For last year’s Donna Karan shoot with Demi Moore and Bruce Willis, he shot in three different locations – an aircraft hangar in Los Angeles, the set of GI Jane in Florida and the Willis’s garage in Idaho – on consecutive days. Problems are all made by attitude.” He is also famously adaptable. He never speaks to anybody in a bad tone, even in a difficult situation.”Lindbergh says that the key to building up this rapport with his sitters is to “get over any kind of attitude. And what was most striking about him was that he seemed to be completely devoid of ego – a quality not generally associated with the fashion world “He’s very Zen and balanced,” asserts Nadja Auermann “He’s never angry, never nervous. When it was finally interrupted after nearly two hours by a dinner engagement with Franca Sozzani, the editor of Italian Vogue, Lindbergh suggested that I come back later – ie after midnight We eventually end up chatting until 2.15am. He really loves people and he really loves what he does.” Karan’s vice president of advertising and creative services, Trey Laird, agrees.

“I would fall down backwards if anyone ever said: `Oh, I met Peter Lindbergh and he was such a jerk’.”I’d agree Our interview was due to last an hour. “There is nobody, and I mean nobody, who is better to work with than Peter,” says Donna Karan “He’s warm, he’s caring, he’s funny. It is also in large part because of both his commitment – Lindbergh seems to have little time for anything other than work – and personality. In the early Eighties, based in Paris, he shot a number of campaigns for Comme des Garcons (typically grainy studio shots with brooding models and dramatic lighting effects) which placed him firmly at the top of his profession.If he is still there, it is not only due to his talent. “If there had been another job I would have become something else.”Within a few years Lindbergh was Germany’s highest-paid advertising photographer, the man behind the first print campaign for the VW Golf. His first fashion photos were published in 1978, in the German magazine Stern; the result was a flood of requests from fashion editors around the world, impressed by the pictures’ spontaneity and almost documentary feel. “A photographer’s assistant place came up through a friend,” he remembers.

By then, he was already 27 and, strange as it may seem, had still not picked up a camera He slipped into the profession more or less by accident. After returning to Germany, he enrolled in art school in Krefeld, had his first personal exhibition in 1969 and was all set to become an artist when his brother persuaded him that the work he was producing was “really boring”. He started taking art classes in Berlin, but soon left and hitched his way around the South of France, Spain and Morocco. “This may sound odd, but I thought that was the greatest job,” he laughs.However, his outlook changed after military service. Family holidays were spent on the windswept beaches of Holland Peter spent every spare minute playing handball “I went to training every evening,” he says.

“That was the one thing I was thinking of.” He claims that as a child he didn’t even know what photography was; when he left school at the age of 15 he became a window dresser in a local department store. However, most of the images are of the handful of models with whom Lindbergh’s career is most closely associated. There is Amber Valletta as a Marlene Dietrich look-alike and with angel wings in the streets of New York. There is Naomi clowning around as a modern-day Josephine Baker, and Linda Evangelista flying through the air of a grimy Manhattan street. There are also perhaps his most famous images – those featuring models posing on the beaches of northern France and in industrial locations.Both settings recall Lindbergh’s childhood in Germany’s Ruhr Valley.

He was born in East Germany in 1944, but was brought up on his uncle’s sheep farm overlooking the mining town of Duisburg. He generally chooses bleak locations, insists that hair and make-up are unfussy and that his subjects look extremely natural “He is the stylist’s nightmare,” claims Tina Turner. “He likes natural and simple clothes, and when stylists bring along racks and racks of high-fashion clothes, he always asks if they have a white shirt and jeans.”The only photo of Turner which makes it into Images of Women is one of her legs. There is also a wonderful photo of Nastassja Kinski’s torso and celebrity shots of Pamela Anderson, Antonio Banderas and Joaquin Cortes. However, Lindbergh refutes the idea that they are his trademark. “I don’t have a style and I try not to have one,” he insists, “because afterwards it’s difficult to get away from.” He does, however, admit that in his photos “the woman is always more important than the clothes”.