William Klein: From Outsider to Iconic Visual Artist

American-born French photographer and filmmaker William Klein died in Paris on 10 September, 2022, at the age of 96.

One of the fathers of street photography, he was celebrated as one of the 20th century’s most influential artists, who revolutionised and broke the prevailing rules of photography, reframing his photos, playing with blurry and grainy effects, with a strong penchant for strong contrasts and shaky images.

Backstage Ungaro + Nude, Paris, 1987 © William Klein

Born in 1926 into an impoverished ultra-Orthodox Jewish family in an Irish neighborhood in New York City – his parents lost their clothing business in the 1929 Wall Street crash – Klein was already an outsider as a kid, spending time alone and creating art to escape the bullies on the street or his distant parents at home.

A gifted student, Klein graduated from high school three years early and enrolled at the City College of New York at the age of 14 to study sociology. He joined the US army in 1945 and was posted to Germany, where he worked as a cartoonist for the Stars and Stripes newspaper. He then moved to Paris, making the city his home for much of the rest of his life.

“As a kid, I wanted to be part of the Lost Generation who came to France. Hang out at the Coupole with Picasso and Giacometti”, he said.

In 1948, Klein enrolled at the Sorbonne, and trained as an abstract painter with French artist Fernand Léger. He later turned to photography after winning his first camera in a poker game! He also experimented with kinetic art, and this is how he attracted Alexander Liberman, American Vogue‘s art director, who helped bring Klein’s kineticism to the glossy realm of high fashion.

William Klein, Life is Good & Good for You in New York: Trance Witness Revels (1956)

Klein was finding inspiration in the busy and chaotic streets of New York, spending days wandering the city, talking to strangers about their lives and taking photographs of them, as immortalised in his book Life is Good & Good for You in New York: Trance Witness Revels (1956), which he wrote, designed, and typeset, and for which he won the Prix Nadar in 1957, one of France’s top photography prizes.

Disrupting the tradition of understated observation, the book made a sensation in France but earned opprobrium from critics overseas who thought that it was vulgar and somehow “sinned”. Since then, the book has been regarded as one of the most influential and groundbreaking photography books.

Anne St. Marie + Dodge, New York, 1958 © William Klein

In the late 1950s and 1960s, Klein became a renowned fashion photographer for Vogue, experimenting new techniques and breaking the rules of fashion photography, dominated by the stylised studio shoots by Irving Penn and Richard Avedon. Klein was shooting his editorials on the street, placing models amid crowds and taxicabs and photographing them in striking and quasi-surreal scenes.

Klein worked for Vogue until 1966, where his distaste for the fashion editors reached its climax, and he started to pivot to films. After leaving Vogue, he released Who Are You, Polly Maggoo?, a satire of the fashion industry. Klein eventually directed twenty-seven short and feature length documentaries and films, such as “cinema vérité” documentary Muhammad Ali: The Greatest (1974), Mister Freedom (1968) or The Model Couple (1977).

Nina + Simone, Piazza di Spagna, Rome (Vogue), Variant, 1960 © William Klein

Starting his life as a quiet outsider, William Klein finally left his mark, not only as a photographer but as a visual artist, receiving numerous honours and awards, including a Commander of Arts and Letters in France in 1989, the Centenary Medal by the Royal Photographic Society in London in 1999, and the Outstanding Contribution to Photography Award at the 2012 Sony World Photography Awards.

To discover or pay tribute to William Klein, you may head to f22 foto space at the Peninsula for their exhibition William Klein: Style, which highlights Klein’s revolutionising approach to fashion photography.

William Klein: Style – Until 27 November at f22 foto space at the Peninsula