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American photographer William Klein died last Saturday in Paris, aged 94, his family announced this Monday in the local media. He died “peacefully”, assured the artist’s family, who left an impressive legacy of reports that marked photojournalism.
his is the volume Life is good and good for you in New York, dedicated to his hometown, New York. The book was published thanks to a French publisher after rejection in the United States, where his work only began to be celebrated in the 1980s. The same would happen with The americansby Robert Frank.
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Born in 1928 to Hungarian Jewish parents, Klein was a key portrait painter of the streets of New York, Paris and Rome in the second half of the last century. Internationally recognized for its urban photographs, his work extended to other disciplines such as fashion and cinema. His free style, with which he managed to make his snapshots appear to be taken almost at random, began to stand out in the 1950s with images that denote the impulses and violence of the street and that challenged established principles of framing, lighting or sharpness. .
[William Klein, photographer and everything else]
Klein introduced innovative resources that moved away from the precepts of the decade, such as the fact that he provoked the people he portrayed: he made them laugh or react with different behaviors in relation to the objective. One of his most famous images, that of a boy pointing a revolver at the camera, is an example. “I told him: do evil!”revealed Klein in an interview on the world in 2005.
In 1947 he studied at the Sorbonne in Paris and in 1951 he came to exhibit his work in Milan. In 1954 he returned to New York and met Alexandre Libermannartistic director of the magazine Vogue. Impressed by the abstraction of her photos, he offered her a contract. Klein revolutionized fashion photography with his innovative method, which consists of placing mannequins on the street. At the same time, his activity at the magazine allowed him to finance a personal project: photographing the city and New Yorkers in an ethnographic way, “as an anthropologist would treat the Zulus”.
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William Klein: 'Portrait of Stickball Team, 40th Street between 2nd and 3rd Avenues', 1954-55
Between 1954 and 1956, he made numerous fashion reports to which he always knew how to contribute his particular point of view, transforming these consumer images into true works of art. His photographs were listed on the same level as other great talents of the time, such as Helmut Newton, Irving Penn or Richard Avedonalthough Klein was much more irreverent and ephemeral in the industry.
His true photographic vocation was, as he himself said, his “serious photos”, the photographic reports that he edited in a series of monographs and which represented aspects of daily life in cities such as his beloved New York, Moscow, Tokyo or Rome. When he left his job at Vogueand except for some sporadic work, dedicated himself entirely to cinematographyfield that he approached in the politicized and avant-garde cultural context of the late 1960s and 1970s.
William Klein with Rossy de Palma and Diane Pernet at the Center Georges Pompidou in Paris (2012)
In 1958 he released his first film, Broadway of light, a documentary lasting just 11 minutes. movies like Who are you, Polly Magoo? (1966) or its documentary far from vietnam (1967) received important recognition.
Cinema began as a hobby after working as an assistant to Federico Fellini in The nights of Cabiria (1957). He then took the opportunity to portray Rome, although it is not exactly its most idyllic side. On the contrary, he focused on the less touristy part of the city, which earned him the applause of Pier Paolo Pasolini, also a filmmaker, who wrote the texts for his book Pomegranate. Fellini even said: “Rome is a film and Klein directed it.”
[William Klein, the photo takes place on the street]
In June 2019, Espacio Fundación Telefónica coordinated an exhibition dedicated to his work. Guilherme Klein. Manifest, part of the PHotoEspaña festival, exhibited material comprising 245 works and documents. Paintings, abstract photographic experiments, series of big cities, his work for fashion magazines, his films and projections... A sample of his entire artistic legacy curated by Raphaëlle Stopin.
His character, provocative and transgressive, accompanied him until his last years. He continued to present his work in galleries throughout Europe, serving journalists and admirers and providing an extremely scathing assessment of the political situation in the United States.