William KleinMegan White, Ellen Banach &

Matthew Galliford

Who Where When?

• American-born French photographer

• Born April 19, 1928 (Age 85)

• Ranked 25th on the Professional Photographer’s Top 100 Most Influential Photographers

• Trained as a painter but quickly moved onto photography (No formal training)

• Gained fame in ‘Fashion Photography’ ei. Vogue

• ‘Father of street photography’

Background

• Klein joined the US Army and was stationed initially in Germany and later in France, where he would permanently settle after being discharged.

• In 1948, Klein enrolled at the Sorbonne, and later studied with Fernand Leger. At the time, Klein was interested in abstract painting and sculpture.

• This was where he was encouraged to break the constraints of conformity, evident in his groundbreaking photography in New York.

Klein worked at Vogue until 1966: his ‘Serious Photographs’

Fashion Photography

• Kliens fashion photography consists of surreal images which have influenced generations of fashion photographers.

• His innovations have not only been technological, but also philosophical: he encouraged his models to 'act' rather than just to 'pose’, and his 'street esthetics' opened up a new dimension in Fashion Photography

• He lacked studio experience, so preferred to take his models out into the street or on location. He posed his models in a group of mannequins, crossing busy streets, surrounded by a crowd whose faces he painted out as blank masks.

Street Photography

• ‘At last real pictures, eliminating taboos and cliches’

• Unconventional wide-angle and telephoto pictures, with unusual lighting and flash effects and with intentional motion blurs.

• His pictures were first criticized as the rough work of an amateur street photographer- yet his deliberate anti-technique has in itself become adopted as a technique, and the pictures, far from being amateur, are rooted in Klein's early artistic training in France with Fernand Léger, the first painter to confront modern urban reality

New York

• Produced over an intense 8-month period in 1954-1955

• The New York book was done with one camera, a 35mm camera, and three lenses. A 28mm, a 50mm and a 135.

• Normal lens was his wide angle lens.

• ‘Grain, blur, contrast, accidents, cockeyed framing, no problem.’

• Editors in New York didn’t see potential – Klein went to Paris, found an editor and produced the cover and typography himself.

• Controversial after release – Cast off as a bad, naïve representation of New York

ROME

“Rome was an accident- I was a groupie”

ROME CONT.

"How could I make photographic sense out of a city that I barely knew and where I hardly spoke the language? But that's the problem with photography in general. I was willing to take a shot... I soon found out that the Romans reacted to the camera much like New Yorkers. Everyone felt they deserved to be photographed, immortalized."

TOKYO

MOSCOW

WILLIAM KLEIN b. 1928 May Day, Moscow, 1961

PARIS

Dance group La La La Human Steps in Metro, Paris, 1991

‘FRANK ‘N’ KLEIN’

Frank/Klein

• In many ways the reputation of Klein, an American living in Paris, is similar to that of the highly regarded Robert Frank, a European living in America.

• It's now largely forgotten that Frank's classic work, The Americans, was dismissed at first by most critics and intellectuals.

• Klein's book New York, which established his reputation in Europe, has never been published in America.

Frank/Klein’s Style

• Half the time the photographers seemed not to have even looked through the camera.

• They were far from seeking the perfect composition, their work seemed curiously unfinished.

• It captured ‘indecisive’ rather than decisive moments.

• It was exciting, expressive, flying in the face of accepted photographic good taste. Importantly, this was a style whose informality was far better suited to the book form than to display as individual prints on a wall.

Frank/Klein’s Style

• In different ways, both men rebelled against the consciously elegant and beautiful. Both took a tough look at America - though Frank was wry and could be distant, whereas Klein was violent and personal.

• Frank used mostly one camera, one lens, one technique.

• Klein experimented with flash, wide-angle, grab shots, abstraction, blur, close-up, accidents, deformations, harsh printing, special layouts, and inking.

• Frank was concerned with showing America as never before, Klein with ways of showing it as never before.

• These transplanted photographers found live and visual metaphors for the bleakness of this Cold War moment, and the deadness of the things in it. (Max Kozloff)

Works Cited

• http://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/photoblog/2009/11/kleins_rome_revisited.html

• http://www.worldphoto.org/community/blogs/world-photo-london-day-2-in-the-photographers-studio-with-william-klein/

• http://bcove.me/rmv0r1nh

• http://www.hcs.harvard.edu/~hpj/badger.htm

• http://www.masters-of-photography.com/K/klein/klein_articles2.html

• http://photostick.blogspot.co.uk/2013/01/william-klein-robert-frank.html?m=1