William Klein - New York - 1995

Collector's book published in 1995. A classic for every photography enthusiast.

In 1956, William Klein's NEW YORK was published, one of the most important books in the history of photography. Its release sparked a true revolution in the world of images. Breaking with traditions and taboos, Klein immediately established a new, violent, graphic style that blends dark humor, social critique, satire, and poetry. 'For the first time,' writes Alain Jouffroy, 'photographs preceded the evolution of the visual arts.' Klein had indeed grasped all the themes later explored in the context of Pop Art, Nouveau Réalisme, and New Figuration. This book has become a kind of myth, a collectible object... impossible to find. That is why a group of European publishers, with American partners, planned this reissue, which features significantly renewed form and content. Nearly a hundred additional pages with dozens of unpublished photos. Klein meticulously reviewed all his contact sheets to discover images never published, some never even enlarged. Of course, the New York of then is not the same as today. But it is astonishing to see how the madness of 1995 was already evident in William Klein's prescient vision and how it has influenced photography since. Painter, photographer, filmmaker, graphic designer—an American in Paris? William Klein defies labels, categories, and movements. Born in New York in 1928, Klein grew up on Manhattan's 'Mean Streets.' After graduating from university at 18, he spent two years in the US occupation army (including one at the Sorbonne, invited by the French government!). He settled in Paris to become a painter and briefly worked with Fernand Léger. Later, in Milan, he created a series of murals for Italian architects, assimilating the evolution of plastic arts from Masaccio to Bauhaus. In 1954, after six years of pictorial research, he returned to New York and embarked on a complex love-hate guerrilla with his hometown. Half an outsider, half a rebellious native, he created a sharp photographic journal. He explored and cataloged the metropolis of absurdity like no photographer before him: mindless crowds, absurd parades, normalized violence, crazy accumulation of urban debris, walls covered with Dada messages. He rejected amateur photography, reportage, and staged photos. He used ultra-fast film, wide-angle lenses, unusual framing and printing techniques, freeing the 35mm camera while transforming accidents, grain, contrast, distortion, and abstraction into a new visual language. The book, which he designed himself, also broke with traditional photographic publishing in both concept and content. NEW YORK received the Prix Nadar in 1957 in France but was never published in the United States. Curiously, as Klein's international reputation grew, he became a figure of the underground, from which he drew his inspiration. In the following years, Klein published three more books with unrestrained, cinematic design: Rome (1956), Moscow (1961), Tokyo (1962). From 1955 to 1965, he intermittently worked for Vogue magazine, creating images of a new, unusual, and graphic genre. In 1958, Klein directed Broadway by Light, arguably the first pop film, and in the sixties, he abandoned photography for cinema. His films include the 'Supermen Noirs' series: Muhammad Ali the Greatest (1964-74) and The Little Richard Story (1980); political documentaries: Loin du Vietnam (1967), Le festival panafricain (1969), Grands soirs et petits matins (1968-78); feature films: Who Are You Polly Maggoo? (Vigo Prize 1967), M. Freedom (1968), Le couple témoin (1976), among others, biting fables about the ideological myths of our time. In the 1980s, he returned to photography, exhibited worldwide, and published Close Up (1989), Torino 90 (1990), Mode in & out (1994), along with numerous catalogs and monographs. He received the Hasselblad International Prize, the Guggenheim Award in the USA, the Grand Prix National in France, the Kultur Preis, and the Prix Agfa-Erfurt in Germany. While Photokina in Cologne placed him among the thirty greatest photographers in history as early as 1963, the United States, after a long 40-year purgatory, finally recognized the importance of his contribution: the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, for its new building inauguration, organized the first major exhibition of his NEW YORK photographs in America. The release of NEW YORK 1954-55 was accompanied by exhibitions worldwide, including at the Maison Européenne de la Photographie in Paris.

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Tags: photo, art, collector, belongs to the same artistic movement as the following photographers:

1-Ansel Adams (1902 – 1984)
2-Dorothea Lange (1895 – 1965)
3-Edward Henry Weston (1886 – 1958)
4-Henri Cartier-Bresson (1908 – 2004)
5-Irving Penn (1917 – 2009)
6-Diane Arbus (1923 – 1971)
7-Man Ray (1890 – 1976)
8-Robert Capa (1913 – 1954)
9-Robert Mapplethorpe (1946 – 1989)
10-Steve McCurry (1950 – )
11-Yousuf Karsh (1908 – 2002)
12-Annie Leibovitz (1949 – )
13-Andreas Gursky (1955 – )
14-Robert Frank (1924 – 2019)
15-Philippe Halsman (1906 – 1979)
16-Brassaï (1899 – 1984)
17-Weegee (1899 – 1968)
18-Mary Ellen Mark (1940 – 2015)
19-Gerda Taró (1910 – 1937)
20-Sally Mann (1951 – )
21-William Eggleston (1939 – )
22-Vivian Maier (1926 – 2009)
23-Josef Koudelka (1938 – )
24-Elliott Erwitt (1928 – 2023)
25-W. Eugene Smith (1918 – 1978)
26-André Kertész (1894 – 1985)
27-Joseph Nicéphore Niépce (1765 – 1833)
28-Louis Daguerre (1787 – 1851)
29-Ken Rockwell (1962 – )
30-Margaret Bourke-White (1904 – 1971)
31-David Bailey (1938 – )
32-Richard Avedon (1923 – 2004)
33-James Nachtwey (1948 – )
34-Lewis Hine (1874 – 1940)
35-Robert Doisneau (1912 – 1994)
36-Alfred Stieglitz (1864 – 1946)
37-Garry Winogrand (1928 – 1984)
38-Joe McNally (1952 – )
39-Jacques-Henri Lartigue (1894 – 1986)
40-Eliot Porter (1901 – 1990)
41-Walker Evans (1903 – 1975)
42-Edward Muybridge (1830 – 1904)
43-George Hurrell (1904 – 1992)
44-Arnold Newman (1918 – 2006)
45-Harold Edgerton
46-Guy Bourdin (1928 – 1991)
47-Cindy Sherman (1954 – )
48-Imogen Cunningham
49-Frans Lanting (1951 – )
50-Paul Strand (1890 – 1976)
51-Don McCullin
52-David LaChapelle (1963 – )
53-Anne Geddes (1956 – )
54-Mario Testino (1954 – )
55-Sebastião Salgado (1944 – )
56-Jerry Uelsman (1934 – 2022)
57-Jay Maisel (1931 – )
58-Brian Duffy (1933 – 2010)
59-Marc Riboud (1923 – 2016)
William Klein