“The Pirelli Calendar has many functions—it pleases both the eye and the soul and offers a different, quite often fresh, and always interesting look at female beauty—every time in a different place and different way. Every year we wait to see what the chosen photographer will surprise us with,” said Zdeněk Vacl, Marketing Manager, Pirelli Tyre Czech. “Moreover, the now-classic Pirelli Calendar helps charity activities through auctions. This year, however, it offers even more: the opportunity to ponder—especially when confronted with beauty—over man’s activities, and thus consider to what extent his impact on nature is sustainable for mankind itself,” added Mr. Vacl.
The Pirelli Calendar was first introduced in 1964 and, with the exception of the years between 1975 and 1983 when it was not issued, has each year constituted a major event in global photography. Over the years, a number of prominent photographers have contributed, e.g., Richard Avedon, Annie Leibovitz, Peter Lindbergh, Bruce Weber, and, last year, the Peter Beard working with a model renowned French photographer Peter Demarchelier. For the 2009 Pirelli Calendar, Peter Beard chose seven models as the symbols of beauty showcased in incomparable African settings featuring pristine and unbridled wilderness, such as the Okavango Delta and the Kalahari Desert in Botswana. This year’s models are Daria Werbowy, Emanuela de Paula, Isabeli Fontana, Lara Stone, Malgosia Bela, Mariacarla Boscono, and Rianne Ten Haken.
Beard has befriended and cooperated on other projects with countless other artists, including Andy Warhol, Andrew Wyeth, Richard Lindner, Terry Southern, Truman Capote, and Francis Bacon. By the irony of fate, this great friend and conservationist of African wilderness was injured by an elephant’s tusk and trampled by an elephant in 1966. He currently lives with his wife, Nejma, and daughter, Zara, alternately in New York, Montauk Point and Kenya.
The Pirelli Calendar has traditionally been intended for important customers, famous personalities and heads of states, among them Czech President Václav Klaus. In recent years the Pirelli Calendar has also become an object of sale in online auctions in the Czech Republic. An auction held within the last year brought 171,000 crowns, which was earmarked for purchasing an inverse microscope for genetic analyses for Masaryk Oncological Institute.