Even as the Pirelli Calendar flaunts its fiftieth anniversary with a previously unseen shoot by Helmut Newton, it’s easy to forget that powerful images of impossibly beautiful women were not always the norm. The original Calendar was a novel experiment in luxury marketing, devised by art director Derek Forsyth in 1964 to set a then-fledgling tire maker apart from the competition.
Pirelli Calendar by Sarah Moon, 1972
In spite of the fame Pirelli achieved, problems in creating unusual photographs, which measure up to that fame, begin to appear.