Steven Klein
It took me a a long long time to appreciate Steven Klein‘s work. For that long time I didn’t get it. I didn’t think it looked good, and that requisite was what took me a long time to get over…or not get over, but rather it took me a long time to redefine and learn what “look good” means. Now I think Klein has one of the most compelling visions in the industry for the reason that from a practical standpoint what he manages aesthetically is incredible: he’s one of the few guys that can take, uh, not-pretty pictures that still manage to be completely effective as fashion work. I say not-pretty in the sense that it looks like a lot of his work is shot on an old digital camera at iso 400 under flouro lights and processed by a mini-lab…I’m oversimplifying it, but you get the idea. (One thing not simple in his work though is set/prop design, which is usually pretty bloody amazing.) I think his work, from a photographic standpoint, is of the sort that you have to be a fellow photographer (or creative) to understand how good it is, to understand how hard it is to come to something that definitive.
I’m bringing this up b/c I think Klein’s recent work has shown no sign of backing off:
photo: from “Lara Fiction Noire,” French Vogue, 2009. ©Steven Klein.
photo: from “Wild Couture,” Vogue Italia, 2009. ©Steven Klein.
And I’ll add a link to this excellent post by The Imagist, which I found immediately after I published this post: http://www.theimagist.com/node/2862.
To further this topic, out for drinks last night w/ a major fashion agency account director, the talk of Klein’s recent work came up. She commented that, Ugly is in….scary, gross, it’s what everything is about right now, dark times, dark visions. Interesting, and while I didn’t see it from such a macro-smart-level while doing this post, I agreed with her trend summation. Hard times don’t have a lot of room for the Romantic. Work by Linbergh, Roversi, Luchford, etc, the guys that do pretty/beautiful, seems somewhat ingenuous when you feel like the worlds falling apart around you. Fashion and art is about fantasy, yes, but it’s a fantasy that in ways needs to align with the collective reality to work…otherwise how’s one to sympathize?
Klein isn’t one of my favorite photographers, at least in the sense that I feel inspired by his work, but he definitely gets my respect in terms of his defined vision. That he was able to wrangle two leopards and get a model to dangle herself in front of them while he’s safely behind a fence says a lot about his production abilities.