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| photo by Steve Hiett |
| Click photo above to view gallery. |
Steve Hiett had no defined ambition to make a career as a fashion photographer. His student years, including his final spell at the Royal College of Art in London, had opened his eyes to many influences and disciplines. His instinct was for a diversified approach, and his skills as a typographer and graphic designer were from the start as integral to his creativity as was his vision as a photographer. And he would be the first to remind you that his love of popular music—The Beach Boys, Chuck Berry, et al.—has also been a constant force in the way he thinks about making pictures or pages. The mood, the pace, the visual rhythms, and effects that he achieves have their parallels in the music that he loves. When asked recently why he is so fond of very wideangle lenses, his response was, “I like distortion. I like Jimi Hendrix.”
When, around 1970, the fashion world started to regularly employ Hiett to make his distinctive pictures, his aesthetic and sensibility were already well defined. He hit the ground running as a fashion photographer and discovered that the medium, though in some ways prescribed and seemingly limiting—always the formula of girl or girls, the garments, a location—nonetheless offered him endless opportunity to explore variations on a central theme that always obsessed him. Every Steve Hiett picture is a fixing of a dream. “Photography,” he explains, “is about recording what you see. Fashion photography is about depicting what you are thinking about. It is a process of constructing stills from your imagination.”
Hiett has always stubbornly stuck to his own way of doing things and will not conform to a rigid brief. “You have to just disappear into your dream world when you take photographs. Don’t listen to anyone else,” he says. What he does incorporate are the lessons learned from the countless artists, designers, and photographers whose work has informed his curiosity about making pictures. Hiett’s visual memory bank is considerable and wide ranging. The archetypal Hiett image situates his model in a low-key suburban setting and creates a slightly off-kilter mood. The images are pin-sharp, the color saturated, yet there is an enigmatic, romantic feeling, often the suggestion of longing or loneliness. Hiett will cite the “strange, poetic effect” on him of the London street pictures of Roger Mayne that he first saw in the publication Uppercase 5 in 1962. Or he will evoke “the sense of disquiet in early street scenes by Francis Bacon.” He sees his work as very English in spirit, though he has made most of his pictures elsewhere, principally in the U.S. He likes the punch of strong sunlight and for years, long before it became hip, used Miami’s South Beach district as a location. “My dreams are sharp, and bright, and in color,” he says. Kodachrome II was the film made to match the pictures in his mind’s eye.
This integrity, and Hiett’s lively ability to pull together a successful and memorable image out of seemingly slight ingredients, has ensured his ongoing success in a business that is swift to discard photographers who cannot sustain a consistent level of creativity. But if Hiett is appreciated by editors and peers within the fashion publishing world, his name is little known beyond. He has never been one for self-promotion, and though he sets himself a high standard, wanting both to satisfy his creative needs and to engage an audience, he is pragmatic about the measure of his achievement. “It is art for the masses, the visual equivalent of pop music. The finished object is the printed page. It’s ‘Mission accomplished’ when my pictures are torn out and pinned to the wall.” Hiett’s pictures in fact have layers of content and reference that mark them out as something more than the forgettable, disposable commodity that is the norm in the vast flow of fashion images. They constitute an important facet of a creaive spirit whose multidisciplinary work deserves greater opportunity to be seen and appreciated in its full range.
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