Photo: Robotic Hand, Salt Lake City, Utah, 1986. © Hiro
For more than fifty years, Hiro has made fashion photography one of the most magical mediums in the world, a place so extraordinarily beautiful and lavish that anything was possible. A master of glamour and mystique, Hiro transformed his photographs into dreamscapes that recalled the splendor of the Surrealist movement. Channeling the spirit of Rene Magritte and Salvador Dali, Hiro created works that transformed ideas about fashion photography.
Also: Books | Disco: The Bill Bernstein Photographs
Born Yasuhiro Wakabayashi in Shanghai in 1930 to Japanese parents, Hiro grew up in China. After World War II, his family returned to Japan. While working an American hotel, Hiro came across magazines filled with fashion photographs. Inspired, he moved to New York in 1954, and briefly enrolled in the School of Modern Photography. Dissatisfied, he moved on. By the end of 1956, he was working for Richard Avedon. Seeing his talent Avedon sent him to Alexey Brodovitch, the art director at Harper’s Bazaar, who made him a staff photographer, where he worked from 1956–1975.
Jerry Hall, Saint Martin, French West Indies, . 1975. © Hiro
Now in his mid-80s, Hiro continues to take assignments that allow him to conceptualize exquisite photographs, revealing his on-going love affair with lush color, daring design, and innovative lighting to create entirely new ways of experiencing the photograph. In celebration, an exhibition of his work is currently on view in Hiro at Pace/MacGill Gallery, New York, now through April 16, 2016. The exhibition includes some of the photographer’s crowning gems including a 1963 photograph of a black bovine hoof that wears a Harry Winston diamond necklace. This early image revealed Hiro’s intuitive gift for fashioning the new through a shocking yet beguiling juxtaposition of seemingly disparate objects.
It is his way of envisioning the world that makes Hiro’s images ethereal. His celebrated image Jerry Hall, Saint Martin, French West Indies (1975) is as perfectly now as it was over forty years ago. At once it reminds us that beauty is in the eye of the beholder and as such it is the photographer’s job to perceive new ways of looking. By combining the portrait with the seascape, Hiro allows brilliantly recalls the earlier works of Bill Brandt, but lavishes them with a luxurious touch, using color to create a sense of majesty befitting the idea of fashion itself.
Harry Winston Necklace, New York, 1963. © Hiro
Whether photographing The Rolling Stones, Tokyo subway commuters, fighting fish, the 1969 Apollo 11 spaceship launch, or a baby’s foot, Hiro approaches his subjects with a distinctly metamorphic vision. As Mark Holborn observes of the photographer’s practice in the 1999 monograph, Hiro: Photographs by Hiro, “In Hiro’s world everything is new. The most mundane objects or the most delicate features are transformed. A toenail, the pupil of an eye, a mouth or a light-switch are seen with the same concentration. Concentration is Hiro’s most obvious quality. When he takes the whole theater of fashion to the beach, he returns with a metaphysical contemplation.”
The result is one of pure pleasure, a distinct combination of mind and soul that makes the photograph a profound object to return to time and again, to consider and to behold.
.. Kelly Stewart, New York, 1994. © Hiro
Miss Rosen is a New York-based writer, curator, and brand strategist. There is nothing she adores so much as photography and books. A small part of her wishes she had a proper library, like in the game of Clue. Then she could blaze and write soliloquies to her in and out of print loves.
