Markus Klinko Photographs Heidi Montag at Jonathan Club
The Core Art Gallery, in partnership with the Jonathan Club, is pleased to share a new body of work by Markus Klinko, created on-site earlier this year. The photographs, shot in the weeks following the January wildfires that displaced over 300,000 residents in Los Angeles, feature Heidi Montag and mark the re-release of her 2010 debut album Superficial.
Montag and her husband, Spencer Pratt, lost their home in the Pacific Palisades during the fires. Shortly after, her track “I’ll Do It” surged to the top of the iTunes charts, aided by a viral wave of TikTok remixes and international support. In the midst of this resurgence, Klinko was introduced to the couple through a mutual friend. He accepted the project with immediacy, recognizing in Montag the kind of mythologized figure around whom culture often pivots.
“Heidi is a quintessential 2000s pop culture icon. A lot of my own work from that period is now seen in art galleries and museums around the world. Therefore, when a friend introduced me to Heidi and Spencer during the tragic LA fires, it was immediately a priority for me to collaborate on this album cover. [...] Her meteoric rise to the top of the charts is completely unprecedented. I wanted to do these facts justice, with a shoot that would truly establish her as an American Princess!”
The shoot took place inside the historic interiors of the Jonathan Club in Downtown Los Angeles, where Klinko staged Montag in a series of portraits referencing classical Hollywood and royal portraiture. The images carry the gloss and spectacle of celebrity photography, while carefully staging Montag as a subject shaped by both pop ambition and public memory. The visual references accumulate as real material: Grace Kelly, American iconography, the shape of stardom after reality television.
Klinko’s work often moves between commerce and image-making with fluency. His photographs, while made for the public eye, are attuned to the aesthetic mechanics of desire and fame. The shoot with Montag exists within this trajectory. It is public-facing, theatrical, and precise in its staging of a specific cultural moment.
