Navigation up and down via buttons that will appear bottom right
Best viewed if you click on every photo in turn
After 1945 a colourful and confident culture was shaped by a proliferation of illustrated magazines. Titles such as Vogue, Harper's Bazaar, Life, Look were joined by the new travel magazines and and a host of consumer titles such as Ladies Home Journal, Women's Weekly and so on. The vast majority of photos were still in B&W but colour was increasingly used, especially in up-market glossy magazines. The biggest publishing houses, such as Condé Nast, operated out of New York but published across the globe and spawned a host of more local magazines in a variety of local languages.
For all three of the photojournalists featured on this page New York was not only the location for their most important experiments and innovations, it was also their most important subject and inspiration.
.
Andreas Feininger, Ernst Haas and William Klein had many things in common: all three were Jewish photojournalists who had a life-long involvement in painting and the other visual arts, all three produced work that was experimental, and enlarged the vocabulary of photography in interesting ways. And all three linked the culture of Europe to the developments taking place in New York.
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .. . . . . . . . . . .
Andreas Feininger was born in Paris in 1906, son of the American painter and art educator, Lyonel Feininger (1871 - 1956), who in 1919 took up the post of Master of the Printing Workshop at the newly formed Bauhaus school of art and design. Andreas left school at 16 to study cabinetmaking at the Bauhaus. He went on to study architecture and to develop an interest in photography, under the influence of a neighbour and Bauhaus teacher, László Moholy-Nagy, author of the visionary Painting, Photography, Film.
Lyonel Feininger (1871-1956)
The paintings and graphics of Lyonel Feininger show a sustained interest in the metropolis as subject and inspiration. Interestingly, when he painted a small village and the village pond, his characteristic style served him just as well, giving the scene an air ... paradoxically ... of calm.
When Lyonel was fifty-eight years old and had been a professor at the Bauhaus for almost a decade he first began experimenting with photography. Inspired by the works of his sons, Lux and Andreas, as well as the experimental photography of László Moholy-Nagy, his neighbour in Dessau, Feininger Snr. began to explore a variety of avant-garde techniques.
In 1936, Andreas gave up architecture and moved to Sweden, where he focused on photography. In advance of World War II, in 1939, he immigrated to the U.S. where he established himself as a freelance photographer. In 1943 he joined the staff of Life magazine, an association that lasted until 1962.
As a member of staff for Life Feininger took a wide variety of photos but became noted for photos taken when the camera was attached to a long (telephoto) lens. Sometimes an especially adapted very long lens (as below) was used to compress perspective.
Feininger's architectural background is evident in the way he sets out to capture the nature of New York. One can see an interest in abstract structure that becomes even more evident in his later studies of nature.
Feininger had little enthusiasm for portraits or photos of people in general.
When he did photograph people his long lenses managed to keep them at quite a distance . . .
. . . and the crush of traffic and crowds becomes a central theme...
Feininger wrote several comprehensive manuals about photography, of which the best known is The Complete Photographer.
Nature became an increasingly important preoccupation for Feininger, leading to a study of Trees, and Form in Nature and Life. His studies build on the inspiration of Karl Blossfeld and culminated in the publication of The Anatomy of Nature: How Function Shapes the Form and Design of Animate and Inanimate Structures throughout the Universe.
The bellows used in these studies works in much the same way as the bellows used in architectural photography: to allow adjustments to the alignment of the focal planes of the lens and film within the camera. Those adjustments are crucial to removing (or introducing) those minor distortions that create a convincing image.
Feininger's photographs of nature have been published in various publications over the years.
I had to go pretty far back to find the perspective that puts all these [oil] derricks close together. That is how I got this feeling of their importance and their dynamic and their horror.
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Haas was raised in the cultural climate of Vienna before World War II. His parents, who placed great value upon education and the arts, encouraged his creative pursuits from an early age. From 1935 to 1938, Haas attended LEH Grinzing, a private school in Vienna, where he studied art, literature, poetry, philosophy, and science.
His formal education was interrupted in 1938, when the school was closed following Germany's invasion of Austria. Haas was sent to a German army labour camp, working six hours a day in exchange for two daily hours of school attendance. He left the service in 1940 and returned to Vienna to study medicine. Haas was only able to complete one year of medical school before he was forced out as a result of his Jewish ancestry.
Haas was uninterested in learning photography as a child, though his father tried to encourage him. Upon his father's death in 1940, Haas first entered the darkroom, learning to print old family negatives. He obtained his first camera in 1946, at the age of 25, trading a 20-pound block of margarine for a Rolleiflex on the Vienna black market.
I never really wanted to be a photographer. It slowly grew out of the compromise of a boy who desired to combine two goals — explorer or painter. I wanted to travel, see and experience. What better profession could there be than the one of a photographer, almost a painter in a hurry, overwhelmed by too many constantly changing impressions?
In 1947 Haas presented his first exhibition at the American Red Cross in Vienna, where he had a part-time position teaching photography to soldiers. Taking a portfolio of his work to Zurich, he drew the interest of Arnold Kübler, the first editor-in-chief of the magazine Du. After reviewing his photographs, Kübler introduced Haas to Swiss photographer Werner Bischof’s images of Berlin after the war.
Haas began travelling and working with Inge Morath who was recruiting photographers for the magazine Heute when they met. Their first joint pieces were quite banal and several were on women's fashions, a major topic for Heute. Their most successful joint project was a story about Austrian soldiers returning from Russian POW camps.
These “Homecoming” photographs led to an invitation for Haas to join the Magnum photo agency, then two years old. Haas insisted on bringing Morath with him. He was also offered a staff position at Life but stayed with Magnum because he was determined to maintain his independence.
After carrying out assignments in Vienna and London, Haas conceived an extensive project about America. Visas to the United States were difficult to obtain, but in 1950 Robert Capa appointed him Magnum's U.S. Vice President. With this position, Haas was able to obtain the proper documentation, and he arrived in New York in May of that year. The first images Haas took in the United States showed fellow immigrants arriving at Ellis Island.
In 1952 Haas hitchhiked across the United States to the White Sands National Monument in New Mexico, planning to photograph Native Americans. His finished photo essay was published by Life as “Land of Enchantment” in a six-page spread. According to writer (and early Magnum employee) Inge Bondi, Haas’ Western chronicle was the first major story he created based on his own instinct and at his own financial risk.
In the late 1940s, Haas switched from his medium format Rolleiflex to the smaller 35mm Leica rangefinder camera, which he used consistently for the rest of his career. Once he began working in colour, he most often used Kodachrome, known for its rich, saturated colours. To print his colour work, Haas used the dye transfer process whenever possible. An expensive, complex process most frequently used at the time for advertising, dye transfer allowed for greater control over colour hue and saturation.
Once back in New York, Haas purchased color film to begin a new project. He had experimented with colour as early as 1949, but this would be his first opportunity to work with what was still a scarce and expensive medium.
Haas spent two months photographing New York, and in 1953 Life published his vivid images. Titled “Images of a Magic City,” the sprawling 24-page story spanned two issues, the longest colour photo essay Life had published up to that point.
According to critic Andy Grundberg, these images “brought photography into the precincts of abstract expressionism.”
Looking back, I think my change into colour came quite psychologically. I will always remember the war years, including at least five bitter post-war years, as the black and white ones, or even better, the grey years. The grey times were over. As at the beginning of a new spring, I wanted to celebrate in colour the new times, filled with new hope.
The compression lent by the long lens in the photo below adds to the dynamism, even the sense of celebration so welcome in the magazines of the time.
In 1962 the Museum of Modern Art in New York presented a ten-year survey of Haas's colour photography: MoMA's first solo-artist retrospective exhibition dedicated to colour work.
In 1954 Robert Capa, Magnum's first president, was killed while on assignment covering the First Indochina War. That same year, Werner Bischof died in a car accident in the Andes. Following their deaths, Haas was elected to Magnum's board of directors and traveled to Indochina himself to cover the war. After the death of David “Chim” Seymour in Suez in 1959, Haas was named the fourth president of the Magnum photo-agency.
When he submitted his blurred motion bullfight photos, original at the time, to the lab they said there was a problem and they were unusable.
Life ran the photos as a 12-page spread.
As the technology of colour photography evolved and improved during this period, audience interest in colour imagery increased. Many of the magazines that published Haas’ work, such as Life, improved the quality of their colour reproduction, and increasingly sought to include his work in the medium.
In 1962, the year of his retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art, Haas was invited to write and host The Art of Seeing, a four-hour miniseries for National Public Television, then in its first year.
Haas was a respected stills photographer for many films, including The Misfits, Little Big Man, Moby Dick, Hello Dolly, West Side Story, and Heaven's Gate. John Huston employed Haas as a second-unit director for his 1966 film The Bible: In the Beginning, to visualize the section devoted to creation.
Inspired by this collaboration, Haas conceived an ambitious, multi-year project to visualize the theme of the Earth's creation, as described in a variety of religious texts, primarily the Old Testament. The Creation (1971) became one of the most successful photography books ever, selling 350,000 copies.
In addition to editorial journalism and unit stills work, Haas was also highly regarded for advertising photography, contributing groundbreaking campaigns for Volkswagen automobiles and, especially, Marlboro cigarettes, among other clients.
Haas remained enthusiastic about his adopted home. In 1975 he published In America, a celebratory volume. In his later years he developed a strong interest in Buddhism. Before his death, from a stroke, in 1986, he supervised the publication of two retrospective volumes: one of B&W photographs, the other of colour.
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
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. He joined the U.S. Army during World War II and was stationed in Germany and later France, where he, aged 18, he met Jeanne Florin and decided would permanently settle after being discharged. He and Jeanne were together until her death in 2005.
In 1948, Klein was one of a group of ex-servicemen to be enrolled at the Sorbonne, and later studied with and became assistant to Fernand Léger (see the four images following).
Despite Léger’s continued encouragement to pursue forms of new media like photography and film, Klein stuck with the 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.”
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 several publishers were equally unenthusiastic but 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 who 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. 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 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.
'My pictures showed everything I resented about America.' -- William Klein
In the iconic photo above Klein has managed to bring together four faces of distinctly different ethnicities in one fleeting, tightly-packed frame.
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 above), 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.
Credits:
Photos have been taken from the internet for educational purposes only under fair use terms.