German Larkin Photographer | About

Mr. Larkin, who was born in Semey, Kazakhstan, to a German father and Russian mother, did not professionally pick up a camera until he was 30. At 13, his parents divorced and he moved to Nuremberg, Germany, with his father. Three years later, at 16, he moved to Moscow to live with his mother and at 19, he moved to Milan, where he graduated from Bocconi University with a bachelor’s degree in sociology in 2003. Mr. Larkin then sought opportunities to “do something in media,” as he put it. He spent six years working in press offices for fashion companies including Aeffe, an Italian business that owns Moschino and other labels, before starting to write freelance for publications including Style.com, Russian Tatler, Grazia and Elle Ukraine. Mr. Larkin, who had no formal photography training, said that his approach to the medium was influenced by his background in sociology. “I was really studying society with my lens,” he said, “to capture the rawness of what was happening behind the scenes at very glamorous events.” From the start, he was less interested in taking staged photo ops as he was in seeking out what he described as “real life,” or what was going on “at the tables, on the tables and under the tables.” High-profile nuptials he has since photographed also include the July 2021 wedding of Princess Diana’s niece Lady Kitty Spencer and Michael Lewis, the chairman of the fashion conglomerate Foschini Group; the September 2020 marriage of the model and charity founder Natalia Vodianova and the fashion executive Antoine Arnault; the January 2020 nuptials of Dasha Zhukova, an entrepreneur in the art and magazine worlds, and the shipping heir Stavros Niarchos III; and the July 2019 wedding of Elie Saab Jr., the chief executive of his father Elie Saab’s namesake fashion company, and Christina Mourad.