“What would please me most is to make photographs as incomprehensible as life”
William Klein was a true pioneer — a multidisciplinary artist who worked across photography, painting, and filmmaking throughout his remarkable career.
Known for his bold and unconventional approach, Klein’s distinct visual language became a defining part of the 20th-century cultural zeitgeist and continues to resonate and influence today.
Born in New York City to a Jewish family, Klein graduated high school at 16 and enrolled at the City College of New York to study sociology. After completing his studies, he joined the U.S. Army and was stationed in Germany during the Allied occupation. Following his demobilization, he moved to Paris, where he settled and enrolled at the Sorbonne.
Emerging from the lingering shadow of the German occupation, Paris was beginning to welcome back artists who had left during the war, along with a burgeoning generation of new creatives from the city and beyond. Among them, Klein found kindred spirits. He studied under influential avant-garde painter Fernand Léger, working in his studio, and befriended other young artists, including fellow Americans Ellsworth Kelly and Jack Youngerman, both of whom would go on to become highly influential in their field.
Klein is perhaps best known as a photographer, but it was never his intention. His first experiments with a camera came from capturing images of his paintings moving on revolving room dividers. The outcome was a series of bold, geometric compositions which caught the attention of Alexander Liberman, the formidable Ukrainian-born Art Director at Vogue, who, in 1954, offered him a job as a staff photographer. Klein returned to his home city and, while shooting for the magazine, also began capturing everyday life on the city streets—driven by the same interest in motion, chaos, and immediacy that had informed his abstract experiments in Paris.
Though undeniably compelling, no American publisher would take them on, partly because Klein’s images exposed societal divisions, though also due to his approach, which was viewed as too unconventional for the time. However, he found a Paris-based publisher and, in 1956, released his debut monograph, Life is Good & Good for You in New York. Designed, written, and typeset by Klein himself, the raw, frenzied collection rejected the traditional photobook’s unified vision in favor of something more fragmented and visceral. It would go on to prove highly influential, inspiring numerous artists, including Japanese heavyweight Daido Moriyama.
Although the book wasn’t well received in the U.S., where many struggled or refused to accept or understand Klein’s radical and subversive approach, in France, it was celebrated, winning the prestigious Prix Nadar the following year. Klein went on to publish similarly bold books on Rome (1959), Moscow (1964), and Tokyo (1964), each charged with his signature energy, abstraction, and irreverence.
Meanwhile, at Vogue, Klein was making his mark on the world of fashion. Liberman, who had taken a chance on the young artist who had no formal photography training, encouraged Klein’s creativity. Initially assigned still lifes, Klein was soon given major fashion assignments, where he brought a new, raw energy to the genre with his experimental approach.
He used grainy textures, wide-angle and telephoto lenses, and flash mixed with multiple exposures, giving his fashion images the distinct dynamism and unpredictability of street photography. He also took models out of the studio, often interacting with them and encouraging them to engage with passersby, adding another layer of spontaneity. While he wasn’t the first to shoot fashion editorials in ‘real’ settings (Frank Horvat and Frances McLaughlin-Gill had pioneered similar techniques), Klein’s vision was unique—bold, at times chaotic, but always alive.
His time at Vogue with Liberman was productive, lasting over a decade and producing some of the most striking and influential fashion photography of the era.
But Klein was never one to be confined to a single medium. After his Vogue contract ended in 1965, he left fashion photography to focus on filmmaking in Paris, releasing Who Are You, Polly Maggoo?, a satirical critique of the fashion world with which he had an uneasy relationship, the following year. In 1967, he co-directed Far from Vietnam, an anti-Vietnam War documentary that sparked controversy, particularly among his former employers at Condé Nast.
Over the next decade, Klein focused on filmmaking, directing features, shorts, and commercials. He photographed sporadically but didn’t return to fashion until the mid-’80s when he produced Mode in France while also capturing striking backstage images at runway shows during the filming of the documentary.
He never returned to photography full-time, but it remained a constant. In later years, he reworked old images into ‘painted contacts’ while also curating major exhibitions, including a 2005 retrospective at the Centre Pompidou. He never moved back to the U.S., a country with which he always had a complicated relationship, choosing instead to remain in Paris with his wife Jeanne Florin—whom, incredibly, he had met at 18, when he first arrived in the city—until her death in 2005.
Despite his declining health, Klein continued making art until his death aged 96, and actively participated in curating his exhibitions, including his final major retrospective at the International Center of Photography in New York, which concluded just days after his passing in September 2022.
There are many ways he will be remembered. As a photography enthusiast, it is his contributions to the medium that resonate most. For others, it may be his filmmaking. But that, in itself, embodies his essence—for he always defied rules, convention, and categorization. In a world that loves to put artists in boxes, he refused to be confined. Instead, he will be remembered simply as one of the most important visual artists of the 20th century. An iconoclast, pioneer, and visionary.
All images © William Klein Estate