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By Dana Thomas
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Photographer William Klein has always been a rebel. When he started shooting fashion in 1955, he says, he wanted to "invent and find new ways of doing things." By putting models in real life setting and printing the images in extreme black and white contrast, he radically changed the way clothing was presented in the glossies. When he decided to make documentaries, he grabbed a handheld 16mm camera and went out in the street to discover, as he puts it, "little miracles." So when the Centre Pompidou proposed a retrospective of his work, Klein naturally wanted to make the show revolutionary, too. And he has succeeded. "William Klein" (through Feb. 20) is as modern and unexpected as Klein's half century of work.
A few days before the show opened last month, Klein gave NEWSWEEK a personal tour. The journey begins with a wall-size collage of dozens of images--a preview of what is to come. Among them is a 1984 portrait of French crooner Serge Gainsbourg in drag, a plume of cigarette smoke rising like a warning up his right cheek. Below it, from just two years ago, French soccer star Eric Cantona, naked to the waist, displays the phrase "You play to fight the idea of losing" across his pale, hairy torso. "They are actually the same, those two, aren't they?" Klein says, laughing, as he takes it in. Next to them is a poster from "Grands Soirs et Petit Matins," his documentary about the student uprisings in May 1968, with four stick people drawn by his son Pierre when he was 5. Klein says the figures represent protesters, and the black squares at their feet are cobblestones ready to be thrown.
From there, a yellow walkway beckons down a red corridor into the show itself. There is a room dedicated to Klein's groundbreaking photo books; pictures in the room are affixed to pairs of glass panels that stand at 90-degree angles like an open book. Another room focuses on films such as "Muhammad Ali, the Greatest" and "The Messiah," with extracts playing in a small theater as well as on a big white wall outside so visitors passing by can get a glimpse. "I think it will be amusing, with people congregating in the street," Klein says. The gallery dedicated to Klein's fashion photography shows how he took fashion out of the studio and shot the couture-clad models in the world's most graphic cityscapes, surrounded by everyday people.
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The path winds up in a mammoth gallery lined with gigantic pictures from floor to ceiling framed in splashes of red, yellow and blue paint, like marked-up contact sheets. There are images from every period of Klein's career, bigger than life. In this room, you see Klein as well as the postwar cosmopolitan world. Klein's street photography is not sappy or romantic like Robert Doisneau's or of a particular epoch like Henri Cartier-Bresson. His pictures from New York in the 1950s meld easily with those of Paris in the 1990s, primarily because he doesn't capture a moment, he seizes the soul. Like Man Ray, Klein has always been foremost a contemporary artist. The camera was simply one of his tools.
Though he has spent most of his life in Paris, Klein is still, deep in his bones, a New Yorker. Born to poor Jewish immigrants in 1928, and raised at 108th Street and Amsterdam Avenue, Klein was a whiz kid who graduated from the City College of New York at 18. During his military service, he was sent to Paris as a cultural exchange student at the Sorbonne. Within 48 hours of his arrival, Klein met 20-year-old French student Jeanne Florian and married her not long after. They are still together.
Klein remained in Paris after his discharge to study art and used grants from the GI Bill to pay for classes with French cubist painter Fernand Leger. After that, he worked with a group of architects in Milan who painted murals on revolving panels. Klein photographed the panels as they turned and was intrigued by the blurred images. He took up photography seriously, doing urban studies, as well as fashion spreads for Vogue. In 1965, he stopped taking pictures and started making movies. He returned to still photography in 1980 and is still shooting away.
Throughout the show, you see all that informed Klein's youth: New York, Leger's bold colors, the love of architecture and graphics. In the same way, Klein himself has shaped all of modern photography, from fashion photographers to the school of young French art photographers who have brought Klein's blurring technique back into vogue. "Trash photography," says Quentin Bajac, cocurator of the exhibit, "can definitely trace its roots to William Klein." Not that any of this matters to Klein. As Bajac points out, "Monsieur Klein has always done what he wanted, and he is still doing it today." Once a rebel, always.
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