Fashion Photographer Gunnar Larsen Dies

PARIS (AP) _ Danish photographer Gunnar Larsen, one of the French fashion scene’s most prominent chroniclers, has died, friends said Wednesday. He was 59.

The Copenhagen newspaper Jyllands-Posten said Larsen died Monday after a long illness. The paper said he suffered complications following an operation on his pancreas.

Funeral services were held Wednesday in the French capital, Larsen’s friends said on condition of anonymity. Burial was set for Friday at the Pere Lachaise cemetery.

Born in Copenhagen, Larsen worked as a shop assistant before heading to Paris in 1959 to work as a photojournalist. He later became a freelance fashion photographer.

Larsen did not meet with immediate success and wrote to supplement his income. He interviewed Brigitte Bardot, Alain Delon and Jean-Paul Belmondo for the Danish newspaper Ekstrabladet.

By the late 1960s he had developed an avant-garde style in photography, relying on black-and-white film when most of his contemporaries had switched to color. The British model Twiggy was one of his favorite subjects.

Larsen’s pictures staged girls in science-fiction outfits with pale faces and dark-eye makeup. He also held his own fashion shows in which models wore bullet-riddled jackets.

″Paris is the world’s best workshop,″ he once told the Danish newspaper BT.

In 1988, Larsen launched an oversize, thrice-yearly magazine, Gunnar’s International, as a vehicle for his photographs. He published an autobiography titled ″Life of Dreams″ the same year and was preparing another book on the history of Paris fashion.

The photographer was secretive about his private life. He never married and had no children.