“She just felt like the right model at the right time for that. We weren’t trying to prove anything,” recalls Patricia Peterson, the magazine’s editor at that time (and Gösta Peterson’s wife, with whom he frequently collaborated). Indeed, Gösta, who was known for his quick, often improvisational style of photography, was more incentivized by the allure of a fresh face than making history or notions of celebrity. Earlier that year, he was also the first of his industry peers to photograph Twiggy in the United States. Again, it was a matter of capturing images of the waifish Brit before becoming disinterested by her inevitable ubiquity.
It’s hardly an overstatement to call Gösta Peterson one of the most influential, yet little-known, fashion photographers of his time. Despite his barrier-breaking work, Peterson, a self-taught lensman with a fondness for jazz and natty tweed suits from Savile Row, has remained a lesser-known figure in the pantheon of great fashion photographers from that era: Richard Avedon and Irving Penn, for example. Many of his contemporaries, including the photographer Arthur Elgort and the fashion stylist and entrepreneur Linda Rodin, both of whom worked as his assistants, attribute this astonishing omission to Peterson’s unyielding resistance toward household-name models—the Lauren Huttons and the Cheryl Tiegses of the modeling world. “It was the time of Avedon and Hiro, but Gus didn’t buy into that. He didn’t shoot Vogue because he didn’t want to work with their models,” says Rodin, whose own visual memoir, forthcoming in early 2024, will feature a sizable selection of Peterson’s photographs.
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