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On an outsize screen in “Time Capsule,” a multipanel video installation shown in Moscow last week, a Garbo-esque siren past youth’s first blush rests in a chair as an attentive majordomo clamps an oxygen mask to her face.

The image is one of 10 at the Garage Center for Contemporary Culture that show its subject, the actress and model Amber Valletta, aging by chilling degrees from 20 to 110. Spectators, including Naomi Campbell, sheathed to the ankles in alabaster fur, may well have been puzzled. Was this world-weary creature sucking oxygen to shore up her looks?

Steven Klein, the photographer and auteur of this vaguely sinister spectacle, wasn’t about to clear up the mystery. “I like what’s obscure,” he said simply.

Of course. Klein, after all, has long been an enigma in the world of style, cultivating a sphinxlike mystique by hiding in plain sight. It is not by chance that a self-portrait was backlit to mask his features. Yet he makes no secret of trading in shock effects. Of the oxygen mask Valletta wore, he said, “I put it there to disturb people.”

He was discussing his work at his spartan studio in New York City’s Chelsea neighborhood, where he stows his digital files, the kinky collection of fashion photographs and celebrity portraits that have cinched his reputation as an A-list photographer of A-list celebrities, and one of fashion’s most cunning provocateurs.

During the interview, a rare one, granted in the weeks leading up to his Moscow show, Klein betrayed almost nothing of the steely character who turns models into fembots in his shoots for Vogue, and who famously persuaded pop-culture deities like Brad Pitt and Madonna to contort themselves for his camera.

At a tender age, as he recalled, he fell in love with a somewhat older schoolmate. Dark and sloe-eyed, “she epitomized the perfect beauty,” he said. When she didn’t return his ardor, he pursued her nonetheless, “chasing her with my camera.”

To this day, he remains most comfortable behind the camera, from which he pursues his subjects with a mix of curiosity and dread. “I like them and I fear them — I do fear them,” he said, raking his fingers absently across the table. “But at the same time I desire them.”

He brought some of those mingled emotions to the “Time Capsule” exhibition. Organized by Dasha Zhukova, the heat-seeking Russian art impresario, the installation of 2.7-meter-by-4.8-meter panels was arranged in a circle above spectators’ heads.

Klein says that his work is collaborative, yet his subjects are proverbial clay in his hands, twisting themselves into pretzel formations to accommodate his disquieting vision. “He tends to push further than any of his contemporaries,” said Vince Aletti, the curator of “Weird Beauty: Fashion Photography Now,” a 2009 exhibition at the International Center of Photography that featured many of Klein’s images.

Klein first took up a camera at the Rhode Island School of Design, where as an art student in the mid 1970s, he began exploring his disturbingly violent, erotically charged and, some would say, unholy themes. His reputation rests in part on preternaturally polished images that owe a debt to Helmut Newton, whose models were often trussed in prostheses, as animated as blowup dolls.

In a 2003 W shoot, Madonna writhed in a series of steamy yogic poses. In the same year, in a portfolio for Dutch magazine, Brad Pitt was photographed kneeling and bare-chested, being brutally cuffed by the police.

“Time Caspsule” documents Valletta’s transformation to priestess-slash-crone. Klein is not the first to venture into such uncharted terrain. Subjects slouching toward their sunset years have been variously colonized, and glamorized, in publications including Vogue and Harper’s Bazaar, and in niche magazines like V.

Former editor Carine Roitfeld tested readers’ tolerance during her tenure at French Vogue. She invited Tom Ford to edit the December 2010 issue and raised eyebrows by featuring Ford’s photographs of a sleekly groomed, diamond-festooned elderly couple in fevered embrace.

But Klein is arguably the first photographer to treat the aging process lyrically, from time to time injecting an element of the grotesque. There is a creepy “Sunset Boulevard” moment in the video when a young man in a dinner suit plants a kiss on Valletta’s withered face. She averts her eyes — in shame or self-loathing?

Klein shrugs. The project was less about examining the corrupting effects of time on beauty, he said, “than about exploring time itself.” His objective was to demonstrate that life is cyclical: past, present and future, unfurling simultaneously.

In the final frame, Valletta, dressed as if for some ecstatic sadomasochistic encounter, gazes into the distance. Behind her, a young man cradles an infant. Was the child meant to be a reincarnated version of Valletta herself?

Klein would not, or could not, explain. “I think what happens is that you do the project first, then you think about what it’s about,” he said. “Years later, you figure out why you’ve done things.”

The New York Times