Britney Spears was in the driver’s seat of her career in 2004, according to celebrity photographer Markus Klinko.
“This is an interesting dynamic given everything that happened later, that she was so in charge,” Klinko exclusively tells Page Six, reflecting on his experience shooting a then-22-year-old Spears for her Onyx Hotel tour book.
“Probably nobody else except David Bowie, I would say, was so creatively in charge,” adds the creative, who’s worked with an array of A-list musicians, “and did not ask for her management, publicist or whoever else to get a second opinion.”
Though the pop superstar’s former manager Larry Rudolph and now-estranged father, Jamie Spears, were present during the shoot, they did not exert any semblance of jurisdiction, Klinko recalls.
In fact, the shutterbug remembers Britney, now 41, defiantly shooing Jamie, now 71, away when he interrupted a vulnerable setup that involved the “Everytime” singer posing on a bed in lingerie.
“That was really interesting. When I shot Britney in bed … she was in very revealing lingerie playing in the bed and with the pillow and all that. But at some point, she noticed that her dad came by the set,” he says.
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“He just sort of wandered in and she immediately grabbed the blanket, covered herself and she said, ‘Dad, get out! I’m doing something.’”
Klinko says that Jamie obeyed his daughter, who — as she revealed in her bombshell memoir, “The Woman in Me” — was financially supporting her family at the time and, notably, had settled her dad’s outstanding debts.
“He left immediately,” the photographer says. “Although her dad and her management were all present on the location, they all sort of went off to play cards in a back room for the next 12 hours and barely appeared.”
Klinko was tapped by Britney’s stylists — legendary duo Kurt Swanson and Bart Mueller, aka Kurt & Bart — for the gig, he says, calling it an “honor” as the Princess of Pop had exalted herself to a level of fame that rivaled Michael Jackson’s or Madonna’s. (Six years into her career, she had already performed live with both icons.)
“They contacted me and they said, ‘Britney wants to hire you for a very, very personal project for her tour.’ I was obviously fascinated with that idea and was just sort of on the heels of [shooting] Beyoncé’s ‘Dangerously in Love’ [album art],” he tells us.
“I got a lot of music requests at that time, but nothing could have been better or more exciting for me than hearing from Britney — and especially through sort of almost private channels. It felt very personal.”
It wasn’t long before Britney showed up at Klinko’s Manhattan studio, thrilled to execute a specific vision that she conceptualized herself. He only had a matter of days to build sets that aligned with her imaginative ideas.
“[Kurt & Bart] sent over a [photo] of a napkin on which Britney had put some key words of inspirations that she wanted to integrate into our photo shoot and some of these key words were ‘ice princess,’ ‘magic forest’ and ‘jazz lounge,’” he says.
“She and I really worked very closely as a creative team.”
Britney arrived without a rider and no diva demands, Klinko remembers.
“She was so process-oriented and … she gave it 100 percent,” he raves, acknowledging that she powered through a 14-hour work day that wrapped in the wee hours of the morning.
“Never did she say, ‘Oh, it’s getting late, I’m tired.’ She was like, ‘What are we doing next?’”
Of all the “magical” setups Klinko materialized for Britney — which appeared not only in her Onyx Hotel tour book but in her fragrance ads, on merch and the covers of magazines — he is most fond of the seductive bedroom shots.
“I loved the bedroom series. She really had fun with that. And then with that interesting moment with her dad appearing for a second, it kind of broke the atmosphere for a couple minutes,” he says.
“It took her maybe five minutes to get back into the playful mode once he left. She was a little bit startled maybe, I would say, for a minute or two.”
After Klinko cracked a joke to cut any lingering tension, Britney resumed posing in a way that he felt mirrored the charisma of the late Marilyn Monroe.
“She was just posing in the bed in a very Marilyn Monroe-ish but updated, 2000s kind of way,” he says, remarking that he was taken aback by Britney’s beauty.
“In 2004, I’d already seen my share of the most beautiful supermodels and celebrities on Earth. But when Britney walked in the room, she took my breath away. I thought to myself, ‘This is probably the most attractive woman on the planet,’” he explains. “She stood out to me as the ultimate goddess.”
Klinko says that he would like to make more magic happen with Britney in 2023, nearly two years after breaking free from her conservatorship.
The restrictive legal arrangement — established by her father in 2008 — controlled her personal, medical, financial and career-related affairs for 13 years, an experience that the Grammy winner says debilitated her passion for performing.
“I bet you anything that if I get six hours or eight hours with Britney in the next few weeks or whatever that I can not only repeat [the Onyx Hotel tour book shoot] but I can top it,” he says.
“[Her current team knows] that this is an offer that I made and I’m waiting for. This is now 20 years later. This is a Britney in a completely different situation. She has her power back.”
Limited edition prints from Klinko’s 2004 shoot with Britney are on display and available for purchase at Pop International Galleries in New York City.
