It all started with a sketch. A pencil stroke on a blank sheet of paper. A touch of colour on an embroidered blouse, lipliner on a mannequin’s mouth. Like a fashion designer sketching a model’s curves and drapes in a sketchbook, Brigitte Niedermair dreams up her photographs by hand. Her sketches are a prelude to an image. Drawings are like the first stop on a great adventure.

In a new book published by Rizzoli², the photographer – a loyal collaborator of the House – reveals the genesis of her compositions. A captivating journey revealing her boundless taste for detail: from symmetry to silhouette, from set design to chromatic palette, from couture embroidery to the fall of a dress, everything is carefully studied.

Her preparatory work – poetic drawings and virtuoso collages, works of art in their own right – led to the creation of her most iconic photographs and campaigns. An instantly recognizable art of simplicity that magnified the House’s various worlds, from couture to jewellery and beauty. Since her arrival at Dior in 2016, Maria Grazia Chiuri, fascinated by the remarkable artist’s multifaceted talent, began forging a unique dialogue with her, a woman who “fights for an image” and strives to capture, season after season, Dior women’s wear and the excellence of its craftsmanship, with elegance and subtle provocation.

Where does she get her ideas for her extraordinary framing and staging? Her references are as varied as an inventory by Jacques Prévert: Renaissance paintings, Monsieur Dior’s archives, icons of fashion photography – starting with the Americans Irving Penn and Robert Mapplethorpe – Surrealism, Henri Matisse’s paintings and novels by Stendhal.

Because the artist likes to break free of constraint. At 18, she enrolled at the Academy of Fine Arts, Munich. The experience was short-lived. “I left after 30 minutes: everyone looked so sad. I heard a voice saying, ‘Run, get out of here,’” she says. For Brigitte Niedermair, real life was elsewhere. Armed with her box camera, she travelled through the Tyrolean mountains, slowly developing her vision and sharpening her unique perspectives. Two years later, in the early 1990s, she moved to Milan and encountered the frenetic world of fashion. Her asceticism and calm stood out amid the tumult. She naturally decided to continue using the analogue cameras of her youth and not to yield to the siren song of digital.

Ten years of photographing and further elevating Dior collections, always using the same method. Her spirit nurtured by preparatory sketches, she gently leaned towards the black box of her camera. Her vision is clear. The shutter snaps. The sound is “like a samurai’s sword slicing the air”. The photo would be definitive. Brigitte Niedermair never crops: the subject remains as photographed. Like an indelible masterstroke. A dazzling paradox. She embraced freedom by committing to the framework of her images. A desire for the absolute, like an echo of Christian Dior’s words: “A well-cut dress is a little-cut dress.”³