“To open this book is to enter criminal territory,” says photographer Mark Holborn in the introduction to Klein’s book. The police are busy here. Transgression is also attractive.” If Klein’s transgression doesn’t look as exciting as it used to, you can’t disable it. Few magazines—and even fewer advertisers—continue to be strong, edgy, and “difficult” when they value anything remotely challenging. Sadly, that makes “Steven Klein” feel like a period piece, with fashion photographers including Klein, Meisel, Nick Knight, David Sims, Bruce Weber, Collier Shore, Mathias Vriens, Jürgen Teller and Wolfgang Tillmans. – led an adventurous, sophisticated, queer-oriented avant-garde. They have broken old conservatives, led to new ones, and changed the way we think about the medium and its message. Because Klein was one of the group’s most radical members, especially in retrospect, his work seems even more outrageous now than it did when it first appeared. How dare he take pictures of a naked woman with surgical scars on her stomach and breasts as if she were a corpse lying on the grass? Or a pregnant male nudist, a Los Angeles sex film producer, a model in a tank like Damien Hirst’s Sharks, or Tom Ford masquerading as a car hood beating a man’s bare ass? It is strange to think that this is history too despicable to repeat itself.
Ricardo Tisci, New York City, 2011
“Kim in Prada, Image #15”, Motel 6, Los Angeles, 2014.
Holborn’s introduction describes a short film Klein made for Alexander McQueen that focuses on the opening scene from Michael Powell’s 1960 film “Peeping Tom” with Kate Moss, a “troublesome hunter” played by Klein himself. Just short of that, a small camera crammed like a weapon in Klein’s tattooed hands, is one of the book’s most charged and gripping images. Klein is not a lone fighter. He has a great support staff to help him realize his obsession: producers, stylists, hair and makeup people. But his most flamboyant visions don’t make the editorial pages these days. For the cover of the spring issue, he transformed singer Ethel Cain into a vampiric Queen Victoria. V, it’s just shocking. Deconstruction — a cross-sectional view — may be old-school, but Klein hasn’t given up on it. His monograph suggests that he is still an exciting and disturbing force.
