Pierre Winther: In The Depth Of Winther

Pierre Winther is an ideas man and, as he tells Lee Sharrock, unlike many photographers, he starts off with the concept, preciously guarding his creative freedom as he develops it. Having produced arresting campaigns in both print and film for many iconic brands, the methods of this deep-thinking Dane seem to have served him well for over 25 years

Considering he is self-taught, Pierre Winther has fashioned for himself an enviably successful career, spanning close to a quarter of a century, working in film and print for big clients such as Diesel, Dunhill, Levi’s, Hugo Boss and Nike. Now based in the buzzy arts hub that is Berlin, he has also worked in most of the world’s creative hotspots; Paris, London, LA and New York.

Winther fell into photography in the 80s when he was taking a winter walk in his native Copenhagen and was pondering the best way to capture the long shadows. He soon got a camera and taught himself how to record such transient moments. That epiphany led to a long artistic journey as an autodidact, during which he has created his own unique style. His surreal images have appeared in The Face, iD, Rolling Stone, VICE and Vogue and traversed the traditional boundaries between commercial and fine-art photography. He has directed videos and shot covers for artists including Skunk Anansie, INXS, Tricky, Björk, Massive Attack and Beastie Boys.

Winther applies the same approach to his stills and film work, starting with an idea around a scene, which he translates into a series of images or a film, or sometimes both. He laboriously constructs his stills by casting the perfect characters to live out his narrative, working closely with stylists and set designers to make his ideas come alive. Winther is with Radical Media for his film work and special projects, putting him in the company of some of the great auteurs of our time – Terrence Malick, Terry Gilliam, Ron Howard and Robert Rodriguez.

Probably Winther’s most famous image is Shark Riding, an idea he came up with for a Levi’s campaign in 1993. The photo spawned many imitations and found its way into the hallowed auction rooms of Christie’s. The immediate reaction when confronted with the unbelievable photo of a man gliding through the water on the back of a shark, is that it was Photoshopped. That’s until you realise that Winther captured the image on Australia’s legendary Great Barrier Reef in the early 90s, well before Photoshop’s creation in 1998. I asked him how he did it. “I was contacted by Levi’s who were keen to build a world around a water-related subject that promoted their new ‘shrink to fit’ jeans (which were an innovation at the time). I came up with the key visual of a man riding a shark and developed a whole underwater universe that drew parallels between the ocean environment and the dangers of the urban landscape. Levi’s loved the idea and commissioned me to carry out a three-week shoot on the Great Barrier Reef with a crew of more than 30 people. The model was a stuntman who wore only a small air tank on his back. When he was finally riding the 17-foot tiger shark I had a short period of time to get the picture and we were surrounded by guards taking care we wouldn’t get attacked by other sharks. It was all done for real and was pretty wild looking back at it.”

Winther’s approach to creating images for clients is not a conventional one and he likes to communicate his inner vision with or without commercial diktats:  “I sometimes compare my relationship to clients with the way an artist would function with his or her benefactor. My ambition is always to actualise an idea more as an art project, no matter if I do it on my own or together with advertising clients. I’m not a typical photographer who gets commissioned to shoot someone else’s concepts. I make exceptions if I like the vision. When you see my images you can’t really see a difference between free photography and commissioned work. I will collaborate with a commercial client only under the premise that they give me creative freedom – so it’s my vision that is portrayed in a photograph. This is the same as the approach for fine-art photography.”

His powerful imagery often possesses a cinematic quality, with a single frame offering an intriguing narrative that draws the viewer in. “I like to invite the viewer into my world, trigger something that is already in them and let them complete the narrative on their own,” he explains. For example, the Backgammon of Death from The Challenge, one of two series of images and films forming the huge 2002 campaign for Dunhill Luxury, show two men buried in a desert with only head and shoulders exposed, playing backgammon. The Family Ride, from the Trust print campaign for JVC in 1997, depicts a man with a rope around his neck apparently about to drive off and throttle himself. Two other images from Trust display Winther’s talent for the visceral and shocking: On Fire for You, appears to show a burning person in the middle of a street; while Bomb Girl is an eerily erotic image of a topless woman with a bomb strapped to her chest: “I like to portray the darker side of human behaviour and social messages. In the Trust series I wanted to display trust in a social context and Bomb Girl had already been taken in 1996, long before suicide bombing was so omnipresent in the media.”

Pierre Winther’s interactive hardback book Nothing Beats Reality is a carefully curated selection of work from his oeuvre and takes its name from the working title for a project that saw him exploring old police documents, newspapers and medical reports. The stories he came across were so astonishing that the phrase Nothing Beats Reality became a mantra for his work as it summarised how real life can be even more bizarre and disturbing than fiction.

Nothing Beats Reality is published by teNeues in January 2015 with accompanying exhibitions planned for Berlin, London and elsewhere. www.pierrewinther.com