In a grimly lit video-editing bay on West 18th Street, Steven
Klein is hovering above proofs of his most recent photographs of Brad Pitt—Brad
in pasty makeup that makes him look like an albino, Brad in a straitjacket,
Brad shirtless and in a sensuous stretch that shows off his rippling back—as
flames that Klein has created for Madonna flicker on a nearby monitor. The
editing bay, stocked with computer-generated-imaging hardware that’s churning
through the billions of ones and zeroes that will add up to the video backdrop
for Madonna’s upcoming tour, hums ominously.
“This is a CGI
animation,” Klein says, pointing to a corner of one flaming screen that will
debut in front of a live audience when the tour kicks off on May 24. “It’s not
real. This back area is made up of, like, five different pieces assembled
together.” The work—which will be projected onto massive, multistory screens at
Madison Square Garden and other venues—is a dramatically expanded outgrowth of
Klein’s 2003 Deitch gallery installation, titled “X-STaTIC PRO=CeSS.” That shows
featured twitchy images of Madonna in unlikely, revealing yogic poses, all
taken in stark interiors. “These layers are going to make the whole piece,” he
continues. “It’s going to be like a moving painting, in a way.”
Beyond multitasking with
Pitt and Madonna, Klein is, arguably, the most influential (and busy) fashion
photographer in the world right now, even while his career seems to be all
about flouting the rules of fashion photography. The Pitt images, for instance,
appear in a 62-page portfolio that takes up the entire feature well of the
May-June issue of the Italian glossy L’Uomo Vogue—and the vast majority
of them don’t have clothing credits, in defiance of fashion-magazine
imperatives.
Klein has also made a career
of flouting the usual rules of celebrity portraiture. The stars he shoots often
seem to be more at the service of his art than their own image management. In
positioning himself as a sort of post–Annie Leibovitz auteur, he’s been able to
persuade stars to pose for intensely private, erotically charged—and sometimes
not particularly flattering—images that he then releases into the most public
and mainstream of forums.
“It’s like, maybe, you
know, Brad and Madonna are two of the biggest icons in the world,” says Klein.
“But I don’t connect with them because of their standing. I’ve connected with
them because of their way of morphing into my pictures, and being willing to go
there with me.”
“There,” in a Steven
Klein image, is typically a place with a dark, foreboding aura. Sometimes the
mood of his photographs is so emotionally isolating that it can seem like he
conducts all his shoots in airtight bunkers buried under a desert floor
somewhere. The paradox of Klein’s status as a superstar photographer of superstars—he’s
created risqué, iconic images of not just Pitt and Madonna but Justin
Timberlake, Ethan Hawke, Naomi Campbell, and others—is that he’s successfully
selling a darker version of celebrity at a particularly idiotic, giddy juncture
in pop culture, just as US Weekly is flying off newsstands and the
treacly showtunery of American Idol is topping the ratings.
If Steven Klein’s
photographs are often punishing takes on pop culture—and on the pop artists
themselves—it may be that we all secretly wish to be punished for what we love.
The fashion industry, likewise, seems eager to submit to Klein’s gentle sadism:
It’s when he’s cared the least about fashion that he’s been most celebrated as
a fashion photographer.
“The thing that gets
frustrating about fashion,” Klein says, “is that as a photographer you always
want to grab on to something that reflects what’s happening in the world,
what’s in the street. You don’t want to just fabricate these dream lives of
these idealistic Barbie dolls that don’t even exist anymore.”
Mindlessly glam fashion
photography is a dead or dying form, and Steven Klein, the anti-fashion fashion
photographer, helped strangle it.
If Bruce Weber’s hard-bodied, shiny, happy Abercrombie boys and
girls set the tone for sexually charged fashion photography for much of the
nineties, and Terry Richardson’s trashy, bisexual leer helped usher in the new
millennium, then Steven Klein’s sexually ambiguous, quasi-commercial
transgressiveness is the new fashion frisson. There’s a seedy glamour to his
work, but it’s a carefully calculated seediness: never so out-there as to be
alienating, and enhanced with the best lighting and sets Condé Nast money can
buy.
“Steven’s edge is what
distinguishes the work,” says Susan Kismaric, a photography curator at the
Museum of Modern Art. “The way it examines the dark side, the side of things
that we tend not to want to focus on. I mean, I realize that sex sells clothes,
but his is a sexuality that is much more palpable and realistic.”
Kismaric is one of the
curators behind MoMA’s current show “Fashioning Fiction,” which largely
examines what happens when fine-art photographers like Philip-Lorca diCorcia,
Nan Goldin, and Cindy Sherman get assignments to shoot fashion. (The answer:
fashionable fine art.) As a result of the show, there’s been a lot of talk this
season about the distinctions (or lack thereof) between art and fashion
photography. The collective conclusion—the boundaries have become so blurry
that they’re practically meaningless—is hardly surprising.
Klein isn’t in the show,
which might be for the best. He finds the “art” discourse to be beside the
point. Madonna, a frequent collaborator of Klein’s, e-mails in to say that she
considers him to be “an artist, not a fashion photographer,” but Klein insists,
“I never consider what I do art. I never will, never will.”
Which is not to say that
he has some sort of creative inferiority complex. Klein restates that “my whole
thing is, nothing’s better, nothing’s more. Art isn’t better than fashion
photography. With fashion photography and art, people have the same kind of
hype about their work. But to say that it all means nothing doesn’t mean you
have to take your work less seriously.”
“Great fashion photography not only understands the clothes and
makes them look beautiful and of-the-moment,” says Vogue editor-in-chief
Anna Wintour, “but it also brings a twist that catches the eye and captures the
imagination. In the case of Steven Klein, you give him a dress, and he will
give you a girl in a dress with a robot in a garden. It’s clever, conceptual,
and ultimately lyrical.” Klein routinely shoots intricate tableaux for Vogue,
as part of his relationship with Condé Nast/Fairchild, which also makes him a
contributor for L’Uomo Vogue and W.
With his boyishly shaggy
haircut, slight build, and unremarkable clothing (jeans and T-shirts, usually),
Klein, 38, blends into his surroundings. In fact, if one hadn’t already met
him, one wouldn’t have been able to pick him out of the crowd of workers
assembled in a chilly, abandoned warehouse at the Brooklyn Navy Yard for a
recent Vogue shoot. A half-dozen emaciated models in nothing but Calvin
Klein underwear are huddled around a heat lamp during a break, smoking
cigarettes, while a team of burly lighting technicians bustles about, wielding
giant umbrella-shaped flash canopies.
There are close to two
dozen people in the dank warehouse space, and this all-day production has the
feel of the most organized indie-movie shoot ever. Klein is seated next to the
old-timey-looking eight-by-ten-inch-format camera, and after surveying the
scene, he occasionally squeezes off a bunch of shots. But the real action on
this set occurs between takes, at a folding table set up nearby. “Maybe we can
build this out a bit,” Klein says quietly to his production designer, gesturing
at a portion of the set as shown in a Polaroid test print. Throughout the day
and into the evening, Klein spends most of his time silently staring at the
images and rearranging bits and pieces of Polaroids. Watching him quietly move
around the fragments to compose the ideal image brings to mind old-master under paintings.
As the set is rearranged,
Force gets her hair done up into a frightful bouffant. “Steven’s clearly the
master of the photograph,” she says to me as the stylist makes the product in
her hair sizzle with a curling iron. “But he’s so generous. I mean, the way he listens
to everybody.”
Or the way he seems to
listen. “Some people think this is an insult,” says Joe Lalli, a photographer
and filmmaker who has been working as a creative consultant for Klein, “but to
me it’s a compliment: Steven’s passive-aggressive. It’s like, he’ll almost look
like he’s not saying much or reacting much, so people project on him. He’s
almost like an empty screen.
While Klein is able to make clothes—and women—look beautiful for
Anna Wintour and other fashion editors, his work is often most vividly
provocative when it features men. The Klein edge, MoMA’s Kismaric says, “is
often sexual in content, or erotic—homosexual or sadomasochistic.”
Madonna calls Klein “an
artist, not a fashion photographer,” but Klein says, “I never consider what I
do art. I never will.”
In 1999, Klein shot the Fight
Club–era Brad Pitt for a W portfolio, featuring two spreads of Pitt
facedown on a concrete floor, pants pulled down to reveal almost his entire
butt, in scenes that called to mind an imminent prison rape. In 2000, he shot a
cover fashion feature titled “Nocturnal” for the Netherlands-based magazine Dutch
that featured a male model exposing himself (shirt: Dolce & Gabbana) and
then, several pages later, contemplating his own robust erection (no fashion
credit).
For Arena Homme in
2001, Klein instantly transformed an ’N Sync pixie, then on the verge of a solo
career, into the heartthrob he is now with porny, poolside, shirtless shots:
Justin Timberlake grabbing his crotch and wielding a squirt gun with
surprisingly convincing menace. He shot model Travis Fimmel in 2002 and then
soccer star Fredrik Ljungberg in 2003—both for famously crotch-centric Calvin
Klein ads.
And now there are Klein’s
new Pitt images where Pitt is sporting a straitjacket.
“The thing is, Brad—I
think Brad likes to be hidden, in a way. He likes not to be, he doesn’t like to
be . . . As much as he’s in front of the camera, I feel like he likes to hide.
And I like to obscure people. Maybe you read it as bondage, but to me, it’s
like obscuring a subject. Then people don’t get distracted by the external mask
of, say, a movie star.”
A straitjacket that
emancipates—the S&M subtext commenting on the celebrity’s bondage to
image—is a telling motif in Klein’s work. He reexposes celebrities who have
built their careers, in large part, through exhibitionism. But it’s reexposure
that’s meant to be liberating—collaborative rather than compulsory. For an
afternoon, or a day, or a couple of days, the burden of crass, run-of-the-mill
image management is lifted. And in the end, of course, these outré
collaborations do plenty to edge up the identities of stars who might otherwise
grow stale in the popular imagination.
Klein’s fine-art take on fashion and celebrity and pop culture
and everything else predates even his days studying painting at the Rhode
Island School of Design in his home state. “I wanted to be a painter ever since
I was, like, 12 or 13 years old. I did ceramics and pottery at the same
time—and I built a darkroom in my parents’ basement but I didn’t really want to
be a photographer.” (He became one, officially, in Paris, post-RISD, when he
got an assignment to shoot for Dior.)
The fashion-photography
thing, despite his more tactile interests, happened early. “When I was in fifth
grade, I fell in love with this girl who was in sixth grade. We went out for a
while. I became obsessed with her and photographed her for many years. She had
a very kind of American Indian look: She used to wear her hair in a long braid,
had very dark olive skin, very big scorpion eyes—dark eyes. And she had a
really distinctive fashion sense. She was the first one who showed me a
European Vogue or French Vogue, before I had any idea what fashion was.”
Klein, it turns out,
recently tracked her down. “I said to myself, Wouldn’t it be great to
photograph her again? My childhood muse—the first girl that I photographed,
the girl that I was obsessed with.”
Maybe Klein’s desire to
shoot an ordinary person has something to do with his own bondage to the
celebrity-industrial complex—indeed, the mechanics of what has become the
Steven Klein machine. In the rented editing suite on 18th Street, he talks a
bit about the increasingly elaborate nature of his shoots: “It can get
impersonal. The more people you have around—walking in, interfering,
distracting—it changes the relationship you have with the person you’re
photographing. I still think there should be this simple idea of subject and
photographer.”
But the narrative
sensibility of even his stillest still photography suggests a filmic future for
Klein—above and beyond his video work for Madonna. “I bet by next year,” Joe Lalli
tells me, “he starts working on a movie. And it’s going to be with a big actor.
He’s going to do strange dramas, a lot of atmosphere and stuff—David Cronenberg
stuff.” W creative director Dennis Freedman says, “I could easily see
Steven working in film. In his fashion work, his photography, he thinks
cinematically; he thinks about the whole entirety of the set.”
