C
ommit to something,” reads the tagline on the photograph of a woman wearing diamond earrings and little else, breastfeeding twins over a plate of steak tartare. If Equinox was looking to turn heads with its recent ad campaign, the elite fitness brand has succeeded. This startling image was created by Steven Klein, the photographer whose own “something” is an artistic vision that is seductive, transgressive and gender-bending. Saturated colour, highcontrast tonality and pointed storytelling are typical of Klein, whose background in film informs his fashion editorials and luxury-brand campaigns with cinematic magnetism and suspense. Klein says his models and celebrity subjects “are fearless when they can understand the difference between making pretty pictures versus interesting photographs.” “Ugliness and beauty are in the eye of the beholder,” adds Klein, keenly aware that his daring work has caused shock waves over the years. When he photographs A-list stars such as Brad Pitt, Naomi Campbell or Lady Gaga, he often portrays them in scenarios that are erotic, foreboding and sometimes violent. In a 2003 sound and video installation, for instance, the photographer cast Madonna as a performance artist living out her most abject fears: in one scene, the pop star, surrounded by coyotes ready to pounce, is in a backbend and tied to a pole. Bondage, extreme poses, constricting clothing and dangerously vertical footwear are preferred Klein tropes. In his photograph Killer Heels, Klein shows female feet clad in devil-red stilettos after they have irrevocably scratched a car hood. The work, a 34-by-60-inch still from his video for the 2014 Brooklyn Museum exhibition of the same name, will be offered directly from Klein’s studio in Sotheby’s Photographs sale on 5 October. As one of the most in-demand imagemakers working today, Klein is a favourite contributor to major fashion glossies such as Vogue and W. Yet one of his longest-running and closest collaborations has been with Visionaire, the influential, high-concept art and style publication that has come to define a certain brand of downtown New York cool. At its launch in 1991, Visionaire was the brainchild of the ultra-hip trio of Cecilia Dean, a student and model, and James Kaliardos and Stephen Gan, classmates at the Parsons School of Design (Gan left Visionaire in 2014). Their creation challenged the traditional magazine format: rather than as issues, Visionaire would be released in editions built around a theme and created in collaboration with artists,
(Previous pages) Steven Klein’s Killer Heels, 2014 (estimate $18,000–22,000), will be offered at Sotheby’s New York on 5 October.
(This page, from top) Klein’s portrait of Alexander McQueen in Visionaire 58 SPIRIT, a tribute to the late designer, and a Klein image from Visionaire 31 BLUE. (Opposite) Visionaire 67 FETISH, which includes a set of eleven-by-fourteen-inch photos by Klein, to be released this autumn.
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