William Klein was a real original whose work as a photographer, artist, and filmmaker defined an era, expanding and subverting the visual language of midcentury fashion photography and photojournalism. With wit, dynamism, and a characteristic ironic distance, his vast body of labor shaped the look of the latter half of the twentieth century. The Sixties appear like the Sixties, partly, because Klein’s famous images tell us the right way to recall that febrile decade within the cultural imagination.

On Saturday September 10, 2022, Klein died at home in Paris, town by which the American-born photographer had made his home. Aged 96, his death coincided with the conclusion of a retrospective of his work in Recent York – town by which he was born and raised – on the International Center of Photography. Within the wake of his death, we take a take a look at a choice of the seminal works featured in Willaim Klein: YES.

One of the vital celebrated photographers of his generation, Klein arrived at photography in a rather oblique way, having first studied painting and dealing briefly in Paris as an assistant to the novel communist muralist Fernand Léger. After the war, at an exhibition in Italy, he was propositioned by Condé Nast editor Alexander Liberman. “I made a wall out of six interchangeable panels on rails that would – like toy trains – roll through the room, cut the space in two or make a mural on the wall,” Klein recalled in a conversation with Dazed back in 2013. “I painted these panels and a magazine called Domus published them. Alexander Liberman saw the show and said, ‘How would you prefer to work for Vogue?’ I said, ‘Doing what?’ and he said, ‘I don’t know, you can be an art director or something. You possibly can do photographs or do what I’m doing – placed on a suit through the week and go all the way down to the office and paint and sculpt.’’

With none formal training in photography, his first project was a photographic study of his hometown, which he described as “a photographic journal on the best way I see Recent York after having lived in Paris.” By his own admission, he “didn’t know much about taking photographs, actually”, however the camera allowed him the licence to specific himself unencumbered. “After I was a child, I all the time felt the Big Apple didn’t have any bite, but once I had a camera I could say what I wanted about Recent York, about America,” he told Dazed.

While his portraits are vigorous and beguiling, they betray his cynicism in regards to the ideology of American life, undermining middle-class America’s established idea of itself while capturing something incredibly potent and frenetic in regards to the city’s street life. A photograph akin to “Moves and Pepsi” (above) is a joyful vignette of Recent Yorkers going about their business, captured along with his unique and offbeat sense of composition and focus.

The photographs weren’t initially met with a universally warm reception from the editors who didn’t recognise aspirational middle-class America in his pictures. In keeping with Klein, they told him, “‘This just isn’t Recent York – these photos are shit. We are able to’t publish a book that shows Recent York so anti-American and grungy.’”

“In the style world, you may never be too absurd” – Willaim Klein

His debut book Life Is Good & Good for You in Recent York: Trance Witness Revels – reviled by so lots of the American editors he approached – caught the attention of Italian filmmaker Federico Fellini. “I used to be an enormous fan – a groupie, even – of Fellini,” Klein confessed to Dazed. “In those days, you can call up anyone in a hotel and say, ‘I’d prefer to speak to Fellini,’ and they might say, ‘One moment, please.’ So I went to see him and said, ‘I even have this book.’ He said, ‘I actually dig it. Why don’t you come to Rome and be my assistant? If I’m sick, you shoot.’ I used to be still a child, about 24, 25, and I said, ‘Okay, I’ll come to Rome.’ Then I discovered that Fellini was a bullshit artist and he had about eight assistants and he didn’t need me… I discovered quickly that there’s just one one that decides anything on a movie: the director.”

While Fellini’s Nights of Cabiria was delayed, Klein spent his time in Rome wandering the streets, creating one other seminal book of portraits of city life together with a few of his iconic Vogue pictures.

4 years later in 1960, Klein’s acclaimed image “Nina and Simone” was taken for French Vogue in Rome’s Piazza di Spagna. The 2 models are wearing the brand new geometric collection of rising young Italian fashion star, Roberto Capucci. Taken from an elevated distance with a telephoto lens, the photographer directed the pair to walk forwards and backwards across the zebra crossing amid the chaos of the busy street. Surrounded by oblivious commuters, the 2 women look striking and arch, posed against the monochrome of the crossing, capturing the elegant geometry of the world at large.

Despite making his mark as a fashion photographer, Klein remained aloof from the style world and his celebrated images parodied the mores and the conventions of the shape. Liberman, who originally gave Klein his start at Condé Nast, adroitly encapsulated Klein’s impact as a fashion photographer: “In the style pictures of the Fifties, nothing like Klein had happened before. He functioned like a Fellini, sensing the glamorous and the grotesque.” Klein himself remarked: “In the style world, you may never be too absurd.”

Talking to Dazed, he recalled, “I never really got together with the style people. I believed fashion was bullshit. I also thought the people doing it were second-rate.” His 1966 foray into film took aim at what he perceived because the vanity and caprice of the style industry: “I figured that if I used to be going to do a movie, it couldn’t be on any old subject. I believed the style world was a su

bject you can really go to town on. Who Are You, Polly Maggoo? (1966) was a really sarcastic, ironic film.” Yet film retained its fascination for Klein, whose best-known work on this arena was the two-part documentary Muhammad Ali, the Best (1974) – a study of the fighter’s transition from Cassius Clay.

Throughout his profession, he continued to challenge the conventions of each medium he worked in. His idiosyncratic photo essays on urban landscapes reconceptualised the looks of the world around us, reframing established perceptions of the streets and sidewalks of over-determined destinations akin to Recent York, Tokyo, Paris, Moscow, and Rome.

Speaking of his 2003 book Paris + Klein, photography critic Richard B. Woodward reflected: “As usual, Mr Klein rubs our faces in urban grime and dares us to be offended. It’s a Recent Yorker’s razz of Paris, just as his 1954-55 photographs of Recent York were inflected by a Gallic film noir sensuality.” But Klein’s unique genius and allure are perhaps best encapsulated in Woodward’s commentary of William Klein as “a perpetual outsider”.

Take a take a look at the gallery above for a glimpse of a number of the seminal images from Willaim Klein: YES on the International Centre of Photography in Recent York.