IDEA - Steven Klein - Private Collection

Overview

Photographed and compiled by Steven Klein, PRIVATE COLLECTION is a limited-edition box set comprising four distinct volumes-Cut Throats, Dildos, Death Kit and Photo Booth. This four-part anthology investigates the performance of identity, staged violence, erotic abstraction, and aesthetics of control. Through Klein's bold, cinematic lens, the work explores sexuality, voyeurism, surveillance, and desire, offering glimpses into hidden worlds: anonymous violence, ambiguous objects, fictional crimes, and early self-portraiture. These are not stories with conclusions, but fragments-obsessions and wounds-that together form a kind of intimate archive. A body of work that resists interpretation and demands to be looked at, again and again.

"PRIVATE COLLECTION is a record of images that were never meant to be seen-private, perverse, sometimes violent. Each book is its own fiction, its own confession. I wanted the work to feel uncovered rather than created-like finding traces of a private world left behind. These aren't stories with conclusions. They're fragments, obsessions, wounds. Together, they form a kind of intimate archive- one that resists explanation and demands looking."
-Steven Klein

1. CUT THROATS
In Cut Throats, a series of film stills, Klein redefines the portrait as a site of rupture-psychic, social, and anatomical. Staged within domestic suburban spaces, young men appear with their throats violently cut, suspended in moments that blur the thresholds between life and death, violence and voyeurism. These images resist sentimentality, presenting flesh as a metaphor for cultural decay and personal exposure. The work cuts through the conventional idea of portraiture as revealing, choosing instead to see-literally-beneath the surface.

2. DILDOS
Dildos is a sequence of stark still lifes. Sculptural forms are gripped, held, and suspended-rendered with clinical precision and photographed in isolation. The result is a study in formal tension: charged, impersonal, and exacting.

3. DEATH KIT
Death Kit reconstructs a staged crime scene through a sequence of photographic fragments. Garments, objects, and residues are documented and reassembled using iPhone 8 images, dye-sublimation prints, and scanned materials. The scenes suggest a forensic investigation into a feminine death, but the evidence resists narrative closure. What remains is an unresolved dossier of violence and appearance.

4. PHOTO BOOTH
presents a series of self-portraits captured by the artist in 2011 using early desktop camera software. These images reflect a transitional moment-between analog photo booths and the rise of the selfie- when self-portraiture immediate, performative, became and endlessly reproducible. Klein uses himself as subject, folding self- surveillance into the tradition of studio portraiture. The work is both diaristic and critical, documenting a transitional moment in the evolution of self-image.

Archival box with gloss sticker containing 4 softcover books 21 x 28 cm
104/60/112/88 pages
Edition of 1000