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tspiele GmbH and the Museumspa ̈dagogischen Dienst
Berlin, DuMont Buchverlag, Ko ̈ln 1997.
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Cantz-Verlag, 1994.
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texts by Noemi Smolik, and Carsten Ahrens. Exhibition
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bition catalogue. Vancouver: Fine Arts Gallery, Univer-
sity of British Columbia, 1992.WILLIAM KLEIN
American
William Klein is an eclectic artist, initially a painter
and graphic designer, and a renowned photographer
and filmmaker. Appreciated since the 1950s for the
striking novelty of his images in Europe and Japan
that followed the publication of his now legendary
book about New York,Life Is Good and Good for
You in New York(1956), his importance to contem-
porary photography was late in being established in
the United States. Today, however, he is recog-
nized as one of the most important practitioners
of twentieth-century photography, who helped
establish the genre known as snapshot photogra-
phy or street photography. The use of the wide-
angle lenses to distort the image, fast film, extreme
contrast, grainy printing, and blurry and streaked
imagery is Klein’s photographic language.
William Klein was born in New York in 1928. He
studied sociology at City College of New York, and
in 1946, enlisted in the United States Army, where he
worked as an army newspaper cartoonist. When he
wasdischargedin1948,hefoundhimselfinParisand
decided to stay, living there until 1954. These were the
years of his artistic formation. After attending the
Sorbonne, he briefly studied painting with Fernand
Le ́ger. Abstraction was the prevailing aesthetic in
Europe at that time, but it was the teaching of Le ́ger
that had its greatest impact on how Klein learned to
relate to the art world: there should be no barriers
between the various artistic mediums and styles.
Le ́ger provided the example: while best known as a
painter, he also did set design, costume design, mur-
als, and films. This attitude had its origins in the
avant-garde movements of Russian Constructivism,
the Dutch movement De Stijl (The Style), and Dada,
as well as from the teachings of the German Bauhaus.
In 1952, an Italian architect, Mangiarotti, after
viewing Klein’s exhibition of abstract paintings at
the Galleria del Milione in Milan, asked him to realize
a mural made with sliding and revolving panels. Klein
painted the panels with abstract shapes and then
photographed the panels in motion. This led to his
first experiments in the darkroom with a kind of
rayograph or photogram, where he placed geometri-
cal shapes on photographic paper and exposed them
to light.
In 1954, Alexander Liberman, art director of
Vogue, was in Paris. He saw an exhibition of Klein’s
abstract photographs and offered him a job atVogue
as a fashion photographer. Back in New York, Klein
began his personal project: a photographic diary of
his return to his native city. The photographs he took
in the streets of New York did not convince prospec-
tive American publishers. They seemed too raw and
violent; Klein’s aesthetic was in direct contradiction
with the rules of what was then considered good
photography. The canons that had been imposed by
Henri Cartier-Bresson were those of a clean and
balanced image, built on the average tones. The per-
sons were taken at a distance or secretly. Klein meant
to contradict explicitly every rule dictated by Cartier-
Bresson: to the average tones he opposed a strong
black-and-white contrast, to a clean and defined
printing contrapposed a grainy one obtained through
the blowup processes. Klein chose a popular modelKLEIN, WILLIAM