The set of the Pirelli 2026 calendar: Digital surrealism, analogue esthetics and a fish tank | Tradition

On the set of each nice photograph shoot, there’s an virtually solemn pressure: each gesture that’s made will influence the ultimate outcome; what any worker in any division does impacts the work of one other. With a non secular respect, nobody does something they shouldn’t. The leaders of every crew may be shortly recognized: they’re those crowded on the three or 4 screens that present the shoot’s progress. The helpers are those who carry instruments. The make-up artist totes a bag filled with brushes, lotions, foundations and concealers; the manufacturing supervisor, a continuously vibrating cellular phone and a scrunched pack of cigarettes.

This specific set, the luxurious Arri Stage on the outskirts of London on a June afternoon, has all the weather of an enormous manufacturing: solemnity and pressure, helpers and creatives — and a fish tank. The tank is about two meters lengthy, and the legendary Czech mannequin Eva Herzigova is immersed in it. Norwegian photographer Sølve Sundsbø takes her portrait, Fuji digital camera in hand, zooming out and in from the tank, interrupting every collection of photographs to look infrequently on the screens. The mannequin surfaces continuously to gulp air earlier than totally immersing herself once more to let her blonde hair tackle surreal shapes round her head. “I always play a role in the sessions, I’m never myself,” Herzigova explains after three hours within the water. “Today, for example, I don’t play a mermaid: I’m more of a creature like a jellyfish. I didn’t ask for this aquatic job, I was assigned it. I’m a Pisces. Coincidence?”

There’s a extra earthly rationalization for what introduced Herzigova right here: the 2026 Pirelli calendar, one of many largest annual milestones on the planet of images. What started in 1964 as a automobile to advertise the Milan firm’s tires that includes spectacular pictures of worldwide fashions, has turn into an establishment that has employed among the best image-makers of our time, together with Richard Avedon, Terry Richardson, Helmut Newton, Peter Lindbergh, Bruce Weber, Annie Leibovitz, Steve McCurry, Steven Meisel, in addition to among the largest stars.

“Being chosen as a photographer for the Pirelli calendar is like winning an award, you just have to then deserve it,” explains Sundsbø, who has photographed campaigns for main vogue homes similar to Bulgari, Cartier, Hermès, Gucci, Prada, Louis Vuitton, Tom Ford, Thierry Mugler, Estée Lauder, Giorgio Armani, Guerlain and Lancôme. In 2014, he received an Emmy for a video for The New York Times.

Herzigova, 52, is among the fashions chosen for the subsequent The Cal. She joins a mature solid: actresses Tilda Swinton,64; Isabella Rossellini, 73; Italy’s Luisa Ranieri, 51; and designer Susie Cave, 58, who’s married to musician Nick Cave. Then there’s a barely youthful crew: the tennis participant Venus Williams, the pop star FKA Twigs, the actress Gwendoline Christie (Briana of Tarth in Game of Thrones) and Irina Shayk, the most well-liked mannequin of the early 2010s. They are additionally joined by Puerto Rican actress Adria Arjona and Chinese mannequin and actress Du Juan.

“These are not young models who you pay to come but who don’t know what they are doing here,” explains Sundsbø.“I did the casting with Pirelli thinking of experienced women: Susie has been on the calendar three times and Eva as many times in the last 25 years. I didn’t want to be the man who takes advantage of the innocence of women younger than him: I wanted women my age who wanted to be here, who were told at all times what was going to be done,” he explains.

What was going to be performed was an exploration into Sundsbø’s esthetic obsessions, particularly the combo between nature and know-how. Months earlier than the studio photograph shoots, to which Pirelli invited EL PAÍS, the photographer took the crew by way of the Norwegian and English countryside. The landscapes they captured there are these which can be projected onto the large screens of the Arri studio, due to the newest Hollywood know-how. This permits Sundsbø, who makes a speciality of outside images, to find his fashions in nature whereas controlling how Herzigova’s hair floats or the drooping of her eyelid, with an consideration to element that solely a studio permits. A millimeter in any route means a special universe.

The combination of naturalism and artificiality produces one thing virtually surreal. Sundsbø calls it magical realism. “But not because it resembles Latin American literature, but because it is real but unreal. The sets are digital, the cameras are digital, but the photos look analogue,” he says.

Some of the fashions have an related component: Herzigova water; and actress Ranieri, the wind. In earlier classes, Ranieri posed like a statue in entrance of a giant fan. Before Sundsbø took the pictures, a silk fabric was draped over the actress to ripple dramatically. “It’s very difficult to portray the wind, but if you have an object that represents it, it’s feasible,” Sundsbø explains.

“It’s very different being a model to acting!” observes Ranieri as she leaves the session. “With a script, you have words that allow you to enter a world of emotions. In a photo shoot, you’re capturing a moment, there’s no context, there’s no character that you can build with words.”

Capturing the second, that tense relationship between images and time, is one other of Sundsbø’s skills: “Photography is not cinema, where there is narrative and a story. Photography is not even a poem. It’s a phrase in a poem, where you have to guess what came before and what will come after. And when it’s good, when it’s really good, you want to know what surrounds that moment. You see a photo by Cartier-Bresson and that happens, it makes you dream. Who is the boy carrying the bottle? [In reference to the famous photo Rue Mouffetard, Paris] What is happening in this image? It makes you think. And thinking about it makes it better than if you were told the whole story.”

It is probably the least Instagrammable strategy on the planet, however maybe that’s exactly the target. “It’s just that the world of fashion, of fashion photography, is so boring right now,” says Herzigova. “In general, with the new platforms, the new networks, anyone can use a filter and be a model, anyone can be a photographer. It’s nice to work with someone who presents you with a worthy idea because they have a worthy vision,” she says of Sundsbø.

All this — supermodels and fish tanks, the wind and the Norwegian countryside, digital surrealism with analogue esthetics — to promote tires? “No,” says Sundsbø. “It’s like that famous phrase by Irving Penn: ‘Fashion photography doesn’t sell fashion, it sells dreams.’ It’s the same here. Pirelli already has Formula 1 to sell its tires. I don’t intend to sell car wheels, but to communicate something beautiful and magical, something that, hopefully, they will want to have associated with their name. That’s my job.”

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