Indelible Images From a Fashion Photography Icon

Throughout his five-decade (and counting) career, the fashion photographer Hiro has shot everything from surrealist still lifes to album covers — creating a vast, wide-ranging archive of work that’s big enough to support three (!) retrospectives this season. (Two shows of his work are now on view in Boston and London; another opens later this month in New York at Pace/MacGill.)

After arriving in New York from Japan in 1954, Hiro briefly trained with Richard Avedon before moving on to work with the legendary art director Alexey Brodovitch at Harper’s Bazaar — by 1964, he had become the only photographer under contract there, a position he kept for the next 10 years. Leafing through decades’ worth of back issues, the influence of his exacting technique is clear. The underlying constant is his unique ability, using light and color, to transform seemingly mundane items into objects of desire — whether it be a hoof, a fish or a toenail.