Photographer William Klein dies at 96

(Paris) The American photographer William Klein, who died on Saturday at the age of 96 in Paris, revolutionized fashion photography and urban photography, with “punch” images reflecting the feverishness and violence of cities, in the course of a long career devoted also to the cinema.

Photographer, but also painter, documentary filmmaker and graphic designer, William Klein is considered one of the most influential artists of the 20th century.^e century. He passed away as a retrospective exhibition of his work at the International Center of Photography in New York came to an end.

Inspired by the raw aesthetic of reportage and the sensationalist style of tabloids, William Klein has shaken up the codes of street photography, but also of fashion, by being one of the first to bring models out of the studios.

Deframings, exacerbated contrast are at the rendezvous in his work, essentially in black and white, where young boys brandish weapons at point-blank range and where scowling faces are displayed in very close-up, sometimes blurred.

“William Klein photographed like a boxer”, for Alain Génestar, director of the specialist magazine and the Polka gallery.

Born on April 19, 1926 in New York into an Orthodox Jewish family, the young American discovered Europe while doing his military service and settled in France after meeting the model and artist Jeanne Florin, with whom he would share her life until her disappearance in 2005.

New York Underground

At the time, he devoted himself to painting, after having studied with Fernand Léger, and imagined himself as an architect for a time.

The trigger occurs when he wins a Rolleiflex, his first camera, in poker: he begins to machine-gun Parisian monuments. His first photos, rather abstract, caught the eye of Alexander Liberman, artistic director of Vogue, who offered him a collaboration. William Klein is 26 years old.

From this return to his native country, eight years later, a cult book was born, the stripper Life is good and good for you in New Yorkreleased in France in 1956, but long disdained by American publishers, hostile to the idea of ​​seeing New York as “a hovel”.

Thanks to this book, Federico Fellini notices him and offers him to be one of his assistants on Cabiria nights.

Cinema and politics

He took the opportunity to produce a book on the Eternal City. Moscow and Tokyo will follow for a long cinema break, initiated with Who are you, Polly Maggoo? in 1966. The film is a scathing satire on the world of fashion, which Klein frequents sporadically, and always with derision.

William Klein also made more than 250 advertising films that marked their era, notably for Citroën, Dim, Saupiquet, Renault, Ricqlès…

Then it will be time for political battles with documentaries like Far from Vietnam (1967) and portraits, the most famous of which is Muhammad Ali the greatest (1974). “This black boxer, converted to Islam, had a real political dimension,” said the photographer.

In the plane that takes him to Miami to meet the boxer, at the start of the project, William Klein meets the black leader Malcolm X (assassinated in 1965).

“It was the only empty seat, because no one wanted to be near him. We got along very well, ”said the man who was very interested in the condition of black Americans, the Black Panthers and the protest movements.

From the 80s, he abandoned the camera for the viewfinder, produced several books (Close-up1989, Torino ’901990 and In & Out of Fashion1994), and signs the cover of an album by Serge Gainsbourg, where the singer appears in drag, a cigarette in hand.

“My motto,” recalled the photographer, “in doing the (book on) New York was: “anything goes”. She always suits me. No rules, no prohibitions, no limits”.