William Klein
Photographer who shot gritty New York scenes and imbued his fashion work with the same energy
WILLIAM KLEIN, who has died aged 96, was a photographer whose work was celebrated for its sheer dynamism, each exposure brimming with movement that seems scarcely contained within the frame; he was one of the great exponents of street photography, whose aesthetic he imported into his fashion work, ripping up the rulebook and creating a new subversively playful and surrealistic mood.
“The original loudmouth of street photography”, as the Telegraph once described him, he embraced fast film, motion blur and natural light, using wide-angle and telephoto lenses to distort the images and cram multiple subjects into the frame. Careful composition and lighting gave way to what he called the “snapshot aesthetic”; as Robert Delpire, producer of Klein’s fashion mockumentary Who Are You, Polly Maggoo?, said: “He has a deadly eye, all the more lethal since he moves in close and shoots point blank.”
William Klein was born on April 19 1926 in New York into a Jewish family who when he was three lost their clothing business in the Wall Street Crash. He was a precocious child, and graduated from high school aged 14, going on to study Sociology at the City College of New York.
He joined the US Army towards the end of the war and was sent to Germany, where he won his first camera, a professional-grade Rolleiflex, in a poker game and worked as a cartoonist on the Stars and Stripes paper.
Leaving the army, he settled in France and in 1948 he enrolled at the Sorbonne to study abstract painting and sculpture, going on to study with Fernand Léger, who told him: “Get out of the galleries. Look at buildings; go out on to the street.”
As well as painting, Klein made murals and light drawings on photo-sensitive glass. He had successful shows in Milan, and began experimenting with kinetic art. After photographing another artist’s work he began to explore the medium, and it was at an exhibition of his stock photographs that he met Vogue’s art director Alexander Liberman.
The Vogue of the Fifties was tame and stuffy, and Liberman was looking for someone to rival Richard Avedon at Harper’s Bazaar, someone who would bring what he called “the grit of life” to his pages.
Liberman took Klein back to Manhattan and made him one of their star photographers. Klein set himself apart from the fashion pack with his abrasive, grainy work; he had, recalled Liberman, “a brashness and a sort of violence that I admired.” Liberman did, though, advise Klein to temper his wild spirit with a dose of market realism, telling him: “You have to realise that women who subscribe to Vogue have pink bathrooms.”
Klein had agreed to go back to New York on the understanding that Vogue would support his personal projects, and he decided to make a photo-diary of the city chronicling the changes since he had last been there.
The resulting book, Life is Good and Good for You in New York: Trance Witness Revels
(1956), was rejected by American publishers, and even by Vogue, and published in France. It was, wrote the Telegraph, “a tantrum of finger-poking photography… any sense of introspection jettisoned in the hunt for style and excitement” – but it also recorded his enduring fascination with his home town. As Klein said himself: “I loved and hated New York. Why should I shut up about it?”
He retained the street settings for much of his fashion work, with elaborate staging and often odd poses. For his celebrated photo of two models crossing the Piazza di Spagna in Rome, he positioned himself high on the Spanish Steps with a telephoto lens, flattening the image so that it looked like the models were against a backdrop.
They were told to cross and recross the road, “noticing” each other’s outfits as they went. With Klein out of sight, men began to congregate, he recalled. “They seemed to think the models were whores, because they started to goose them.”
Sometimes his work was too radical for Vogue, which censored another famous shot, of two models outside a barber shop, by cropping out the black barber. “I always sent up fashion,” he told The Sunday Telegraph in 1967. He was talking to the paper about Who Are You, Polly Maggoo?, a satire on the excesses of the fashion world which went on to win the Prix Jean Vigo in France).
By then he had already diversified into film work, making his first movie, the short Broadway by Light in 1958; a semi-abstract depiction of the lights of Times Square, it was described by Orson Welles as the first film he had seen where “colour was absolutely necessary”.
Klein also worked on Louis Malle’s surreal 1960 comedy Zazie dans le Métro, and in 1964 he made Cassius the Great,a
documentary about Cassius Clay, which was re-edited with new footage in 1969 as Muhammad Ali: The Greatest. He worked with Jean-luc Godard and Alain Resnais, and contributed to the 1969 documentary Far from Vietnam.
The previous year he had directed a superhero satire, Mr Freedom, featuring Donald Pleasence and Serge Gainsbourg, which was likened by some to the work of Godard and Stanley Kubrick, and was, one critic judged, “conceivably the most anti-american movie ever made”.
His other films included Eldridge Cleaver
(1972), a well received study of the Black Power leader, and he also directed more than 200 television commercials. A lifelong tennis fan, in 1982 Klein made The French,a
documentary about the French Open.
Klein took his street photography to other cities, including Rome, Moscow and Tokyo, and was feted abroad, though he was never ranked in the US alongside the likes of Avedon and Robert Frank. In the 1980s, however, as the market for art photographs picked up pace, his early work was rediscovered and championed.
He returned to satirising the fashion world in his 1985 film Mode in France, which featured 13 sequences, each shot in a different movie style – mockumentary, B-movie and so on. “The film made me some more enemies – those who didn’t think I treated them seriously enough,” he recalled .
He could be combative in his public appearances, too, once using a Q&A session in London to excoriate Vogue’s picture editor (who was present) about the state of fashion photography.
“I’m known for fashion photographs, but fashion photographs were mostly a joke for me,” he told Interview magazine in 2013, whereas his life on the streets thrilled him. “It’s the excitement of discovering people. They’re like X-rays, these photographs – I feel that I’m getting an idea of who these people are, the life they lead, and where they’re going. That’s the excitement of taking photographs of people in the street.”
William Klein married, in 1948, the painter and model Jeanne Florin, whom he had met on his second day in Paris. She died in 2005, and he is survived by their son.