Within the pantheon of fashion photographers, the late Gösta Peterson stays largely unheralded — but that might be changing.

The primary posthumous show of his imaginative, go-with-the-flow work debuts Thursday at Deborah Bell Photographs at 526 West twenty sixth Street in Manhattan. “Gösta Peterson Photographs Sixties-Nineteen Seventies” brings into focus the Swedish American talent’s progressive elan. Peterson, who died on the age of 94 in 2017, prized his independence and elements of surprise, whereas the photography of his contemporaries Irving Penn and Richard Avedon was generally more studied. Bell compared the freelance-focused Peterson to the late sports photographer-turned-fashion photographer Martin Munkacsi, who was quick to capture not only motion but a spirited moment with an incredible eye for composition.

“His talent is the same as those, who were better-known than he. It’s true that some people resolve they need to live their lives in a different way and in how they work. A few of the photographers which might be better-known like Avedon and Penn had contracts with fashion magazines,” Deborah Bell said. “He was just more independent in every way, and in spirit. Sometimes people make these lifestyle decisions. Either they don’t need a full-time job or having people tell them what to do. Gus was very very like that.”

Without query, the fashionable images stand the test of time. Unlike current digital photographers, who can correct their images, the self-taught Peterson needed to figure things out himself and submerged himself into his darkroom to achieve this. Known simply as “Gus,” he was stimulated by challenges, not terrified of them, based on his wife Patricia. A former Henri Bendel executive and longtime fashion editor, she often worked shoulder-to-shoulder on location with him.

“I don’t need to sound so boastful but I’m amazed how original and unorthodox his photos are, because they’re very tasteful. There’s nothing vulgar about them. They may run today and look just as fresh and chic,” his wife said.

After attending the art school Anders Beckman Skola in his native Sweden, he served within the Swedish military after which launched into a fashion illustrator job on the country’s first modern ad agency, Gumaelius Annonsbyrå. Top-drawer in his performances, Peterson was given a Rolleiflex camera as a farewell present before picking up stakes for Recent York in 1948. All in favour of art and jazz, the trombone-playing Peterson arrived Stateside with a mission. “He went straight to The Met to have a look at the Rembrandts after which he went to Harlem after that to listen to jazz,” his wife said. “There was all the time jazz in his studio.”

Improvisation also surfaced in his work with Harper’s Bazaar, Mademoiselle, Esquire and other magazines. In that pre-digital era, editorial assignments also needed to be quick turns. His wife, the Recent York Times’ former fashion editor, recalled having only half an hour for Twiggy’s first U.S. shoot. “I only had one outfit and a hat. He created a composite. He was just capable of solve things. He did things in a really original way within the studio and on the road.”

The creatively symbiotic couple also teamed up in the summertime of 1967 for a Recent York Times magazine cover shoot with the then-relatively unknown Black model Naomi Sims — a primary for the news outlet. During a fashion profession from the ’50s through the ’80s, Peterson was just about assistant-less. Cycling to his assignments in an Abercrombie & Fitch safari jacket with a light-weight meter in a single pocket and film in the opposite, he preferred to go solo.

Not inquisitive about working with models who were known faces “who did their one, two, three poses,” Peterson applied his dexterity Henri Bendel ad campaigns and Mademoiselle’s college issue, his wife said. “He desired to be the director. And there was no digital. He built his own darkroom and the studio itself.”

Highly aware of his surroundings, Peterson once captured a trio of women roller-skating in loose-fitting skirts on a handball court. “Young Sophisticates,” a gaggle portrait of bespectacled boys in Boy Scout uniforms with two precocious girls, is faintly Wes Anderson-esque. Far-flung along with his subjects, the photographer captured a solarized Rudi Gernreich look, Salvador Dalí, Duke Ellington and non-models too. At an editorial shoot at Marymount College with a model, who had been styled by then-fashion editor Deborah Turbeville (whom he later encouraged to pursue photographer),” rapidly, these nuns got here out for one minute on this beautiful staircase, and he just snapped right then and there. It was very quick, only one shot,” said Peterson’s wife, who prefers “Pat.”

Pat first met Peterson at a celebration in West Hampton, Recent York, where he had been camping with fellow photographer Fernand Fonssagrives, whose wife Lisa was a Swedish model and artist. “I noticed him and thought, ‘That’s a wierd thing. A person is watering the flowers.’ He was very much into nature — the Swedes particularly are.”

One other curiosity was the Volkswagen Beetle — a rarity within the U.S. at the moment — during which Peterson drove her back to Manhattan. Bell described his great taste for garments as much like “a gentleman farmer dandy,” often wearing a hat and mid-length boots pedaling through the streets of Recent York. Losing steam standing over a drafting table all day as a Lord & Taylor fashion illustrator, Peterson began spending his spare time walking through the streets of Recent York taking photographs. That led to freelance work with fashion magazines and “taking models out of the standard context to make them seem so independent and free,” Bell said.

She first caught sight of Peterson’s work as a 10-year-old Minnesotan in problems with Mademoiselle and Harper’s Bazaar. Years later her intrigue was so strong that she ferreted out his address before relocating to Recent York in 1978 and wrote a postcard asking to satisfy him. True to his spontaneous way of working, he photographed Bell for the American edition of L’Officiel — “I’m definitely not model material.”

Friendly with Pat, and the couple’s Turn gallery owner daughter Annika and filmmaker son Jan, plans for an exhibition were shelved by the pandemic until they “could have an actual ta-da,” Bell said. She also freelanced for Peterson for a bit, assisting on set and within the darkroom. “As Arthur Elgort once said, Gus worked very off-the-cuff. Once I saw him work, it was all improvisatory. He had an idea for a set, and possibly a setting and a story in his head. For considered one of the Bendel’s campaigns, he put a swing in his studio against the seamless paper for the model to swing backwards and forwards. It was all very take-it-as-it-comes inside a framework that he had in mind.”

Nevertheless bittersweet the brand new show is for Peterson’s daughter Annika, she said there couldn’t be a greater person than Bell. Her stint as an assistant led to great trust and a decades-long friendship with the family. Her father’s streamlined low-key style created a small inner cycle. “Anyone, who was within the studio, was form of a member of the family. When people were there, it was a matter of ‘That is what we’re going to do today. We’re going to eat a bit of salmon together,’” his daughter said.

That was a time when photographers were just doing jobs, not necessarily saving negatives. “This was a trade like a cobbler. It wasn’t regarded as, ‘Oh, that’s my precious art collection.’ That’s the irony. When Gus was making this stuff, I feel it’s fair to say, a number of them were more artistic than fashion photography now. They were just considered then as a job. He just enjoyed what he did,” his daughter said.