Klein

William (1928). Photographer, painter, and American film director. Born in New York to a family of Hungarian origin, he grew up in the mean streets of Manhattan. A self-taught photographer, he likes to experiment with the use of the flash and rather exaggerated zooms to create particularly innovative new visions. In 1954, after 6 years in Paris, he attended the atelier of Fernand Léger, later spent some time in Milan where he created murals for Italian architects, and then returned to New York, where he worked for Vogue America. During this period, his book Life Is Good & Good For You in New York (Nadar Prize 1956) was published in Paris rather than New York, where he had not been forgiven for the aggressiveness of his graphics and his political commitment. After seeing the book, Fellini invited Klein to work with him, which allowed the American to get to know Rome very well, and to which he later dedicated a book. His photos stand out from those of other photographers for the use of weird locations, unexpected characters (such as dwarfs and wax statues), very ironic installations, and for the thin but evident understanding between the photographer and his model. In 1965 he gradually abandoned photography to devote himself to cinema, co-directing an important film (Away From Vietnam, 1965) with the directors Alain Resnais and Jean-Luc Godard, and documentaries on the Black Panthers (Mister Freedom, 1965), the boxer Cassius Clay-Mohammed Alì (Cassius the Great, 1974), fashion (Fashion in France, 1985), the famous French dancer Babilée (1985), and once more about fashion with In & Out of Fashion (1993). In 2002 he published a remasterized anthology of his best 20 films on DVD with the title Messiah. In 1978, he returned to photography. In 1980 the Museum of Modern Art in New York, and in 1983 the Centre Pompidou in Paris dedicated two broad retrospectives to his work. In 1994 he published the volume Mode In and Out. And in 2002 the volume Paris + Klein ideally concluded his work on cities that, since 1954, has touched on New York, Rome, Moscow, and Tokyo.