Beyond Blonde

Steve Hiett's Beyond Blonde gathers five decades of the British photographer's fashion work, most of it never before collected in book form.

Arranged by decade from the late 1960s to the 2000s, the book moves through Hiett's magazine work for British, French and Italian titles, built around his signature use of hard, off-camera flash against blown-out skies and bleached urban backdrops. The pictures favour saturated colour and off-centre framing over conventional glamour, turning studio and street alike into sets for images that read as fragments of unstated stories. Beyond Blonde was published by Prestel in 2015 as a 280-page hardcover with an essay by Philippe Garner, edited by Patrick Remy, following an exhibition of the same body of work at the Hyères International Festival of Fashion and Photography.

Hiett has worked as a fashion photographer since the late 1960s, contributing to Vogue Paris, Per Lui and Cosmopolitan among others, and is closely associated with the plein-air, saturated-colour style that shaped a generation of fashion photographers who followed him, from Guy Bourdin to Miles Aldridge.