Snapper to the stars spills secrets on his juiciest A-list encounters
Celebrity photographer Markus Klinko on David Bowie showing up on his doorstep, being stripped of his jeans for Beyonce and Mariah Carey taking a scissors to her designer gown...
Markus Klinko’s 30-year career as a multi award-winning film, music and fashion photographer is unparalleled, with credits in the likes of Vogue and Vanity Fair.
He is a man who has an unwavering ambition to document pop culture, and he has certainly achieved those goals — he’s taken pictures of everyone, from Beyonce, David Bowie, Jennifer Lopez and Lady Gaga to Mariah Carey, Kanye West, Britney Spears, Mary J. Blige, Anne Hathaway, Kate Winslet and Pamela Anderson — to name but a few.
In our culture of celebrity worship, Markus feels his mission is “to hold up a mirror and reflect back on our obsession with fame as a religion” — and this is apparent with his recent collaboration with Kim Kardashian and luxury tech-fashion house Auroboros.
His latest avatar photographs with the Skims mogul proves that this Swiss-born titan of photography is a force to be reckoned with. Markus’s work is often suffused with allusions to mythology as a way of exploring how that ‘religion of fame’ is explored.
Our sister magazine Chic sat down with Markus before his unveiling of Kim and RnB sensation Usher’s latest images in London’s Saatchi Gallery to discuss Bowie, The Gallagher brothers and lending Beyonce his jeans... but, first, how did he get Kim to bare all for this new collection?
“We created these avatar images of Kim Kardashian and Usher, so these are brand new works that the world has never seen before,” Klinko told us. “I’m particularly excited.
“Kim was very, very sweet, very humble, even a little bit shy. When I met her in the morning before the shoot, I was stunned by her beauty because she was wearing no make-up. Oh my God, what a beautiful woman!”
The Kim collaboration with Auroboros is very interesting because it’s taking everything into the future. Being dressed by virtual clothing is something that the world hasn’t really seen and to present Kim and Usher in these digital creations reinvented, reimagined, is an adventure and a very exciting step forward into futuristic kind of art.
But Klinko adds, “I’m more than a photographer for GQ or Harper’s Bazaar, I really love documenting milestones of pop culture.
“If you remember Beyonce when she launched Dangerously in Love, I shot that cover. Or David Bowie for GQ walking with the wolf, or Lady Gaga as Hello Kitty, or Mariah Carey in The Emancipation of Mimi, the list goes on.
“I want to be always there at the moment that these artists never look better. So in other words, these are the moments that define them and that’s what I’m most proud of.”
Markus is one of the top photographers in the world and his artistry is key to capture a moment to last a generation.
One such moment was when Beyonce was shooting the cover of her debut album and was missing something very important...
“I met Beyonce three years before that when she was in Destiny’s Child when they did Bills Bills Bills,” he says.
“It was No. 1 and I was the first photographer to photograph them for Vibe magazine — that’s where I first met Beyonce and her mother.
“Three years later, I got a phone call from Sony Music, they said that Beyonce requested me to shoot her debut album cover and told me that she loved that diamond campaign that I did for diamond.com with Laetitia Casta that was all over Vogue magazine and she wanted something similar.
“So she arrived on set a couple days later, and her mother was styling it and brought a diamond top. I said, Oh, that’s perfect and Beyonce said, ‘No, I don’t want to wear it, because my mother only brought these prom skirts like red carpet looks and I don’t really want to do that’.
I said, ‘Oh, I understand. I agree, you should wear it with denims’. And she said, ‘We don’t have any denims’. It’s so funny… so I said, ‘Why don’t you wear my jeans?’ And she said ‘Ok’. So I literally took my jeans off and gave them to her, they fit her perfectly. So my permanent joke is, I must have Beyonce’s booty!
“She wore my jeans that I had on four minutes previous and that’s the famous cover story… AND it’s her favourite image!”
What’s incredible about Markus is for all his celebrity — many of his art work and original photography sell for anything from $10,000 up to $300,000 — he is very humble.
We wonder how much an original of the Dangerously in Love shoot would fetch, especially as it’s Beyonce’s favourite.
“I took the most famous photo of the most photographed woman on earth,” Marcus says. “She told The Figaro that it’s actually her personal favourite of all time which was very flattering.
“I have another story; Mariah Carey on the set of The Emancipation of Mimi, the stylist dressed her in that famous gold dress. She demanded scissors and told the stylist to cut the dress to show more leg, to make it sexier. The stylist refused because he was scared to damage the dress. Well, Mariah just grabbed those bedazzled scissors — and the rest is history.”
Markus is a legendary creator of beauty and one of his most iconic shoots was that with David Bowie, which he says is also one of the most poignant of his career.
“I just photographed a book cover for Iman, his supermodel wife, in collaboration with Alexander McQueen in 2001.
“Iman was to come by the studio to choose the pictures; she rang the doorbell and said. to my complete surprise. ‘I’m here with David’.
“Bowie took one look at the shots and said ‘Would you like to shoot my next album cover?’ And so, two weeks later, it was 9/11 when the Towers came down, it was a tragedy and I thought, this is never going to happen, but within a month, Bowie called me on the phone personally and said; ‘you want to come over to my recording studio?’, which was about five minutes away. So I did and he played me his whole album and I photographed him there and then and, again, the rest is history.”
Markus is a big fan of Noel Gallagher — and lucky for him, he also shot him when a big shoot for GQ came up to shoot famous rock guitarists such as Ronnie Wood from The Rolling Stones and Joe Perry from Aerosmith.
“Noel pulled up to the location for the shoot, he was accompanied by a limousine driver. That exact same driver that had taken me all around London during that week so what were the chances?,” Markus recalled.
“I said hello, and Noel was like, ‘How do you know him?!’ It was just this funny moment because we realised this gentleman was driving us both. I mean, what were the chances for that to happen? So we laughed — and it was a great session and looked absolutely amazing.”
Museums and collectors now want fashion photography and artsy work as it’s becoming more coveted and collected because of its subject matter and the importance of celebrity culture on modern society.
But Markus has one undeniable hero of the art world who is the ‘Godfather of Modern Art’ for him.
“Andy Warhol, of course, I admire him greatly. I don’t compare myself at all, but he’s my role model,” he says.
“I’m now focused on the art world, more so than shooting for magazine. I will always do that, but art is my real passion; working with galleries and museums and great art fairs.
“I think art is about empowerment. Art is iconic and so are its stars.”
You can catch Markus Klinko’s latest work and recent collaboration with Kim Kardashian and Auroboros at
www.markusklinkostudio.com and Instagram @klinkostudio.
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