This piece originally appeared in the Los Angeles Review of Books.
ONE OF THE FEW genuinely cool moments amid the slack moralistic sightseeing of Michelangelo Antonioni’s Blow-Up comes toward the end, when photographer David Hemmings runs into the model Veruschka at a party and, a bit puzzled, says, “I thought you were supposed to be in Paris.” To which Veruschka coolly answers, “I am in Paris.”
It’s a great moment, maybe the thing for which the Prussian-born Countess Vera Gottliebe Anna Gräfin von Lehndorff-Steinort is best known. It’s also, perhaps, the key to her art, a clue as to why the photos of her at the peak of her modeling career (from roughly the early to the late 1960s) still seem so striking and contemporary, or, rather, why Veruschka seems so striking in them. Even great models—like Lisa Fonssagrives-Penn, Jean Shrimpton, Twiggy—can seem forever contained in their moment, the moment they first connected with the public consciousness. Fonssagrives-Penn remains emblematic of the relative formality that still ruled fashion in the 1950s, Shrimpton created a tension between the settled maturity of that look and the focus on youth that was about to dominate pop culture, and Twiggy stands for the moment when the domination of youth became total. They are their moments.
You could say Veruschka, with her cool, appraising mien, stands for a certain austerity, for the high-art strain of fashion, and you wouldn’t be wrong. But that rather austere affect refuses to be defined by any specific time. The 1960s may have made her famous, but she has escaped the decade in a way that the decade’s other famous models have not, escaped the decade just as that famous line from Blow-Up—delivered with the offhand confidence of someone stating the self-evident—makes a claim to have escaped the temporal laws of time and space. The context in which the scolding Antonioni presents the line—a scene in which an agitated Hemmings is trying to convince some unconcerned partygoing associates that a murder has taken place—leaves no doubt that the director regards Veruschka’s proclamation as part of the self-absorbed decadence he’s clucking over. Veruschka’s delivery makes it neither self-deception nor boast but fact. I am, she is saying, where I choose to be, what I choose to make of myself. You will not define me.
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