In 1984 photographer Hiro took a surreal image of Elsa Peretti's signature gold bone cuff that the jewellery designer created for Tiffany & Co.
Rather than portraying a model wearing the cuff inspired by the human body and anatomy, with a protuberance that allows the bracelet to fit comfortably over the wrist bone, Hiro modelled it on what looked like a real bone, adding two tiny ladybugs that climb the bone, to create a series of contrasts between luxury, life and death. The iconic image must have come to mind to Hiro's fans when it was announced a few days ago that the photographer, who was 90, died last Sunday at his country home in Erwinna, Pa.
Yasuhiro Wakabayashi, better known as Hiro, was born in November 1930 in Shanghai, China, to Japanese parents. After spending a period of time interned in China, at the end of the Second World War the family moved back to Japan.
Fascinated by American culture and in particular by the work of Richard Avedon and Irving Penn, Hiro moved to the States in the '50s.
He first became assistant to Rouben Samberg and then to Richard Avedon who recommended him to Alexey Brodovich, art director at Harper's Bazaar (Hiro studied photography at the New School for Social Research with Brodovitch in 1956).
Soon Avedon acknowledged his talent: at his studio Hiro had the chance to practice on commercial still lifes while the legendary photographer was in Paris on assignment and, in 1958, Avedon named him associate at his studio. In the meantime, satisfied with the results of the assignments he had given him (one revolving around taking a picture of a Dior shoe), Brodovitch allowed Hiro to work on pictures for Harper's Bazaar.
Hiro worked for the magazine between 1966 and 1974, but also accepted commissions offered by other fashion magazines, including Vogue. While working at Harper's Bazaar Hiro met through Nancy White (then editor of the magazine) Elsa Peretti whom he later introduced to Halston (there's an Harper's Bazaar cover from 1966 by Hiro featuring a photograph of model Marisa Berenson with a drawn green hat superimposed on her profile; the hat was designed by Halston). Peretti went on to become Halston's muse, while Hiro shot every national ad for Peretti’s merchandise for Tiffany & Co., from the early 1980s till last year.
Hiro's aesthetic developed from Brodovitch's teaching – one should click the shutter only when the camera reveals something never seen before.
This principle accompanied Hiro throughout his career: those who know the history of fashion may be able to easily recognise in his pictures a design by Pierre Cardin or Cristóbal Balenciaga (the four-cornered Balenciaga dress pic emphasising the geometries of the design was a favorite of Hiro), but the angle, composition and mood, and the passion for intriguing juxtapositions, made sure his photographs remained unique.
His inventive and innovative style was his trademark and some of his pictures often appear in books about photography that look at composition, juxtaposition and surrealism in this discipline and in particular in commercial photography for advertising purposes.
Among such images there is a picture taken in 1975 in St. Martin of model Jerry Hall's face reclining against a sea-and-sky background, surrounded by the aura of perfume that Hiro created with cigarette smoke from the model's lips.
Hiro's still lifes like one of his early pictures taken in 1963, showing a Harry Winston ruby and diamond necklace over the hoof of a Black Angus steer, also remain iconic.
Quite often women's feet became the protagonists of his shoots: in 1982 he took a photograph of a manicured toenail painted fire engine red being climbed by a very adventurous tiny ant, but in his archive there's also a foot's sole, resting horizontally with a tarantula crawling over the heel and a model's foot on an octopus among black stones (a picture taken in 1982 for Vogue).
The results of his studies and vision were controlled and precise, but also surreal, full of imagination, and intriguing light effects. The quality of light was actually another of his passions that probably derived from cinema.
In his career he experimented indeed with strobes, coloured gels, infrared film and neon lights, and he also attempted to give to his images an inner dynamism to convey a sense of filmic motion (see for example his partially blurred photographs).
Though his innovations suited fashion publications, Hiro's quirky style, often with products prominently on the foreground, proved perfect for advertising purposes.
Yet not everything was commercial and Hiro also tried through his images to comment about consumption: in 1972 he created an image for a cosmetics advertisement showing a close-up of a woman popping pills in her mouth while wearing fierce red lipstick and bi-coloured nails.
Hiro also tried to introduce new themes to fashion magazines: in 1969, the photographer asked Harper's Bazaar to let him photograph the launch of the Apollo 11 moon mission from Florida, but they told him they weren't a science magazine. Hiro took the pictures all the same and eventually his photograph of the Apollo 11 blast-off with the silhouettes of the spectators was included in the magazine's editorial page.
Hiro never considered himself as an art photographer, even though he was celebrated in exhibitions in galleries and museums (including the Boston Museum of Fine Arts, the National Portrait Gallery in Washington, the George Eastman Museum in Rochester, N.Y., and the Victoria and Albert Museum in London).
Throughout his career Hiro also worked on images that were not conceived for commercial purposes, but that had a reportage quality about them, like the black and white portraits of strangers in subway cars taken in the early '60s in Japan and his book "Fighting Birds/Fighting Fish" (1990) featuring black and white photographs of cockfights and Siamese fighting fish.
Hiro is survived by his wife Elizabeth Clark (they married in 1959) and their two sons, Gregory and Hiro.
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