Markus Klinko Takes Us Behind the Scenes with Britney and Beyoncé

Pop culture bows at the altar of celebrity, and photographer Markus Klinko has made a career out of documenting that practice of worship. Since his early days as a fashion photographer in the 1990s, shooting celebrities for magazines such as this one, Klinko has used vivid colors and artfully chintzy sets to make images that defined an era. Think Kelis perched on top of that milkshake, David Bowie holding a growling dog by the leash, or Britney Spears giving face in a mythical forest. “In the ’70s, people used to do acid,” Klinko said, speaking on the 20-year anniversary of the Dangerously in Love album cover. “Maybe they still do, but this is my version of the acid trip, taking my viewers and collectors on a journey into a fantasy world.”

Two decades ago, Klinko captured a star on the verge of explosion when he lent Beyoncé his Dolce & Gabbana jeans to create the iconic cover image for the singer’s debut album. This summer, as fans flocked to see Queen Bey on the Renaissance World Tour, Klinko opened the biggest exhibition of his career, Banksy, Beyonce, and Beyond, at Hilton Asmus Contemporary Gallery in Chicago. On the occasion of the show’s opening, Klinko went through some of his most famous photographs with us and shared stories from behind the lens, including a last-minute styling audible with Beyoncé, his early encounters with Kim Kardashian, and the time he saw Russell Simmons forcibly removed from the set of his shoot with Kimora Lee.

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DESTINY’S CHILD for Vibe Magazine (2000)

 

“When Vibe Magazine called me up and said, ‘There’s this group called Destiny’s Child,’ I had never heard of them. But they had apparently the number one single in the country called ‘Bills, Bills, Bills’ and they said, ‘We need to shoot these girls. They’re iconic, and it’s their first New York photo shoots.’ So they came over—there were still four of them at the time—and Beyoncé’s mom styled. I laid them down on a plexiglass floor with pink lights and I was standing up on a catwalk on a balcony, shooting down. And at some point I was just like, ‘This one in the middle there, she is so charismatic. I think she’s going to be a huge star.’ And her mom was just laughing it off and she said, ‘We know, we got it,’ and so three years later, my agent got a call from Sony Music and they said, ‘Beyoncé requested you for her first solo album.'”

On the Dangerously in Love album cover:

“I got on a call with Beyoncé and her team and she referenced a photograph I had done with Laetitia Casta, the French supermodel and actress, Casta is suspended in a diamond spider web for a diamond campaign. That image was very, very famous at that time. And she asked me if I could do something like that, but smaller on her, and I didn’t really know what to make of that. When they arrived at the shoot, I looked at the styling pieces and there was this top [made of] Swarovski crystals and I grabbed it and said, ‘This is exactly what we talked about. We can do something amazing with it.’ And she wasn’t too sold on it. She was like, ‘I don’t know, because we only have skirts and it’s going to look very red carpet.’ So I said, ‘I believe that this should be paired with denim. What if you wear mine?’ I had on these Dolce & Gabbana men’s jeans. And she said, ‘Okay,’ and so I went, I took them off, and they fit her like a glove.”

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BRITNEY SPEARS for Onyx Hotel Tour (2004)

 

“The inspiration actually came directly from Britney. She had written on a napkin or something these keywords she wanted to represent for her tour, and it was like magic forest and ice princess and hotel lobby. I hired a team of set people and brought in all of these trees. It was very last minute, literally 48 hours before the shoot, and she was so busy. She was about to go on tour, so she had a video shoot in the morning. She arrived around 2:00 or 3:00 PM and Britney and I were completely running the shoot. And I tell you, I never had a better collaborator, and I had great collaborators. David Bowie is one of the best collaborators you could ever have, but Britney, she was up there. She was so fun, she was so dynamic, she was sexy as hell, and so we just worked away, shot this whole thing until five o’clock in the morning and she kept jumping up and down. She was so happy, and it was pure joy to work with this girl.”

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KELIS for “Milkshake” Cover (2003)

 

“Guess how I met Kelis? It was a phone call from Ingrid Sischy, editor of Interview Magazine, who called me up and said, ‘We are doing a story about this hot new singer called Kelis. We want you to shoot her.’ A couple months later, the label called my agent and said, ‘Kelis is requesting you to shoot her new album cover,’ and so I got on the call with Kelis and she told me her story. She used to be a waitress at a diner, like a classic New York diner, and she was already working on her music, but that’s how she made ends meet. She was working at the diner, and I guess the diner had this milkshake that inspired her song.”

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KIM KARDASHIAN (2009)

 

“I shot her on the set of my Bravo show that I had in 2010 [Double Exposure], and Kim Kardashian was obviously enormously famous already at that time and known for very heavy makeup and the artifice of appearing always very, very glamorous. When she walked in on set that morning, she was barefaced, no makeup at all. I think she was wearing gym shorts and a white t-shirt, and I just looked at her and I was like, ‘You’re so incredibly gorgeous,’ and I was thinking to myself, ‘She doesn’t need any of that insane makeup and couture.’ And so I told my stylist and my team, ‘I want to completely pair her down to the most simple Audrey Hepburn-like, very, very minimal, and I want to make her look flawless in that way and hold up this counter proposal to her image.” And say, ‘She doesn’t need any of that. She’s already so gorgeous. Look at this beautiful young lady that is just flawless.'”

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LINDSAY LOHAN for Complex Magazine (2010)

 

“When I shot this Kaws collaboration, things started going a little downhill for Lindsay already. I think she went through multiple scandals and this was the beginning of the cooling down phase, but it was still an interesting time, and I decided to show a different side of Lindsay. This one, I think, it’s almost like an artistic Lindsay: Lindsay goes to the museum kind of thing. And then of course, Kaws is a very interesting artist where street art basically meets high-end gallery. I tried to keep it quite clean with the white background and not complicate things. So, it’s a bit of a different philosophy from those earlier 2000s images that are all very colorful. This is more of a black-and-white with little color points.”

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KIMORA LEE SIMMONS for Baby Phat (2004)

 

“Those were the good days in photography. Those were the days where there were large budgets, pre-Instagram. That’s why I hate Instagram, because it ruined all of these wonderful, very lucrative brand deals, because [now] they just hire an Instagram photographer for $200 and do a campaign. I remember Kimora was in my studio naked on the floor with those shoes, and Russell walked in, unannounced. He just came up and his jaw dropped and he said, ‘What are you doing?’ He looked at me as if he was going to kill me, and I think she asked her assistant to remove him. He was literally escorted out of the studio, so that happened, I’m here to tell you.”

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ANNE HATHAWAY for The Devil Wears Prada (2006)

 

“It was the last day in my SoHo studio. I was about to move out, so the studio was completely empty. I had lived and worked there for 10 years, so it was an opportunity to create the last walkthrough of this place where I shot Mariah and Kanye and Beyoncé and Bowie. [Anne] was the last celebrity to be photographed in that now-empty space. I thought it was almost religious, almost cathedral. I understood the magnitude of The Devil Wears Prada as a fashion documentary almost, to really show the world the craziness of the fashion business. So I just wanted to create these iconic images that are very stylized and stand on their own, but are also part of the whole Devil Wears Prada world.”