Hiro, Fashion Photographer Who Captured the Surreal, Dies at 90
He juxtaposed the mundane and the exotic, transforming ordinary objects into the desirable — an approach he took in his still-life images as well as fashion.
Yasuhiro Wakabayashi, the Japanese American photographer known as Hiro, whose fashion and still-life images captured a relentlessly inventive vision of American life that critics likened to those of his idol and mentor, Richard Avedon, died on Sunday at his country home in Erwinna, Pa. He was 90.
His work was the stuff that advertising dreams were made of. They were more brilliant and infinitely more beautiful than reality. If these images you see feel so surreal, it was perhaps because his early life had been so unreal.
Born in Shanghai, he came of age in the turmoil of World War II in China, the son of a Japanese linguist who may have been a spy. He attended Tokyo high school, but was a stranger in his own land, fascinated with Jeeps, Red Fox beer cans, and other artifacts of American culture. He read American fashion magazines in hotels and in the homes of American officers he tutored in Japanese and was captivated by the works of Richard Avedon and Irving Penn. He acquired a camera and photographed his fractured world.
In his 20s, he photographed and juxtaposed the mundane and the exotic where he transformed an ordinary object into something desirable and salable. Two years later, after working entry-level jobs with two commercial photographers, he landed an apprenticeship at the Avedon studio in New York. Hiro soon started having innovative ideas for the man himself. In 1957, Mr. Avedon recommended him to Alexey Brodovitch, the art director of Harper's Bazaar. This marked the beginning of an 18-year association with one of the nation's foremost fashion magazines as a staff photographer, soon enough, he opened his own studio and freelanced by accepting commissioned assignments from Harper's Bazaar, Vogue, and other magazines.
Hiro's work expanded beyond fashion as he also did portraits of celebrities, and exhibited work at galleries in New York, London, and elsewhere. His work is in the permanent collections of many museums and galleries, including the Boston Museum of Fine Arts, the National Portrait Gallery in Washington, the George Eastman Museum in Rochester, and the Victoria and Albert Museum in London.
