From his earliest years, Mr. Klein said, he was conditioned to see the world as a permanent outsider. He grew up in Depression-era Manhattan, a Jewish boy in a predominantly Irish neighborhood, where he endured poverty and anti-Semitic bullying. Self-reliance and a quick eye for his surroundings were tools for survival – and so was art. At age 12, he began spending his weekends wandering around the Museum of Modern Art, where his work would one day be exhibited.
After military service, he settled in France in the late 1940s to study painting. But he was quickly fascinated by photography when he realized how playing with exposures could form, with endless possibilities, a new kind of abstract art. The vivid disturbances he created were a revelation, he said, of the mood he felt swirling around him and his vision of the world at large: its grit, its vibrancy, its majesty, its grotesque.
He proudly distanced himself from any school or method when he became popular in the post-war years, favoring raw instinct over any established technique.
“I came from abroad, I didn’t care about the rules of photography,” he once said. “There were things you could do with a camera that you couldn’t do with any other medium – grain, contrast, blur, false framing, eliminating or exaggerating gray tones and so on. I thought it would be good to show what’s possible, to say that this is just as valid a way of using the camera as conventional approaches.”
The famous art director of Vogue, Alexander Liberman, who said that he saw Mr. Klein “a prodigious iconoclastic talent,” put him under contract to the fashion magazine from 1955 to 1965. Mr. Klein offered radically original images that included blur, flash lighting, high-contrast printing, and allowed for strange perspectives from wide-angle and telephoto lenses.
“They were probably the most unpopular fashion pictures ever published by Vogue,” Mr Klein told the Observer.
While living off Vogue’s salary, he began a personal project: a series of photographs taken on the streets of New York using the same techniques he was applying to fashion. In Mr. Klein’s lens, the streets revealed a tumultuous modern world alive with action and opportunity, but also filled with hostility.
Rejected by Vogue and American book publishers, the photographs were published in an idiosyncratic tabloid-style book. Its full title, “Life’s Good and Good for You in New York: Trance Witness Revels,” was a collage of tabloid headlines.
“New York,” as the book became commonly known, was published in France in 1956, but not in America. Like Robert Frank’s seminal photographic volume, The Americans (1959), Mr. Klein’s book cast a wry eye on the myth of the American dream at the height of the Cold War. Mr. Klein called it “my diatribe against America.”
Although many American art and photography critics did not approve of Mr. Klein’s style – one accused him of “cheap sensationalist pictures” – the book proved to be of lasting influence. In 1992, Vicki Goldberg, a photography historian and critic, described Mr. Klein in the New York Times as a born rule-breaker who “played a major role in codifying a new outlook” in the visual arts.
He often used a wide-angle lens to include faces on the periphery of the frame or a telephoto lens to condense near and far figures, and photographed his subjects before they were fully aware of his presence. He used the development process to create high-contrast effects and other background effects, and often cropped the results.
Mr. Klein’s most reproduced image from the book, known as “Gun 1,” shows a young man with a tight, angry expression pointing a gun at the photographer, just inches from the target. A smaller, angelic-looking boy appears to try to restrain his friend by putting his hand on his sleeve. The boys were playing, Mr. Klein explained, but still seemed to embody the emotional drama of urban life.
“New York” was a multicultural tour, with many black and immigrant faces. The telephoto shot known as “4 Heads, New York” appears in a frame, according to Mr. Klein, an Italian police officer, a Hispanic man, a Jewish mother. and an African American woman wearing a beret.
The design of the book was extremely experimental. Some pictures flow from the edges of the page; others are grouped into networks. The volume included a separately bound 16-page booklet containing captions for the photos and a reproduction of the Mad magazine cover, ersatz advertisements for spaghetti and bras, and other ephemera. This apparent critique of rampant commercialism preceded Andy Warhol’s pop art.
Mr. Klein characterized his work as “pseudo-ethnographic, parodic, Dada,” the latter referring to an absurdist joke art movement of the early 20th century. He continued to photograph other cities—Rome, Moscow, Tokyo—while also pursuing film, training his lens on people who, like him, had defied the cultural mainstream.
His subjects included boxer Muhammad Ali, Black Panther leader Eldridge Cleaver and rock-and-roll pioneer Little Richard. In addition to his documentaries, Mr. Klein created French-language features, including the fashion world spoof “Who Are You, Polly Maggoo?” (1966) and the comedy “Mr. Liberty” (1968), about a superhero who uses his powers to bolster American corporate and military imperialism.
Despite his extraordinary output over more than 70 years, Mr. Klein never achieved the recognition in his native country that peers such as Frank and Richard Avedon enjoyed. The explanation lay partly in its absence. But his independent streak also helped ease his relationships with editors, art directors and curators. It would be decades before his work received major exhibitions in the United States.
Mr. Klein said he remained an “outsider” even in his adopted country, always the outside observer keen to see the complexities beneath the surface charm. His 2002 book “Paris + Klein” – showing Rubenesque women in a Turkish bath, protesters of African descent demanding their rights, Chinese New Year celebrations – rejected the romanticized vision of the City of Lights.
William Klein was born in Manhattan on April 19, 1926. His father was a tailor who owned a clothing store but lost it in the stock market crash of 1929; his mother was a housewife.
A precocious student, he graduated from high school at age 14 and enrolled at the City College of New York. He left in 1946 to join the army. While stationed in Allied-occupied Germany, he became a cartoonist for the military newspaper Stars and Stripes and, by his own account, won his first camera, a professional-grade Rolleiflex, in a poker game at the base.
After his discharge in 1948, he moved to Paris to attend the Sorbonne and studied under the painter Fernand Léger. A few years later, the abstract photographs he took for the architectural magazine Domus were spotted by Liberman, who brought him back to New York to work for Vogue.
Mr. Klein married Jeanne Florin (also known as Janine) after seeing her on the Left Bank the first week in Paris. She worked briefly as a model and later managed her husband’s schedule. She died in 2005. Survivors include a son, Pierre Klein, and a sister.
Mr. Klein’s first film was ”Broadway by Light” (1958), an abstract celebration of the neon nights of Times Square. While continuing to work in cinema, Mr. Klein returned to still photography in the 1980s, as a market for art photographs was emerging and his early work was being discovered by a new generation of street photographers.
Major institutions such as the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art and the Tate Modern in London hosted retrospectives of his output. The New York-based International Center of Photography awarded him a lifetime achievement award in 2007.
When the Pompidou Center in Paris opened a major exhibition of his work, Mr. Klein told the Los Angeles Times in 2006 that his most reproduced image — the boy with the gun — had been misunderstood for decades.
“Now, I get calls all the time, ‘We’re a magazine in Norway and we’re doing a thing about what our kids are coming to,'” he said. “I’ve probably had 30 or 40 covers done with that picture and the headline, ‘What are our children coming to?'”
The children shown in the photo, he added, express two aspects of his personality.
“You can see in the next picture that the child is laughing,” Mr. Klein said. “If you really look at the picture, it’s a picture of the two of them, me too; I was a bit of a tough kid and also a little angelic kid scared of some gang on the block.”
