July 3, 2025 |
“[It’s] a record of images that were never meant to be seen,” says celebrated American photographer Steven Klein. He’s speaking about Private Collection, his new, four-part box set of provocative photobooks, released last Thursday by cult publisher Idea. And, like peering into a clandestine archive of desire, lit only by the flash of his camera, Klein – who has collaborated with global publications like W, Vogue, Vanity Fair and Arena Homme+ to name just a few – is bang on.
Private Collection offers a peek into a world that’s “private, pervasive” and “sometimes violent”, as Klein puts it. The photographer, who stepped onto the scene in the ‘90s, quickly becoming known for works underscored by themes of objectification, power and control, explains the photobooks to be these sort of “confessional” works of fiction. Each chapter feeds into the others, like diary entries filled with “fragments, obsessions” and “wounds”, leaving the reader with a lingering sense of uncertainty. Starting with Cut Throats before moving onto Dildos, Death Kit and ending with Photo Booth, each tome tells a tale that, at its end, is left open, unfinished and foggy, forcing the viewer to piece the rest together.
Cut Throats
The four softback books are presented inside a black, archival box cut through with a glossy sticker that offers up both a crimson contents list and two eerie images; a sweat-speckled neck with blood trickling down the decolletage and a shadow-cast self-portrait.
Cut Throats, the first in the compendium, gathers a chilling series of gruesome film stills. Young men in domestic, suburban-esque locations lounge on leather sofas, deck chairs, toilet seats and bench presses, their throats slit and noses bloodied, faces fixed in disoriented, vacant expressions. There’s something deceivingly erotic about the stills – maybe it’s the sweat-slicked, dazed look of the subjects, or the charged intensity behind their narrowed eyes. Or perhaps, more bluntly, it’s simply the fact that they’ve all got their tops off. Either way, the images function to redefine portraiture, playing with flesh as a metaphor for “cultural decay and personal exposure,” looking not just at the subject as they are, but beneath their surface – literally – by opening them up and letting something sort of esoteric seep out.
Dildos
Dildos follows with an assemblage of striking still lifes that capture a collection of clinically precise (or so we’ve heard) fake penises. The line up shows the phallic objects being grasped at or standing alone against a plain backdrop, arranged with the sterile detachment of a forensic exhibit. One image sees eight of the pleasure sticks meticulously lined up in a large glass case, the door ajar, shining like trophies, because why not?
Death Kit
The third book, Death Kit reconstructs a staged crime scene with a string of ‘forensic’ photos taken on an iPhone 8 which sit alongside dye-sublimation prints and scanned materials. In one shot, a life-sized doll appears, wearing nothing but shredded, sheer stockings, propped up on all fours on a black, plastic sheet in a grass field. Similar mannequins are posed half submerged under water, limp in a decrepit shed, or wrapped in plastic on a black leather sofa with just its red latex boots sticking out. At the intersection of glamour and gore, a selection of ‘evidence’ bags are also filled with miscellaneous objects – a kitchen knife, red lace tights, a bra, a credit card, an open Saint Laurent condom, a picture of a blood splattered hand – and photographed to form an unresolved dossier of violence.
Photo Booth
For the finale, Klein presents Photo Booth, a series of diaristic self-portraits taken in 2011 and captured using early desktop camera software. With something sort of cheeky and perverted about the way the artist stares into the camera with his grainy, smouldering expression, the photos reflect a transitional moment in the evolution of self image where analog photo booths fast became smart phone selfies. Using himself as the subject and engaging with themes of self-surveillance and studio portraiture, Klein blurs the line between private indulgence and public display. The result is a body of work that feels at once confessional and performative, as if daring the viewer to look closer while questioning why they want to in the first place.
Like a grotesque cabinet of curiosities in photobook form, Private Collection offers more than a snapshot of Steven Klein’s legacy, instead delving deep into his visceral, visual universe. Impulsive, subversive and seedy, it’s fabricated to push your buttons, make you question why it bothers you in the first place, and completely reconsider your outlook on depravity. And that’s exactly the point.
Photography by Steven Klein.
