Hollywood photographer Steven Klein: ‘My biggest successes were my biggest risks’

Not many fashion photographers get their leg-up from the master Irving Penn, or lasso a Dior campaign for their first assignment, but Steven Klein did. And he wasn’t yet 21 when those things happened in the mid 1980s. 

‘I’ll tell you a story about that,’ says Klein. ‘A good one…’

The photographer and film-maker is speaking over Zoom, after ditching our meeting in London. He has a good excuse, though: he’s with Madonna in Sicily, where the singer is celebrating her 64th birthday with a five-day party.

She and Klein have been close friends and artistic collaborators for more than two decades. ‘You are a [unicorn emoji]!’ Madonna wrote to him in a Twitter notelet last year.

Images of her ripple through his new book. Steven Klein is his first monograph, and spans his work from its tendril beginnings in Paris, to his apotheosis among fashion and celebrity crowds in the present day. Both relish the way he turns the unctuous world in which they are required to operate, inside out.

Photo of Madonna at Hotel Glória in Rio de Janerio by Steven Klein

The book also includes actors Brad Pitt and Scarlett Johansson, models Kate Moss, Kylie Jenner and Linda Evangelista, and singers Lady Gaga and Justin Timberlake. But you may take a moment to recognise them. Klein’s images are less mirrors of reality than conceptual set pieces. ‘I try to use my celebrities more like actors,’ he says. ‘I don’t like to celebrate celebrity.’ Sex saturates them – both the promise and the threat of it. Subjects appear in gimp suits, bruised or cut, in a meat locker, a burnt car, even a pool of blood. 

In extremis, the undertow of menace can make your eyeballs flinch, but they are always the result of a collaboration. ‘When people come to me and say, “Create something for me and do whatever you want,” I tend not to do those things,’ Klein says. ‘I need something from the other person. So maybe I’ll say to Brad, gimme a word, and he’ll say “painting”, and then we throw things back and forth.’

‘You may take a moment to recognise them’: Photo of Lady Gaga by Steven Klein ‘Too subversive for the mainstream’

Klein has never sought to avoid controversy. A photograph of Kevin Federline (Britney Spears’s ex-husband) with his throat slashed notched up a few column inches, as did a set of Pitt and Angelina Jolie in eroticised scenarios that included a gun, though that was mainly because they hit newsstands at the moment Pitt split from Jennifer Aniston. Even the late Alexander McQueen deemed Klein’s imagery sometimes ‘too subversive for the mainstream’.

‘The thing is, I know there’s a line,’ says Klein, ‘but I always try to go to that line, I like to hit it. If I’m working for Tom Ford – I do a lot of work with Tom – then I put my brain somewhat behind Tom’s eyes, to know his sensibility. Or if I’m working for Anna Wintour – and Anna’s been very kind with me my whole career, allowing me to print some pretty risky images – I know if I go over that line, she’ll find it inappropriate for her magazine. Obviously if I’m doing my own project, then I’m in another mode. But if you’re being hired, you have to consider: who are you working for?’

‘I know there’s a line – but I always try to go to that line’: Photo of Kate Moss by Steven Klein

Klein is 57, though he looks much younger. He is handsome in a Greek statue sort of way, with tousled curls, graven cheekbones and pillowy lips. Part of the reason he wanted to make a book now, he tells me, at this heated cultural juncture, ‘is that a lot of the images in it, you can’t do them any more. A lot of things have become taboo or inappropriate. And I think the change is good. But as an artist, and as a journalist, I think you have to dive into things that are uncomfortable for people to look at.’

Many of the more radical magazine editors he rose up through the business with are no longer at the helm; those in their place operating in a different landscape. ‘In the 1990s, I remember I worked really, really hard, because the criteria was, what kind of vision did you have? But today it’s not about an individual vision. Magazines are unstable, and when people get fearful of losing their jobs, or not selling [magazines], then it’s hard to be creative. To be creative, you need absolute certainty. You need people that are willing to take risks. For me, the biggest successes that I’ve had, are the biggest risks that I’ve taken.’

‘A lot of things have become taboo’: Klein believes some of his photos would no longer be acceptable

He may currently be in Sicily, but travelling has become the exception for Klein. He prefers to work close to his home, in Bridgehampton, New York. It’s a 15-acre farm, and he lives there with his seven-year-old son, Ace, who was conceived with an egg donor and a surrogate mother. During lockdown, they collaborated on a photo story for Vogue Italia. Is Ace into photography then? ‘He likes the equipment, the big stuff I use on film sets,’ says Klein, ‘but mostly it’s BMX bikes and skateboarding.’

Klein also keeps horses (Crystal and Paloma) and dogs (Prince, Ava and Harlow). The names of two other, since departed dogs are tattooed on his forearm (Brandon) and above his heart (Axel). Later, I get a full tour: a heaven and earth symbol on his wrist, a crown on his upper arm and a Picasso bull on his back. Klein has loved Picasso since he was a teen. ‘He opened up my eyes.’

Early years

Klein grew up in New England. He starts out telling me his childhood was ‘kind of monochromatic’ but then changes his mind. He did a lot of thinking for the book, he says, because ‘there’s a part of my work that’s violent… A part of my work that involves sex, and some like, voyeuristic things. They’re all part of my childhood. I wasn’t abused, not that kind of thing. I didn’t have a horrible childhood. I’m saying things made a big impression on me. I was always snooping around and watching, you know, and if you find a gun in your dad’s bedroom, those things kind of stick with you.’

He took his first photo at 13, partly to counter shyness, partly out of boredom. ‘My camera gave me an excuse to go out, searching.’ On one occasion he and his best friend snuck into a strip club and took a polaroid. At 16, he went to Rhode Island School of Design, to study painting and anatomical drawing. Those ‘hours and hours of bodies’ still inform his photographs: ‘When I pose a model, I think about the muscles. I see it as a nude.’

Photo of Kylie Jenner by Steven Klein

In fact, it was a drawing – large scale, of a man sitting in a chair – that got Klein his break; the one he says he has that good story about. It begins when he took a job at a studio on Fifth Avenue. ‘I was the person that cleaned the floors,’ he tells me, ‘but [Irving] Penn was using the studio. There was this peephole in the office, and I would watch him – for me it was like looking at Hollywood. At night, I would go in and make a note of every set-up.’

Penn – a stickler – sat religiously at the same table, so one day, Klein stuck his drawing right above it. Weeks later, ‘I was walking to the bathroom, he was walking to the bathroom, and he said, “Oh. I like your drawing very much.” He introduced me to the director of Dior, who had admired it too. He said, “If you ever come to Paris, call me up.” I know now that people say those things all the time and they don’t really mean them, but I took it seriously. I sold everything I had and I went to Paris. I called him up, and I said, “I’m here!”’

It’s a little sad, after all that, to learn that Klein doesn’t draw any more. Films are becoming his focus, he says, even if making the book has made him realise ‘how lucky I have been to have the opportunity to do all this work. I think it’s the end of an era, though, isn’t it?’

Steven Klein (Phaidon, £150) is out on 22 September