Gaze at a Cathleen Naundorf photograph and you will certainly see beautiful women in beautiful gowns posing in beautiful locations. But when you look a little closer, you will discover that her work is rooted in the fine art she studied, a passion for history, and a hope that there’s something bigger and better out there for us all.
Born in the East German town of Weissenfels in 1968, Naundorf was raised in a family of painters and musicians who nurtured her nascent gift for drawing. But the Naundorfs wanted to leave the Communist East German regime and join the rest of their family in West Germany. As a result, the government treated them as criminals. Their accounts were frozen. Naundorf and her father were interrogated at various points in time. She was expelled from the school system and forbidden to attend the academy of beaux arts. They finally left on December 19, 1985, carrying only what they could on their way to freedom.
“We looked to America because my father said freedom and journalism are so important,” says Naundorf, explaining that the United States was a source of inspiration for her family at this time, as it represented the antithesis of what they experienced in East Germany. “When I got free, the first thing I did was become a member of Amnesty International, which was beginning its work for the freedom of Tibet.”
As Naundorf finished her studies in Munich, she became passionate about photography and eager to explore the world beyond her homeland. She worked as a travel photographer and journalist, living with and photographing indigenous people in places like Mongolia, Siberia, and Amazonia, and covering such luminaries as the Dalai Lama. Her photographs attracted the attention of famed fashion photographer Horst P. Horst, who grew up in the same town that she did.
“He told me I should try fashion,” Naundorf recalls. “At first, I wasn’t keen to do it. But when I saw Horst’s pictures, I realized that they were art, and that spoke to me.”
Horst became Naundorf’s mentor, and it’s easy to see why. There she was, a young woman from his hometown, who escaped an oppressive regime, and found her way into photography. Like him, she had a painterly approach to her work, and he believed her style would be a good fit for the world of haute couture.
After moving to Paris for love in the 1990s, Naundorf followed Horst’s advice. Condé Nast hired her to be a backstage photographer at fashion shows.
“It was a fantastic time in fashion,” she shares. “And I began connecting with people like John Galliano and Jean Paul Gaultier, who loved what I did.”
Galliano and Gaultier were among the first designers to let Naundorf borrow dresses for her personal projects. When she began working with a large format analog camera to create sharper, more detailed photographs from individual sheets of film, she found that the fixed nature of the materials made her work feel more like the paintings she used to create. Each shot involved pre-planning, sketches, and the contours of a story Naundorf aimed to tell. As her work gained acclaim, more designers—including those at Chanel and Dior—opened their archives to her and told her to shoot whatever she found interesting.
“All of the designers would ship me whatever I wanted, wherever I wanted it to be,” says Naundorf, who divides her time between Paris and London. “They knew I would respect it and that I understood their style. When I put together a cast for a Chanel shoot, it was with people who embody a Chanel look. My respect for their look, their way of doing things is high, and that is why I have worked with all these designers.”
In 2018, Naundorf published Women of Singular Beauty: Chanel Haute Couture, featuring 100 exclusive photographs of the house’s collections, which she took over a 20-year period.
“These Chanel haute couture dresses were very fragile, but [Chanel’s heritage department] restored them just for me,” she says. “I spent a year reading everything I could about Coco Chanel to develop some special ideas for my shootings. I kept it all in my private diary—drawings, ideas, my correspondences and pictures for this project.”
Valentino Garavani, who passed away in January, also admired Naundorf’s work, which is in the collections of the Victoria and Albert Museum in London and the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. She traveled with him for three years, shooting projects that have yet to be published.
“We talked so much about culture, fashion, behavior, sophistication, and the loss of it in this time,” she says. “But I don’t think that’s dying. It’s still there, it’s just not communicated in media. But it makes me sad to think about how Gaultier is finished and Lagerfeld, Armani, and Valentino are dead. What I’ve photographed is a special time and a part of history now.”
Naundorf’s hard-won freedom enabled her to capture this work, some of which is on display in Palm Beach at the Jennifer Balcos Gallery through March. Called “La Parisienne,” the show features both silver gelatin and chromogenic prints—some of the singular images that have cemented Naundorf’s status as a photography icon.
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