Few photography-and-styling partnerships have made the humble flat lay feel this alive. Carl Kleiner is a Stockholm-based photographer known for turning ordinary objects — eggs, pots, sports gear, even a smartphone — into precise, almost architectural compositions shot straight-on from above. His long-time creative partner is stylist Evelina Bratell (credited here, as she often is, as Evelina Kleiner), whose eye for arranging real, physical objects into perfect symmetry is just as essential to these images as Kleiner’s lighting and framing. Together they’ve become one of Sweden’s most recognizable design-photography duos, and the campaigns below show why.
Their breakout moment came in 2010 with Hemabakat är Bäst (“Homemade Is Best”), a campaign created with the Swedish ad agency Forsman & Bodenfors for IKEA, in which raw baking ingredients — eggs, flour, butter, sugar — were arranged into graphic, exploded-diagram compositions that doubled as the recipe itself. The images spread across design and advertising blogs worldwide and set the template for everything that followed: a kind of still life that reads instantly, is deeply satisfying to look at, and quietly does the work of instruction or advertising at the same time. It’s a sensibility that belongs firmly in the world of considered product design, even though the medium is a photograph rather than an object.
The IKEA dinnerware sets below continue that language directly. Notice the mirror symmetry radiating out from a central point in each image — a signature of Bratell’s styling — paired with Kleiner’s flat, shadowless overhead light, which flattens each arrangement into something closer to a mandala or a kaleidoscope pattern than a conventional product shot.
Kleiner’s client list stretches well beyond IKEA, and the same conceptual precision shows up in his advertising work for other brands. For the sporting-goods retailer Intersport, he and his studio built an entire graphic alphabet and a Christmas tree out of sports equipment — proof that his “arrange real objects, don’t render them” method works just as well for a playful holiday ad as it does for a dinner set.
Kleiner has also explored a more surreal, gravity-defying side of still life. In a campaign for the travel loyalty currency Avios, everyday domestic objects were rigged to look as though they were falling, floating, or stuck mid-air — a visual pun on the way travel rewards let ordinary moments (a dinner at home, a living room) feel suddenly weightless and full of possibility.
Perhaps the clearest showcase of Kleiner’s range is “Made of Imagination,” a campaign for Sony Xperia in which the smartphone itself was reimagined as three entirely different objects, each one a physical sculpture built and lit rather than rendered on a computer: a spiny cactus paddle, a glowing lightbulb, and a scaled, rainbow-colored chameleon.
What ties all of this together — dinnerware, sports gear, floating furniture, a phone dressed as a chameleon — is a shared discipline: build it for real, light it precisely, and let the concept do the talking rather than the retouching. It’s a strand of photography worth following if this kind of work appeals to you; we keep a running eye on the photography category here at Moss & Fog, and Kleiner and Bratell’s collaborations remain some of the sharpest, most quietly witty examples of the genre.
Edited by Ben VanderVeen · About Moss & Fog
2 Comments
no, the chameleon is fake, just the cactus is the real one..
Are those real phone cases? That iguana/chameleon one is awesome, I want that!