Klaus Thymann's Magical Motifs

Klaus Thymann is a photographer interested in global tribal culture who has had a longterm collaboration with i-D Magazine. Together they’ve produced many documentations of different stories and characters, including tightrope walkers in Norway, taekwondo in Brazil, and totem pole dancers in California. The resulting work will be on show beginning tomorrow on the Lower East Side. I asked Klaus some questions about the pictures, see his answers below.

This seems like a quite a broad undertaking! Tell me how you started working with i-D, and how this project came about.

I have been shooting for i-D for a long time now and I started to look at all the images as one coherent body of work. The various images start connecting and become something else when all viewed together as one exhibition. I talked to the magazine about doing a show and they were up for it.

The images feel a little real and a little manufactured. How much of it is just what you came about and how much is created…. who are all these amazing people and how did you find them?

As with most of my photography I do things in front of the lens, so everything is set up, and I do script the stories/scenes in advance. It is a good way for me to work as there are usually a lot of elements which need to come together for the image, and if that is not planned it can be a bit difficult. But once I start shooting the process becomes much more fluid and we often improvise. We cast the people where we were shooting, so they’re from  Norway, Iceland, California, Israel, Brazil, Switzerland and Hawaii.

Attached is one of the pictures I find most enchanting. Can you tell me the story behind it?

The image shown here is shot in Norway. Adam Howe (the fashion editor I work with) had this great idea of doing a shot like this so I should really give him credit for this idea. It was fun to set up, we suspended a rope across the lake between two trees and had to sail the rope across in a boat. I shot this with a kind of gray sky, but I left the rope there and then it cleared up and I re-shot it. I do that sometimes if I feel the shot I did can get better.

Are you going to be traveling with this show, or will it eventually be a book?

We are talking to some places in London and a few other places so lets see what happens, the show will be in New York for two months first.

What do you hope for it to become, and are you still making this imagery?

My images are a good way for me to tell stories, and I feel that for someone to engage and believe in the stories the images have to be believable, so I try to make those kind of images.  I am always evolving and trying new paths, but I do feel that the images in the show are very true to what I am about.

Tell me a bit about your history and the other work you do- I heard you have a book out, what is it?

I do a lot of other work, some commercial some editorial, I shoot for V, POP, EXIT and some other magazines, I shoot a lot of people in motion and then I also direct some moving image stuff, but have a look at my website. I did a book called HYBRIDS which is about hybrid cultures. Over a period of four years I documented peculiar hybrid cultures around the planet, such as Snow Polo, Gay Rodeo, Underwater Striptease, Underground Gardening and more. It was a really fun project to do.

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See Klaus’s work at his opening tomorrow night, March 11th, at Bblessing.

181 Orchard St.
NY, NY
6pm-9pm