The biggest surprise in pictures by the photographer Hiro from the 1960s and 70s isn’t their unprecedented imagery, but that those images were hand-crafted from photography’s primary elements. He used light adjusted to the millimetre, especially to cast famous faces into shadow; calibrated shutter speed to the millisecond; and employed colour filters, multiple exposures for kinetic effect, and limitless patience in the darkroom, to composite his imaginings. He also wrangled live owls and ants and fish, and difficult top models, into posing in the peculiar ways he needed. His influence can be seen in much current fashion photography, but with the effects now digitally achieved, without Hiro’s planning or wild spontaneity.
Hiro – abbreviated from Yasuhiro Wakabayashi – who has died aged 90, was a photographer before, and very long after, his decades in fashion, but it was his experimental shots of the early 1960s, especially for jewellery ads, that transformed the way those luxuries have been viewed since, as sculptures in a landscape, or witty props. Anything could and would be introduced – a steer’s hoof embellished with rubies, an owl (fed a live mouse to ensure its cooperation) bemused by a bejewelled frog. Post-Hiro, that was a norm.
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