NEW YORK, NY.- A few weeks ago, on a quiet street in the Red Hook neighborhood of Brooklyn, a woman raced out of a church to tell the people taking photographs outside that what they were doing was not OK.
“I’m going to call the diocese,” she said. “We have active parishioners in this community that would be very, very upset if they ever saw this in a magazine.”
One could understand her concern.
The male model standing in front of a statue that depicted the Visitation of the Blessed Virgin Mary was not exactly pledging fealty to it.
He was decked in Balenciaga black, his hair was dyed peroxide blond, and the black makeup around his eyes and white pancaked around the rest of his face was starting to drip in the late-day sun.
The look was punk-rock ghoul, and the magazine for which it was being shot was The Face. The photographer was Steven Klein, who, for about three decades, has been one of the fashion world’s biggest provocateurs, a guy whose severe, fetishistic pictures in W, Vogue, Harper’s Bazaar and Interview have made him one of the industry’s best-known image architects.
Klein has photographed ad campaigns for Gucci, Saint Laurent, Balmain, Calvin Klein and Dolce & Gabbana, and branched out into directing music videos, including for Lady Gaga and Nicki Minaj. His work has been shown at the Brooklyn Museum and with gallery owners Larry Gagosian and Jeffrey Deitch.
“He has an incredible eye and a slightly perverse sense of beauty that never strays too far in one direction or the other,” designer Tom Ford wrote in an email. Ford, whose ad campaigns are also often photographed by Steven Klein, added: “That creates tension in his photos. They have edge. They can be slightly shocking, not in an extreme way but in a way that makes you stop and look closely. And he makes one feel comfortable on set. Even if they are nude lying between two plastic sex dolls.”
Ford was referring to a sci-fi spread for W that Klein shot in 2005 that featured the designer presiding over a collection of life-size, anatomically correct toys that cost thousands of dollars and look no less real than many of the real-life people who appear in contemporary fashion magazines. Those photographs can be seen again in a 464-page monograph that Phaidon will publish this month.
Nearly every star who can be identified simply by a first name makes an appearance (or two or three): Brad, Angelina, Nicole, Kanye, Kim, Scarlett, Naomi, Rihanna and Madonna, who gave a tribute to Klein in Vanity Fair last month about the dozens of shoots they’ve done together over the past 17 years, a result, Madonna said, of their “mutual passion for horses, mysticism, great art and hot sex.”
Juergen Teller, Klein’s peer in fashion photography influence (and age), takes pictures that are bright, improvisational and underproduced, as if the photographer and the subject were just hanging out. His lo-fi aesthetic defined Marc Jacobs’ cool-kid ad campaigns starting in the late 1990s and spawned countless Instagram imitators.
Klein’s photos have a metallic sheen that is meticulously manufactured. He darts between fantasias that are alternately post-apocalyptic and ridiculously retro. Models, musicians and movie stars are cast as characters who, placed in a fictional universe, eerily become more themselves.
“He’s the most cinematic photographer I’ve ever worked with,” said Dennis Freedman, the creative director for W until 2009. He described Klein as the guy who “carries the torch for Helmut Newton.”
Certainly, the two photographers share a kind of sex-as-a-weapon approach. But Klein, 57, either intentionally or by design, has a unique ability to make famous people look both incredibly glamorous and utterly isolated or “somehow trapped,” as he put it.
In 2005, Brad Pitt started his relationship with Angelina Jolie in a 1950s-inspired shoot for W magazine, that, as Klein described it, looks “like one of those Life magazine shoots; it’s idyllic on the surface, but there are cracks underneath.”
In 2009, Madonna celebrated her divorce from Guy Ritchie by traipsing around a Rio de Janeiro hotel, where, decked out in Dior couture and surrounded by younger male models, she turned into a modern-day Mrs. Robinson.
“I like to create stories that may be fiction but reveal some truth,” Klein said. “And sometimes, I take my pictures, and they become real.”
Always a Voyeur
One of the photographs in Klein’s monograph features Daphne Guinness, the British-born brewery heiress and cyberpunk fashion icon. It is taken from a shoot he did with her in 2008 for Italian Vogue. In it, she towers over a bald, overweight man who bears a resemblance to Alfred Hitchcock. Barely visible in the background is a schoolboy, peering in through a glass door.
Klein grew up in Cranston, Rhode Island, a time in his life when everything was “mundane.” he said. He was sitting in a red club chair in the living room on the second floor of his four-story West Chelsea townhouse.
He had on what he almost always has on: black T-shirt, black jeans, black leather belt with his name in studs on the back and a couple of thin gold necklaces, the kind worn by guys with a posh-punk aesthetic.
Two Great Danes, Prince and Harlow, lay in front of him on the parquet floor. Side tables had diamond skulls. On his bookshelves were several novels by Joyce Carol Oates; David France’s exhaustive history of the AIDS era, “How to Survive a Plague”; “The Photographs of Ron Galella”; and Gay Talese’s recent book, “The Voyeur’s Motel."
As a little boy, Klein had braces on his legs, though he can’t exactly remember how he wound up with them or when those came off; the point is, he was bowlegged and an outsider. When he gained full control of his legs, he became one of those kids who was constantly sneaking off to go explore.
At some point, his mother tied him to chair to teach him a lesson, he said.
In junior high school, Klein developed a crush on a girl who liked to read fashion magazines. Around the time of his bar mitzvah, he was given an Instamatic camera. During a family vacation in Miami, he sneaked into a club with exotic dancers and started snapping away. Back at home, he took pictures of residents of a sanitarium.
In high school, Klein began reading books by George Gurdjieff, an Armenian philosopher who saw life as a constant state of hypnotic waking sleep.
“I imagined myself being in a salon of mystical people who were searching for truth and meaning,” said Klein, who in 1981 headed to the Rhode Island School of Design, where he moved into painting. But he’d always been, as he puts it, a voyeur, and his interest in photography got stronger as he learned about Weegee, Diane Arbus, Guy Bourdin and Irving Penn. (Newton, he acknowledged, is another influence.)
In the late 1980s, he moved to an East Village studio in Manhattan, turned the closet into a darkroom and began hanging out at the Pyramid Club and the Sound Factory.
There wasn’t exactly a moment he realized he was gay. “I probably still had girlfriends then,” he said. “It was never really an issue or something I struggled with in a deep way. I felt good around men, and I felt good around women, and I think I had more of a complex about committing myself to something.”
Brand-name fashion magazines didn’t hire a lot of young photographers at that time, but the European ones with big attitudes and small budgets needed celebrities to appear in them. Since many of them were in the United States, Klein got to work.
That led to assignments with Harper’s Bazaar, Interview, Allure and Italian Vogue.
The Vogue Woman
“My first story for Vogue, with Gwyneth Paltrow, did not run,” Klein said. (The pictures were taken sometime around 1996.) “It was very grungy. Gwyneth had just started acting. She was wearing gold lamé suits, she looked great grungy, but I learned from that the idea of who the Vogue woman was. You could take a picture that was very exaggerated — Anna likes exciting ideas, but she does not like sad, depressing or remote.”
Soon after that, Anna — Anna Wintour, Vogue’s editor — paired him with Phyllis Posnick, the stylist who worked on most of Newton and Penn’s shoots. Posnick helped Klein figure out how to execute his vision within the bounds of the magazine.
“Because the pictures were strange or unexpected, the woman in them had to be chic and lovely, or at least, as we perceived lovely or beautiful or chic to be at the magazine,” Posnick said. “The pictures were successful as long as the person in them looked like the Vogue reader.”
Or the Vogue editor.
Take, for example, a 2005 picture Klein and Posnick collaborated on. It featured a model shirtless in a meat locker, surrounded by carcasses. “We gave her a bob!” Klein said.
Naturally, it ran.
Taking Fashion Seriously
A favorite word in the fashion world is “directional.” That is the term given to designers who find novel ways to make heels utterly unwalkable, decree that they must be photographed with a black mask over their face or decide to place popcorn all over the floor of their runway show simply because.
Klein, from early on, was considered “directional.” He even did cheesy jeans campaigns in Japan, one of which, in 1996, starred Pitt. After that, the two worked on shoots that deconstructed ideas of masculinity and reinvented contemporary fashion photography.
The “laboratory” they used was W magazine, which took fashion pictures so seriously that individual photographers were often given 40 pages of the magazine, something that would never have been possible with, say, Wintour.
The pictures Klein and Pitt did for “Fight Club” in 1999 featured Pitt in a variety of storylines that took the homoerotic undertones of the film and placed them right on the surface. In one image, Pitt wore a mesh shirt emblazoned with the Hustler magazine logo. In another, he was captured facedown on the floor with his bare bottom arched in the air.
With 40 pages to fill, and reasons perhaps too deep for nonfashion people to understand, Freedman decided to run the image twice. Around the time the issue was being sent to the printer, Klein sent the layout to Pitt, who expressed what by most accounts was intense displeasure. “He thought it was overkill,” Klein said.
“I remember,” Freedman said, “I was sitting in the back of a taxi, and the phone rang. It was Steven, and he said: ‘I have Brad on the phone. He wants to speak to you.’ He was really angry.”
Freedman told Pitt that he was terribly sorry but that the issue had already shipped. Perhaps that was the truth.
A Time That’s Ended
Klein had reservations about showing me his bedroom.
I’d just asked him why fetish was such a big part of his work, and he’d responded plainly that he was more like an anthropologist of that world than a direct participant.
“I’m fascinated by what turns people on and what scares them,” he said. “I like to create tension between light and dark, hard and soft. I think if I was really into fetish, the pictures wouldn’t look like they do. If the subject of what you’re shooting is too much what you want, if you’re not an outsider, I don’t think you can depict it.”
Nevertheless, the headboard of his brass frame bed was connected to the base by chains, the sort one sees tied around a bike with a Kryptonite lock. On a side table was a mask with eyeholes. “I wore it for Halloween,” he said. On the other was a picture of a cross, composed of two perpendicular penises. “Madonna gave it to me!” he said.
Klein first worked with Madonna for W in 2002, on a shoot where she used a go-go pole to contort herself into yogic poses.
She introduced him to kabbalah, the spiritual practice that seems to resonate for many powerful people who are obsessed with molding the universe to their specifications and need to know how to give up control (or at least breathe out). He got her into riding horses, which is what they do together in Bridgehampton, New York, on the weekends, where they both own properties.
A few weeks before the Brooklyn shoot, I visited Klein at his house there. From the outside, it is black with a burnt hue. Inside, the floors were dark and concrete. There were a couple of sadomasochism portraits in a bathroom, where the shower had no door.
Klein was in a lofty space that serves as his living room and bedroom, sitting on a perfectly distressed Danish sofa, thumbing through his new monograph. In ran his son, Ace, who is 7, and via Amazon had just received his first BB gun. Klein expressed bewilderment about “boys and guns.”
I had expected him to talk about the book as a capstone on his career. Over the past five years, some of his contemporaries had been sidelined by allegations of sexual misconduct, among them Bruce Weber, Mario Testino, Patrick Demarchelier and Peter Lindbergh. (Demarchelier and Lindbergh are no longer alive.) Klein is close to, if not quite, the last man standing.
Yet he likened the book to a punctuation mark on a time that has pretty much ended. He hasn’t done a Vogue cover since 2018.
That’s a function of a changing industry. Many magazines have closed. W was sold in 2020. Even at Vogue, $200,000 shoots are rarely, if ever, possible anymore.
That gives magazines that are considered “directional” the ability to ask photographers to “reduce costs,” which means spend out of their pockets. Klein is not known as an angry guy, but that gets to him.
“They asked me to cut my fee by 90%,” he said. “I actually wrote Anna a letter. I said: ‘I’m living in New York. I have a son I support.’” (Vogue didn’t respond to a request for comment about the reductions.)
Of course, Klein said all of this in a home he owns in one of the wealthiest spots in the Hamptons. But it isn’t as if Wintour has lost all of her perks, he pointed out.
“She still has a car and driver,” he said. “Don’t cry poverty. It doesn’t work like that.”
This article originally appeared in
The New York Times.
