Photographer, filmmaker, painter and graphic designer William Klein at a press event in Paris 2005. Klein died Saturday at the age of 96.
Pierre Verdy / AFP via Getty Images
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Pierre Verdy / AFP via Getty Images
Photographer, filmmaker, painter and graphic designer William Klein at a press event in Paris 2005. Klein died Saturday at the age of 96.
Pierre Verdy / AFP via Getty Images
One of William Klein’s early mentors, artist Fernand Leger, told him: “Get out of the gallery. Look at the buildings; go out into the street.” That’s exactly what Klein did – and he went on to become one of the most influential photographers of his generation, conveying the dynamics of cities including New York, Paris, Tokyo and New York. Moscow in his work.
Klein died Saturday at the age of 96 in the city of Paris, his son Pierre Klein has announced. His death came in the last few days of a big flashback show at the International Center of Photography in New York, scheduled to close on Monday.
Born in New York in 1926, Klein attended the City College of New York before joining the army in 1946. He won his first camera at a poker game while stationed in Germany. Two years later, he moved to Paris, studying abstract painting and sculpture at the Sorbonne thanks to the GI Bill; It was there that he met and studied with Leger.
In the mid-1950s, Vogue The magazine first published a number of satirical and even satirical photographs of Klein, leading to a long and deep connection with the fashion world.
His first photography book, Life is good and good for you, published in 1956; he was soon hailed as a major new force, and a series of other books followed. Although he is primarily known as a still life photographer, Klein has also made a number of films, including 1969. Muhammad Ali, The Greatest.
Some of Klein’s works are in the collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Museum of Modern Art, and the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York; Center Pompidou in Paris; and the J. Paul Getty Museum in Los Angeles. In 1989, he was appointed by the French government as Commander of the Arts and Literature.
