Chris von Wangenheim
Catch the photographer’s scandalous work in the Rizzoli monograph, Gloss with Gia
The German-born von Wangenheim, who moved to the U.S. in 1965, became a prominent fashion photographer in the ’70s for Harper’s Bazaar, Vogue, Esquire, Playboy and Interview. His work, often shocking, epitomized the glamour and excess of the era and dramatized how the fashionable underworld lived life on the edge. In 1981, at the age of 39, he was killed in a car crash while on vacation on the Caribbean island of Saint Martin. At the time of his death, he was in the process of divorcing the former model Regine Jaffry, with whom he had one child. The photographs selected here by PROVOKR are part of the Rizzoli book Gloss: The Work of Chris von Wangenheim, the first-ever monograph on von Wangenheim’s career, written by Roger Padilha and Mauricio Padilha, with a foreword by photographer Steven Klein.
