Karl Lagerfeld was not a photographer who happened to be a fashion designer. He was a photographer who designed fashion. The distinction matters. When he moved behind the lens in 1987, he did not abandon design—he deepened it. The camera became another pencil, another tool in the service of vision. For thirty-two years he would shoot the campaigns himself, publish more than fifty photobooks, exhibit in galleries across Europe, and demonstrate that fashion photography could achieve the formal rigor and technical mastery of fine art. "What I like about photographs," he said, "is that they capture a moment that's gone forever, impossible to reproduce."

The Frustration That Started It All

The story begins with frustration and a practical problem. By the late 1980s, Lagerfeld had been creative director of Chanel for four years. The house needed press kits for its campaigns. He hired photographers. Nothing worked. The images were unusable. Discarded.

Eric Pfrunder, Chanel's director of image, suggested the obvious solution: Lagerfeld should shoot them himself. It was meant as a practical fix to a persistent creative problem. But what began as expedience became obsession. Lagerfeld took that first assignment in 1987 and never stopped.

Knowing Lagerfeld's admiration for Helmut Newton, Pfrunder arranged for one of Newton's former assistants to help the designer learn the technical fundamentals. The setup was perfect. Lagerfeld had his vision. Now he had the mechanical knowledge to execute it. The result was immediate and undeniable: the first press kit photographs were stunning. They were not what marketing departments expected from press materials. They were art.

The Camera as Tool and Weapon

Lagerfeld worked methodically. He assembled a team of fifteen to twenty people—makeup artists, stylists, models, lighting technicians—and he kept the same crew across years, building a collaborative language that allowed for efficiency and consistency. The environment on set was controlled and deliberate. He was not a photographer chasing spontaneity. He was building images with the precision of architecture.

His shooting method was direct. He did not take three hundred photographs to get one perfect frame. Instead, he shot five or six images and trusted the first. "Very often," he explained, "it's very strange, what we use is the very first photo taken, even with the digital camera." This was not carelessness. It was confidence rooted in preparation. By the time the camera released, the image already existed in his mind. The photograph was documentation of a decision, not a search for one.

On location, in the studio, on Coco Chanel's apartment stairs or the cliffs of the French Riviera, Lagerfeld moved with purpose. He was not interested in discovery through the viewfinder. The camera was a tool to inscribe vision into film. Sometimes it meant working through the night. "I have very bad working habits," he admitted. "Sometimes I start at ten in the evening, and at ten in the morning I am still working. I can be slow, well, not slow, but it takes a lot of time. I don't believe in those thirty-five minute jobs."

Technical Vision and Experimentation

The technical ambition was extraordinary. Lagerfeld refused to settle into a single process. He experimented with resinotypes, an obscure nineteenth-century printing method. He used platinum prints, some on Belgian linen, others on canvas. He made large-format Polaroid transfers. He hand-colored black-and-white images using Shu Uemura makeup, creating tonal variations no standard process could achieve.

Some of his photographs were deliberately blurry. Others were knife-sharp. Some were sepia-toned, others shimmering like caviar or slashed with vivid color. He had access to one of only three large-format Polaroid cameras in the world at the time—a camera that produced instant, unrepeatable images at grand scale. The novelty was never the point. The novelty was in service of expression. He was, as he put it himself, "an illustrator with a camera."

This technical restlessness revealed something important about how he thought. Lagerfeld was interested in what different processes made possible, what emotional register each technique could access. A Polaroid transfer had a different feeling than a platinum print. Hand-coloring created an intimacy that straight color never could. He was not being precious. He was being precise. Every choice expanded or contracted the emotional space of the image.

The Polaroid Revolution

The large-format Polaroid was transformative. Most fashion photographers worked with medium-format cameras and negative film, a process that required chemistry and waiting. The Polaroid was immediate. Lagerfeld could shoot, see the result, adjust, shoot again. The feedback loop was instantaneous. But what made it radical was scale. These were not the small Polaroids of research and study. These were monumental prints—Lagerfeld used them as finished works, not studies.

The Polaroid's surface had particular qualities: a slight flatness, a particular luminosity, an opacity that made colors feel solid and weight-bearing rather than reflective. These were not mistakes of the process. They were assets. Lagerfeld understood them as aesthetic opportunities. The Polaroid became central to his practice because it allowed him to work with immediate results while maintaining a distinctive, unrepeatable aesthetic.

Chanel Campaigns as Art

Beginning in 1987 and continuing until his death in 2019, Lagerfeld shot every Chanel campaign himself. He controlled the casting, the styling, the location, the lighting, the timing. He was not a hired hand executing someone else's vision. He was the vision. The campaigns bore his unmistakable signature: a classical approach to composition allied with a contemporary sensibility, an obsessive attention to the formal properties of the image, and a profound understanding of how fashion and photography could amplify each other.

He photographed the house's celebrated ambassadors—Claudia Schiffer, Christy Turlington, Linda Evangelista, Kate Moss—as well as cultural figures and society personalities. Each image functioned on multiple levels: as advertisement, as portraiture, as fashion documentation, as fine art. The boundary between categories dissolved. A campaign image could hang in a gallery without irony.

This integration became more explicit over time. In 1996, the Zurich-based Galerie Gmurzynska began representing Lagerfeld's photographic work, exhibiting his prints alongside his books. Museums acquired individual prints. The collector market recognized what was happening: these were not fashion photographs that happened to be beautiful. They were photographs that used fashion as their subject matter.

Books and Gallery Exhibitions

Lagerfeld's partnership with Steidl, the German publishing house, became one of the most prolific collaborations in photobook history. Beginning with Off the Record in 1994, a collection of his personal photographic sequences shot between the mid-1980s and early 1990s, he would go on to publish over fifty books with the publisher. Each was a distinct project: a series of Polaroid transfers, a body of society portraits, a study of the little black jacket, a documentation of locations and models and concepts.

Off the Record established the template. Black-and-white sequences, fashion narratives, portraiture, landscape, architecture, all treated with identical formal attention. The cover featured Claudia Schiffer in a landscape, and the book itself became a manifesto: photography could do anything. It could tell stories. It could document fashion. It could be pure abstraction. All within the same binding.

The Little Black Jacket, published in 2012, exemplified the maturity of his practice. The book contained 113 portraits of models and entertainers photographed wearing the iconic Chanel piece. Each portrait was individually composed, each background considered, each lighting arrangement deliberate. The subject was a single garment, but the visual range was encyclopedic. He had made the same argument about fashion photography that Mapplethorpe had made about photography more broadly: technique and taste could transform any subject into art.

His retrospective, "Karl Lagerfeld: A Visual Journey," opened at the Pinacothèque de Paris in 2010 and traveled to major institutions. The exhibition spanned three decades of photographic practice. Viewers encountered the full range: the Chanel campaigns, the Polaroids, the colored images, the platinum prints, the portraiture, the experimental work. What emerged was a complete vision, a coherent practice that had evolved but never abandoned its formal principles.

Philosophy and Process

Lagerfeld was uncompromising about standards. "Whatever is good will survive," he said. "The rest has to go to the garbage can." This was not elitism. It was clarity. He understood that beauty was not accidental and that technical facility without vision was useless. A good photographer could make bad work in a bad mood, in bad weather, with the wrong product. But the good work endured.

He believed that photography, like design, had no limits. "I think the photographer can do anything," he said. "You are not the best photographer or a lousy and poor creature only because you do press kits." This was a radical statement. It challenged the hierarchy that placed art photography above commercial work, fine art above fashion, gallery exhibitions above magazines. Lagerfeld demonstrated through his practice that these distinctions were arbitrary. A press kit could be a masterpiece. A fashion campaign could belong in a museum.

His approach to the medium was rooted in a particular understanding of modernism. He valued clarity, formal composition, controlled lighting, and the elimination of visual noise. But he was not dogmatic. He could work in color. He could work in abstraction. He could use the camera to explore texture, surface, light behavior. The consistency was not in style but in seriousness—every decision was motivated by expression, nothing was left to accident.

The Illustrator with a Camera

Lagerfeld made a significant claim in 2010 when the Maison Européenne de la Photographie in Paris mounted a survey of his work: "I'm an illustrator with a camera." He was not claiming to be a photographer in the documentary or journalistic sense. He was claiming the right to use the camera as a tool of authorship, of design, of illustration in the broadest sense—the translation of interior vision into external form.

This was consistent with how he had always worked. The sketch, the design drawing, the photograph—all were acts of creation, all required the same formal attention, all were meant to communicate a vision that could not be otherwise expressed. The camera did not change his fundamental method. It extended it.

His photographic legacy sits at the intersection of several traditions: the fashion photography of Newton and Peter Lindbergh, the formal portraiture of Irving Penn, the experimental approach to process that connects to the nineteenth-century photographers he admired. But his synthesis was unique. He proved that a single person could be creative director, designer, photographer, and publisher simultaneously. He proved that fashion photography could achieve gallery status without irony. He proved that the camera, in the hands of someone with vision, was a tool of unlimited possibility.

When he died in February 2019 at the age of eighty-five, the photographic archives numbered in the tens of thousands. More than five decades of image-making. The work continues to be exhibited, published, and studied. What began as frustration with poor press kit photographs became a comprehensive meditation on vision, technique, composition, and the transformation of ephemeral fashion into permanent art.

Explore More

For other photographers who bridged fashion and fine art, see Herb Ritts and Helmut Newton. Lagerfeld's formal approach to portraiture connects to Annie Leibovitz and Peter Lindbergh. For more on masterful studio lighting and controlled composition, explore our composition guide and studio lighting techniques.