Hiro, Japanese-American Photographer of Elegant Surrealism, Dies at 90

Hiro, the Japanese-American photographer born Yasuhiro Wakabayashi, died on August 15, 2021, at his country home in Erwinna, Pennsylvania, at age 90. His family announced his death to The New York Times. Born in Shanghai on November 3, 1930, to Japanese parents, he moved to Japan in 1946 and studied in Tokyo. In 1954 he emigrated to the US, briefly attending the School of Modern Photography in New York. Two years later he began working for Richard Avedon and met Alexey Brodovitch, art director of Harper's Bazaar, becoming his assistant at the New School. From 1956 to 1975 he was on staff at Harper's Bazaar, and in 1969 he was named Photographer of the Year by the American Society of Magazine Photographers. His most iconic images include an ant balancing on a glossy scarlet fingernail and a woman—Jerry Hall—exhaling a cloud of smoke on a beach in Saint Martin. In 1982, American Photographer dedicated an entire issue to him, praising his pragmatic brilliance and inventive technique that changed how photographs appear and how photographers work. His fashion photography created a parallel world of vivid colors and surreal beauty, with subjects like a foot piercing a surface of white porous stones threatened by a tarantula, a black hat casting layered shadows, and a woman in a blue veil evoking Magritte.