Versatile photographer William Klein captured New York in raw, grainy black and white

On the very last day of his major retrospective at the International Center of Photography in New York, the death of American photographer William Klein was announced on Monday. Klein died last Saturday at the age of 96 in Paris, the city where he had lived for most of his life.

Klein became famous for his fashion photos Rowing, but mostly through his crude, lifelike, coarse-grained black and white images of cities like Rome, Moscow and Tokyo, and especially New York. The vivid street photos she took in his hometown belong to the canon of the history of photography; the young black man with a broad smile walking around Harlem in his elegant suit; the grim-faced street bitch pointing a revolver at the photographer’s lens, causing us viewers to look fully into the barrel of a gun. His boy, almost a smaller head, soft face, looks a little embarrassed.

The title of the New York Exposition, YES, (which was extended for a few days after Klein’s death) reflects the enthusiastic and greedy way in which Klein has always been open to new challenges and experimentation in his work. He painted, drew and for many of his books he wrote the texts himself and was the designer. And besides being a street and fashion photographer, he became known as a director and documentary maker: he was Federico Fellini’s assistant and made 3 films and 27 documentaries on different topics such as fashion, sport, music, dance and opera, as well as how the American protest movement and the Vietnam War. The most famous of him: the documentary Muhammad Ali, the greatestsince 1969.

Military service

William Klein was born in New York in 1926 to European immigrants, near Harlem, where he filled the streets after his father’s clothing store went bankrupt. In the years following the Second World War he enlisted in the allied forces in Europe, after finishing his service in 1948 he settled in Paris, where he studied with the French painter Fernand Léger. He also started taking pictures. Later he met Alexander Liberman, the legendary art director of the American magazine Rowingwhere Klein would make a name for himself with his fashion photography.

Despite the high-profile portfolio he built there – Klein remained one of the magazine’s leading fashion photographers for decades – many photography enthusiasts know him primarily for his street photography, particularly the work he will create at the end of the years. 1950s and early 1960s.

His photographic books on the four cities of the world, Rome (1959), Fly (1964), a Tokyo (1964) a New York (1956) are still considered revolutionaries, especially the latter. In the years when America preferred to present itself with optimistic images of The American Dream, Klein showed a different side. Just like Robert Frank would do two years later with his photo book The Americans, showed a mirror to the countryside with its swirling street scenes and abrupt arrangement: distorted compositions, blurring, people only partially pictured with their faces. Something that did not interest him at all in the United States: Klein finally published his book in France in 1956, the American publishers preferred not to burn his hands.

William Klein immersed the viewer in city life, never pretending to be Fly on the wall, but he always interacted. The Russian woman in a bikini smiles at him invitingly in a Moscow park. Kids: how old will they be, 10, 12? – in Gun 1, New York (1954) almost crawling into his goal. Klein has often told of that image in interviews that it was actually a self-portrait. It was both boys. The one aggressively pointing the gun at the photographer: Little, the angry American street boy. The one with the tender face: Klein, the sensitive and intelligent young man who will immerse himself in the arts in Paris. Both characters determined his work throughout his life.

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