the mask of the image can be used to manipulate reality to sinister ends.

Hence, the action of "othering" cultures occurs when groups are labeled as different due to characteristics that distinguish them from the perceived norm. Orientalism provides a framework to understand one's own feelings of unease when faced with images of "odalisques" and slave markets and drug-dealers - the same unease evoked by skewed media representations of Arabs (and Muslims) today. Jean-Léon Gérôme, for example, may or may not have believed in France's mission civilisatrice; perhaps he only ever wanted to sell paintings. But in supplying images of indolence and cruelty he helped to nourish perceptions that eased the path of that mission.