Underworld

Underworld, published by Alfred A. Knopf in 1995, is Kelly Klein's anthology of the body in underclothing. It draws 154 photographs from a century of picture-making, running from the 1880s to the 1990s.

Klein assembled work by more than eighty photographers into a single visual argument about intimacy and exposure. Jacques-Henri Lartigue, Imogen Cunningham, Louise Dahl-Wolfe, André Kertész, Brassaï, Man Ray, Richard Avedon, Helmut Newton, and Robert Mapplethorpe all appear alongside contemporary fashion and portrait photographers. Anne Rice contributes the introduction, framing the corset, slip, and undergarment as a threshold between the private body and the camera. Sam Shahid designed the large-format hardcover, and Klein directed all proceeds from the book to the CFDA Foundation Fund for AIDS.

Klein is a former fashion editor at Calvin Klein and Anne Klein who built a career editing large-format photography anthologies organized around a single object or subject. Underworld followed Pools (1992) and preceded Horses (2000) and Mane (2007), each assembling historical and contemporary photographers around one recurring theme rather than presenting a single photographer's body of work.