Norbert Schoerner was working on editorials for The Face and Dazed in the late ‘90s with a group of creatives in London, including the makeup artist Eli Wakamatsu and stylist Nancy Rohde, when he was spotted by Miuccia Prada. She was turning the pages of Dazed when she saw a Comme des Garçons editorial by him that carried an air of the eerie, as a model styled in print and knitwear by Katie Grand was clearly disturbed by the barren mountainscape or dystopian city behind her. A meeting was set up.
Thus began a new age of genre-defining commercials for Prada – and Miu Miu. “What Norbert did for this series of campaigns had never been done before,” Eli had gushed when I spoke to her last year upon thirty years of Miu Miu – she along with Nancy were also booked for the team simultaneously. “I was frequently asked by people in the industry how it was shot when they were published!” A selection of his Prada campaigns were published in a ring-binder format by London-based publisher IDEA over the summer and is rolling out its second edition – and there’s more of Norbert’s Prada work coming our way.
Recalling the meeting with Prada, Norbert noted self-assuredly that everyone now knows it went quite well. “We found a lot of common ground in our shared view of cultural references,” he said, “spending a few hours in deep conversation.” What she felt Prada needed was a close collaborator. “A personal relationship was crucial for Mrs Prada,” he recalled; “She wanted to ensure there was a strong personal dynamic.” Thus, everyone from this team were taken on – Eli and Nancy – for the next three seasons of both houses, across menswear and womenswear – and of course, Prada Sport. “It felt like continuing our editorial shoots but being paid!,” Wakamatsu had laughed.
Taking over from Glen Luchford’s cinematic lens and his mysterious dark palette shrouded in smoky romanticism for Prada, Norbert veered towards the sharp hyperrealistic that forces a visceral reaction from people till today. The narratives for both brands were different, as were their target audiences. “This has a significant impact on the settings and stories we crafted to align with those unique perspectives,” he said. His Prada woman showed heightened emotions of pain and discomfort – as she lay face down on the floor or picked at her eyelash. Yes, we’ve all been that girl, we shiver involuntarily. The Prada man grimaced as he bit his nails, or pulled his Prada Sport hoodie over his head, caught in a heavy snowfall.
While Glen’s was nearly always a star-studded cast with William Dafoe or Joaquin Phoenix, Norbert was obsessed with magnifying simple gestures of the everyday. A shoe falling off one’s feet, taking one’s glove off or cooling down by pouring water on one’s head in between a frustrating workday. He clung to the sensuality of subtle movements, like someone shifting her hair and nearly baring her neck, or a man touching the fabric of his shirt right above his belt. “Our goal was to create three-dimensional personalities with genuine human qualities, rather than mere ‘mannequins’,” explained Schoerner. “The process involved elements akin to acting, brought to life through extensive testing, trials, and in-depth conversations — all focused on shaping nuanced and complex characters.”
Building a narrative thus became significant to every campaign, and Wakamatsu even recalled hearing the word on set multiple times. A primary way of achieving a storyline was through location, which had always been a significant aspect of Norbert’s work. His worlds lie somewhere between the organised city, and the chaos and beauty of an extraterrestrial world or nature itself. For Prada Man’s Fall/Winter 2002, a city man is situated between his city home, overlooking a rocky mountain. In a beautiful shot, the mountains were reflected in his Prada glasses. “The location was always determined by the initial idea,” said Norbert. “In the Prada Sport F/W 2000 campaign, I envisioned shooting a ski and winter collection on a mountaintop at night, with the blurred, flickering lights of the valley in the background — a concept inspired by some of my own memories. Since it was May and such a setting wasn’t naturally available, we built a mountaintop set in a studio to bring the vision to life.”
Norbert mingling the commercial with artistic experimentation was not a style of photography that was alien to Prada – Albert Watson’s time at Prada from ’88 to ’89 saw him drenching the photographs in intrigue through surrealist juxtapositions. Moreover, Norbert was experimenting with digital photography, which was just becoming available to photographers.
The British photographer Robin Derrick wrote in The Impossible Image (2000) that a new age of photography was upon them, where everything could be manipulated. “The possibility to control every pixel, every tiny part of the image, has inspired other photographers to create a kind of hyperreality,” he wrote. “The work of Mert Alas and Marcus Piggott has a superb finish and quality that smoothes over the skin tones of their models to create an image of impossible perfection… like locations in Norbert Schoerner’s image-making: these are ideas that would have been impossible to realise without computers.” Saturated and highly magnified, the background becomes as important as the foreground.
Highlighting that the image is an image, and another reality is important to Norbert. “I believe this idea is central to my work,” he said. “Richard Avedon once said in Égoïste that ‘There is no such thing as inaccuracy in a photograph. All photographs are accurate. None of them is the truth.’ This resonates deeply with me, as I constantly question the authenticity of any perceived reality. One could argue that nature – and indeed any act of creation – is inherently an artifice, a composite of layered experiences and interpretations.”
Eli recalled how Norbert was layering images like a collage with other elements — they didn’t rely on established processes, Norbert explained. “Instead, we developed our own methods, blending various techniques — both analog and digital,” he said. “Most importantly, the idea for the story and setting always came first — from there, we focused on finding the best approach to bring it to life.”
Each segment took nearly two weeks to shoot on set, Eli mentioned, and so did Nancy last year. “Adding days prior for the set to be built and dismantled after,” the former had said. “It was the most extensive campaign I worked on in my career in terms of duration. Naturally, we spent a long time with each other, and most of us worked on the project and not much else, which is highly unusual for a team of freelancers.” After the end of each day, a physical mock-up of the day’s work was either couriered or delivered by an assistant to wherever Miuccia was, she recalled. “She was very involved,” she said.
Norbert went the visceral way while selecting images for the publication. “Instinctive — but also the result of a close collaboration with Jonny Lu, the art director of the book,” he said. “We were aiming for a specific flow to seamlessly connect the various campaigns.” Very soon, it became clear to both of them which ones would work, and which would not. When asked if he’d work on something similar for Miu Miu, he’d rather not go that route!
