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William Klein 1928 - 2022

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William Klein was born in New York City into a well-to-do Jewish family impoverished by the Wall Street crash. A Jewish boy in an Irish neighbourhood, he felt excluded, but learnt to love the great museums and galleries.

He graduated from high school early and enrolled at the City College of New York at the age of 14 in order to study sociology.

In 1946 he enlisted in the army and was stationed in Germany, where he was a cartoonist for the army publication Stars and Stripes, and later France, where he, aged 18, met Jeanne Florin and decided he would permanently settle after being discharged. (He and Jeanne were together until her death in 2005.) Thanks to the G.I. Bill, Klein was one of a group of ex-servicemen to be enrolled at the Sorbonne, which led to him studying with and becoming assistant to the radically left-wing artist Fernand Léger (see the five images following).

Leger, told him: "Get out of the galleries. Look at buildings; go out onto the street."

... And of course that is exactly what Klein did —

A delight in primary colours was not the only influence Klein took from Leger

Despite Léger’s continued encouragement to pursue forms of new media like photography and film, Klein stuck with abstract painting and kinetic sculpture, and in 1952, he had two successful solo exhibitions in Milan where his abstract works caught the eye of an architect, Angelo Mangiarotti, who enlisted Klein to adorn a series of apartment room dividers. The experiment took Klein to the dark room, where he produced thousands of photograms, altering each one slightly with circular, diamond and square-shaped cutouts, sometimes moving them around his prints as he eagerly toyed with the effects of glare and exposure.

Although Klein had won a camera in a game of cards while still in the army, it was only when he started taking photos of his own art that he became really interested in the possibilities of photography.

A series of abstract shots were featured on the covers of an Italian architectural magazine called Domus and seen, in Paris, by Alexander Liberman, the art director of Vogue.

At this point Liberman was becoming more serious about his own abstract ('Circularist') paintings [see left] and about abstract expressionist experiments. In Europe he began photographing 'Artists in their Studios'.

Liberman offered Klein a dream brief: come and work for us, carte blanche, two hundred bucks a week, limitless photographic supplies, and while you’re at it, shoot the city.

By 1954, Klein was back in New York, on a five-month stay. He was lent a camera (a Leica IIIf) by Cartier-Bresson. He and Jeanne lived in a small hotel; “I would print like a maniac – fifty photos a night, washing them in a bathtub.”

I went to town and photographed non-stop, with literally, vengeance,” William Klein wrote of the book of New York City street photographs that he made in 1954 and 1955. He added, “I saw the book as a tabloid gone berserk, gross, over-inked, brutal layout, bullhorn headlines. This is what New York deserved and would get.”

The result was Life is Good for You in New York: Trance Witness Revels. Although Vogue had underwritten the project, the grim and gritty photos proved too challenging. American publishers turned down the book, which Klein had himself designed. Back in France Klein approached several publishers, but they were equally unenthusiastic. Eventually he showed his work to Chris Marker, an experimental film-maker, then working at Editions du Seuil in Paris, who championed the project. Seuil published it in 1956 – to instant acclaim. In 1957 it was awarded the Prix Nadar, but it did not appear in America until 1995.

New York publishers turned up their noses. “They would say, ‘What kind of New York is this? It looks like a slum.’ I said, ‘Listen. New York is a slum. You live on Fifth Avenue, you come to your office on Madison Avenue – what do you know? You ever been to the Bronx?'”

Chris Marker and Klein remained friends. It is worth noting that Marker, well-known on the film scene in France is best known for his 1962 film La Jetée, comprised almost entirely of still photographs. Marker introduced Klein to film director, Alain Resnais, who said

'Look, you’ve done a book, now you could do a film'. So that’s how I got to do films.”

Klein designed his New York book himself. It impressed film-makers like Fellini, Alain Resnais and Chris Marker because it looked like the storyboard for a movie. But Klein had also alerted readers – those who could get hold of the thing – to the possibility that a photography book, no less than a photograph itself, could be a work of art.

The volume included a separately bound 16-page booklet containing captions for the pictures and a reproduction of a Mad magazine cover, ersatz ads for spaghetti and bras, and other ephemera.

There were no captions, and the rhythm of the layout kept to no known beat: some shots were bordered in white, others leaked across the central gutter or spilled to the edge.

The whole book ends with a bang: a sun raging low on the Manhattan skyline, printed with such rich pointillist grain that what was, presumably, a nice warm day is cranked up into an artist’s impression of a nuclear firestorm. Not what America wanted in 1956.

“I approached New York like a fake anthropologist, treating New Yorkers like Zulus.” - William Klein

Klein’s objective was always to

“Become an active participant of the scene. Interact with the people, hear their conversations, and as a rule of thumb be close enough to see the colors of their eyes”.

Klein used modest photographic equipment to achieve these goals, his 21-28 mm wide lenses forcing him to get up close and personal with his subjects. He was unfazed by the distortion wide-angle lenses produced. Although he appeared to disregard many of the 'rules' of photography, there are underlying themes or principles that emerge. Again and again Klein's best photographs accommodate the maxim of faces, most of them facing the camera. His crowded frames invite the crowd.

In the iconic photo above left Klein has managed to bring together four faces of distinctly different ethnicities in one fleeting, tightly-packed frame.

'My pictures showed everything I resented about America.' -- William Klein

From 1960 to 1964, he produced three other books of photography Rome (1960), Moscow (1964) and Tokyo (1964); all are filled with raw, grainy, swirling yet stark images.

The support of Alexander Liberman and Vogue allowed Klein to experiment on several different fronts: not only did he collect his dynamic and challenging photos on the streets of New York, Vogue also published some of his purely graphic photographic abstracts and hired him for fashion shoots, allowing him to take models and outfits out onto the streets.

Klein was never over-enamoured of fashion photography, seeing it partly as a way of supporting other projects. He worked for Vogue for ten years but always keeping a certain distance, a certain disrespect. Not finding inspiration in the clothes, or even the models, he was constantly having to come up with new ideas, new innovations.

Over 16 pages American Vogue published a series of fashion photos taken by Klein in Rome. Using a Hasselblad camera and a 500mm lens meant that Klein was very distant from the models and could not direct them in detail. On the other hand this meant the introduction of an element of spontaneity, such as the Vespa scooter passing by (in the photo on the left), or the onlookers whose heads are just visible, curious at the goings-on.

One of the photos in the sequence featured the Italian film director, Frederico Fellini (see right) in front of a poster for La Dolce Vitae. When Fellini saw Klein's New York book he declared that it was like a film and urged Klein to make that film.

Klein's first film experiment captured the flickering neon lights on Broadway.

Klein made several photographic trips in Africa, but his photos were not published at the time and have only recently come to light.

When his 1964 documentary Cassius the Great, (re-edited with new footage as Muhammed Ali, The Greatest in 1969) was awarded a prestigious award, Klein withdrew from photography in general and, in particular, from working for Vogue. Instead he directed a film attacking the whole superficial world of fashion. Who Are You, Polly Maggoo? (1966), drew on his first-hand experience in the upper echelons of the art and photography world, and acted as an exposé-cum-satirical-social-commentary on the vapid and insecure business of high fashion.

Klein went on to produce a series of films and documentaries – 27 in total – many of them drawing attention to issues of social injustice, including Eldridge Cleaver, Black Panther (1970) and The Pan African Festival of Algiers (1969), celebrating post-imperial independence in Algeria. Grands soirs et petits matins was his fly-on-the wall documentary treatment of the student riots in Paris 1968. He has produced over 250 television commercials. A long time tennis fan, in 1982 he directed The French, a documentary on the French Open tennis championship.

His work has sometimes been openly critical of American society and foreign policy; the film critic Jonathan Rosenbaum once wrote that Mr. Freedom was "conceivably the most anti-American movie ever made."

Still active as an artist and photographer into his nineties, William Klein has been able to revisit early experiments, to edit and re-present some of his most innovative work. One of the results of his experiments was a series of "painted contacts"...

Self-portrait (1998)
Contact sheets invite us to reconsider iconic images (such as the one top left)
Created By
Lloyd Spencer
Appreciate

Credits:

Images have been downloaded from the internet and are used here for educational purposes only.