At the time of these photographs, STERN was directed by his founder, Henry Nannen, who was still keeping up the great photo-journalistic tradition of the mid-century. He also commissioned fashion sequences, such as the one I photographed on the Island of Aran (Ireland).

When working for STERN, expenses were no problem (in Ireland, we had gone location-hunting on a rented airplane); but what counted even more for me, was the relative freedom I had in choosing dresses, models and situations. This is probably the reason why the Aran job is the one, of all my work, where I best managed to weave fashion photography into a kind of believable story.

The drawback of working for Nannen was that no one seemed to know what would please him. While the Aran pictures were given a cover and several inside spreads, my next job - bathing suits on a Senegal beach - never got printed, even though the models looked just as believable and sexy, as they were fooling around with some goodlooking young Africans on the beach. I couldn't make out the reason until several years later, when a German journalist friend told me: "Didn't you know that Nannen had three proverbial allergies: Schnee, Chinesen und Neger (snow, chinamen and black people)?"