Tales from the Island of Serendip 4 4

[Flex Mentallo]

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.”

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

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In 1969 she painted her head to look like a stone and had herself photographed amid a group of real stones.

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Grace Mirabella, the new editor of Vogue, brought her in to do a Paris collections portfolio in 1972. The makeup, however, took five hours to apply—leaving the model exhausted by the time they were ready to shoot. “It absolutely showed in the pictures: They were dead; I had no expression,” she says. “Grace Mirabella wanted me to be bourgeois, and I didn’t want to be that. I said no. I realized it was no longer my moment. After that, I decided not to work in fashion again.”

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Veruschka retired from modeling in 1975.

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She reverted to her given name and rediscovered her first passion: art.

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Working with Holger Trülzsch, a painter and sculptor, she collaborated on photographic self-portraits in which her camouflage body paint blended into the background.

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They were an “exploration of visibility and disappearance, a near-perfect but uncomfortable analogy for her own life,” according to Frieze magazine.

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Her first photo book, Veruschka: Trans-Figurations in collaboration with artist Holger Trülzsch was published in 1986, and is the one I wanted to share with you today.

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I first came across these images in another issue of the Sunday times magazine. I'm sure I still have it somewhere.

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It was only years later that I realized the book had been published. I eventually managed to find a second hand copy - quite hard to come across in the days before the internet brought everything in reach.

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You may recall that Susan Sontag had written about Leni Riefenstahl's photos of the Nuba and pretty much destroyed them. The comparison with Vera Lehndorff is inescapable.

 

Edited December 30, 2017 by Flex Mentallo

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Since Sontag's introduction to the book is far more insightful than anything I could say about them, I will quote her words.

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What truly fascinates me though, is the striking parallels with my previous posts - I will leave you, gentle reader, to figure them out for yourself.

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The desire to become fully visible, to be seen [at last] as one is, to be honest, to be unmasked.

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The desire to hide, to be camouflaged. to be elsewhere.

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Other.

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The desire to impersonate someone else, but that is not other enough.

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The desire to escape from a merely human appearance, to be an animal, not a person, an object [stone? wood? metal? cloth?]

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not a person