Book of the Week: From Vera to Veruschka
There’s a spectacular sense of discovery in From Vera to Veruschka, the new coffee-table book on the legendary supermodel, born Vera von Lehndorff. We’re all familiar with the German beauty and her impossibly long limbs; even if you haven’t seen her cameo in Michelangelo Antonioni’s Blow-Up (that’s her in the film poster, by the way), you’ve likely come across the iconic shot of her in a lace-up YSL safari jacket, rifle askew on her shoulders. But we’ve never seen her quite like this — and that’s what makes Johnny Moncada’s photos here, taken in Rome in the early Sixties, such a find. Hidden in his attic until his death, these revelatory, never-before-seen images capture the model pre-fame — in the fresh-faced years before she reinvented herself as Veruschka. “Perhaps you can see the beginnings of this transformation,” she writes. “[But] in Johnny’s photos I always remained Vera.”
