by A private family funeral is planned for fashion photographer Hans Feurer, whose fearless style helped push the medium forward and empower women.
The Swiss-born talent died in a Zurich hospital surrounded by his wife Ana and sons Ole and Jens on January 16, according to his long-time agent Andre Werther. The cause of death for the 84-year-old has not been released.
More from WWD
Camera Work, the Berlin gallery that represented him for 25 years, owned the lensman’s archives through 2016, and the Feurer family owns the remaining archives of his most current images, according to Camera Work director Ute Hartjen.
By his own account, Feurer said, “I like to show a free woman who is not afraid of anything.”
The same could be said of Feurer, who quit his advertising career in 1966 to spend two years traveling across Africa in a Land Rover he bought for the trip. His visual gifts and clever writing were applied first to the advertising industry, and that ability to capture the cultural zeitgeist was applied to his second act in fashion photography.
Digital lighting, Photoshop and artificial lighting weren’t always off limits even for night shoots for the self-taught creative, Hartjen said. If asked where he found the best light, Feurer replied, “’I don’t understand the question. It’s everywhere, because the sun is everywhere,’” she said with a laugh.
The photographer once explained, “I make dream projections. Fashion allows a woman to be someone else the way she dresses and if you act long enough, it will be you, so I try to take images of what I want to live or be or be be.”
His love of life had a similar enthusiasm. “The world is the most beautiful thing there is,” was his personal refrain, Hartjen said, adding that he considered women to be the most interesting creatures in it. “That’s why he decided to become a photographer to combine those two things,” she said.
Feurer shot supermodels in her early days, including Iman, Sayoko, Grace Jones and Claudia Schiffer, helping to accelerate their global recognition.
In the ’80s, designer Kenzo Takada teamed up with Feurer and revitalized fashion advertising and Iman played a leading role in creating a sense of world that had not yet been explored. Trying to get a modern take on the fairy tale “One Thousand and One Nights,” Feurer and stylist Françoise Ha Van traveled to Morocco with models from all over the world sporting items from Kenzo’s personal collection. The fashion designer’s openness to expressing love for all kinds of clothing—beyond the styles expected in the West—was true to Feurer’s sense of beauty and aesthetics.
Years before spin classes could be easily found in the suburbs and cities, Feurer photographed Pat Cleveland nude on a silver stationary bicycle folded forward with her chin on her left knee and her hands hanging inches from the floor. The photographer also shot generations of little-known models in striking, often unmatched pieces. His love for nature could also be seen in a shot of a model wearing a neon green swimsuit and a Lycra swimming cap, lying face up on the beach with her flip-flopped legs bent back, like a mantis.
In addition to establishing himself in the pantheon of fashion photographers, Feurer helped mentor new talent, and at one point hired Patrick Demarchelier as an assistant.
One of Feurer’s career-shaping moments was shooting the Pirelli calendar in 1974. That exposure helped land him access to various international editions of Vogue, Elle and other fashion magazines. Feurer also worked at the Stern family of magazines, where others like Helmut Newton and Guy Bourdain were on board. He also collaborated with Bogner for years, thanks in part to a friendship with Olympic skier and filmmaker Will Bogner Jr. In response to Feurer’s death, Bogner highlighted on Instagram how the photographer once explained that his approach was that of a Zen Buddhist: “Leave out anything that is superfluous, simplify everything as much as it is possible, so that the model and the fashion are in the center of the fair,” said Feurer.
The photographer’s influence has also periodically surfaced as an inspiration for various designer collections, including Isabel Marant, who took cues from some of his sporty images from the 90s for her spring 2022 collection. Former Kenzo creative heads Humberto Leon and Carol Lim drew from their well for the 2017 heritage collection as well.
Andre Werther, Feurer’s agent for more than 20 years, recalled being on an early morning shoot in Times Square with him more than a dozen years ago. “The light of day had no secrets for him.” Said Werther. “When he told me about the blue light reflecting off the skyscrapers, I was blind. The only light I could see was the bright neon [billboard] light around Times Square. Hans’ eye could see beauty in what others could only see as a banal, uninteresting light. He was a magician with light – he knew how to play with it.”
As passionate as Feurer was about photography, what enchanted him and “made his eyes sparkle” was the talk of deep-sea fishing, a sport he pursued with some famous deep-sea fishermen. “If you talked to him about that, he wouldn’t stop talking,” Hartjen said.
A gallery of Feurer’s work had already been posted on the Camera Work site before his death. He and Hartjen were discussing the prospect of Hartjen doing something in the gallery next year. “We are very sad,” Hartjen said. “This reminds us all to do things sooner rather than later.”
The best of WWD
