Cathleen started her career in art with formations in sculpture and painting at the Halle/Salle Academy of fine arts and in photography at the school of decorative arts in Munich. Following that, photography assistantships brought her to New York and Singapore, among other places. Her love for foreign countries and cultures led to many travels, and in the nineties these resulted in books with reports and photos valuable from a documentary and an artistic perspective.
Inspired by her encounter of and longstanding friendship with Horst P. Horst, Cathleen Naundorf early on turned to fashion photography. Living in Paris, she has been taking photographs of fashion shows backstage since the mid-nineties, inter alia for Vogue, Glamour, Elle, Marie Clair and leading newspapers. Besides that, she is repeatedly asked for specific photographic projects, such as for fashion houses Scherrer and Galliano, as well as for Elie Saab (catalogues), Wildenstein (jewellery), and American Express.
In the framework of a very special project, she is taking photographs, with the support of the great designers and fashion houses, of selected haute couture dresses from the era since 2000. With the help from, among others, Odile Gilbert (Hair), their teams, she creates in studios or on location a testimony, unique in its kind, of subjects that are more and more recognised as an art form in their own right. Large format Polaroid pictures, taken with a Plaubel or Deardorff camera, are the particular stylistic medium. This also underlines – thanks to long exposure times – the expression of beauty and soul giving the whole a painting-like impression.
Today, Cathleen Naundorf is a significant fashion photographer for haute couture and luxury prêt-a-porter. Her works, characterised by extraordinary beauty and high recognition value, are being increasingly systematically collected and sold through the appropriate auction houses.
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