Gian Paolo Barbieri, Italian Master of Photography, Dies at 89

MILAN — Italian master of photography Gian Paolo Barbieri has died at age 89 after fighting a long illness. The announcement came from the photographer’s namesake foundation on Wednesday. 

A private funeral service is planned at a date yet to be revealed.

Born in Milan in 1935, Barbieri was one of the 20th century’s most influential photographers and a pioneer in fashion, having shot the first cover of Vogue Italia, and since then logging major advertising campaigns for brands such as Versace, Gianfranco Ferrè, Vivienne Westwood, Dolce & Gabbana, Valentino and Giorgio Armani, as well as portraits of everyone from movie stars to supermodels, ranging from Veruschka, Naomi Campbell and Eva Herzigova to Audrey Hepburn and Monica Bellucci.

“Dear Uncle, you were like a second father to me, a precious guide who stood by me through so many moments of my life. You passed on to me your passion for all things beautiful, like nature and aesthetic harmony,” said Barbieri’s niece Giada, who is a board member of the Fondazione Gian Paolo Barbieri, established in 2017 to preserve, safeguard and archive the photographer’s work.

“Beyond moral values, you gifted me an immense aesthetic legacy, teaching me to look at the world with curious eyes filled with wonder. Those lessons, those shared moments — I will treasure them in my heart for the rest of my days,” she continued. “You were not only a teacher of life but also an integral part of who I am. Your love, your teachings and your memory will live on in me and in everyone fortunate enough to have known you. I will carry you with me always, Uncle. I will love you forever.”

The photographer hailed from a family of textile wholesalers and it was in his father’s warehouse that Barbieri started to become accustomed to fashion. He quickly moved to the world of theater, becoming an actor, operator and costume designer. American noir cinema has served among his biggest inspirations, informing his use of light. As he never attended photography school, he conducted experiments in his basement with light bulbs slipped into the pipe of a stove.

After moving to Rome, Barbieri accepted a work offer and moved to Paris in 1960, beginning his career in fashion photography as an assistant to Harper’s Bazaar’s Tom Kublin for a brief period. 

He then returned to Milan, opening his first photographic studio in 1962. In his hometown, he started to work for outlets including Novità, the magazine that in 1965 would become Vogue Italia. From that moment his collaboration with Condé Nast was forged, extending to international editions including American Vogue, Vogue Paris and Vogue Germany as well as Vanity Fair and GQ through the years.

Celebrities like Diana Vreeland, Yves Saint Laurent and Richard Avedon are a part of his story, and are as important as the collaborations with the most iconic actresses of the 20th century. 

In the 1960s, ’70s and ’80s, Barbieri’s commercial campaigns contributed to defining the creative voice of the leading fashion brands, also including Walter Albini and Saint Laurent.

Barbieri’s work has been showcased at the Palazzo Reale in Milan, MAMM in Moscow, Erarta Museum of Contemporary Art in Saint Petersburg and at Shanghai Museum, to name a few. Moreover, some of his works belong to the collections of the Victoria & Albert Museum and the National Portrait Gallery of London, Kunstforum of Vienna and Musée du Quai Branly of Paris. 

His work has also been purchased by one of the most important fashion photography collections in the world, the Nicola Erni Collection, as well as by one of the largest contemporary art collections in the world, the Pinault Collection. 

Most recently, the exhibition “Gian Paolo Barbieri: Beyond Fashion” featuring works and unpublished photographs from the 1960s to the year 2000 landed in Ostuni, in Italy’s Apulia region.

This followed an exhibition in 2022 in Milan offering a glimpse of the lesser-known work of the photographer and spotlighting the link to the worlds of art and cinema in his iconography. For instance, for a Dolce Vita-inspired shoot for the Io Donna magazine in Rome in 1997, Barbieri portrayed model Eva Herzigova wrapped in a Krizia dress under the pictures of Alfred Hitchcock — one of his favorite directors — and Italian movie icon Gina Lollobrigida.

That year, a 75-minute film docu-film on Barbieri’s life and work dubbed “L’uomo e la bellezza,” or “The man and the beauty” in English, directed by Emiliano Scatarzi was also premiered. It included interviews with the likes of Dolce & Gabbana, Monica Bellucci, Rita Airaghi for Fondazione Ferrè and Giuseppe Zanotti, among others.

Previously, Barbieri released a range of books, including “Flowers of My Life,” a tome launched in 2016 and edited by Silvana Editoriale with the support of the Italian fashion company Miroglio Group. Conceived with Barbieri’s longtime protégé, New York-based eclectic artist Branislav Jankic, the book mixed pictures taken by Barbieri with poems written by Jankic and chronicled the three-year love affair between the photographer and the late model Evar Locatelli, who died in a motorcycle accident at age 21.

In recent years, through his foundation, Barbieri devoted himself to promoting photographic culture, supporting young talents and preserving the value of photography as both testimony and artistic expression.

“With his passing, we lose not only a master but also a man who dedicated his life to beauty, creativity and the pursuit of artistic perfection. The Gian Paolo Barbieri Foundation will continue to carry forward his mission, honoring the memory and work of an artist who immortalized the essence of his subjects,” the foundation said in a statement released Wednesday.