From innovative fashion imagery for Vogue to street photography that captured the febrile energy of city life, William Klein was an iconoclast whose seven-decade career changed modern photography. Born in New York in 1926, Klein — who died aged 96 in September last year — arrived in Paris in 1948 and trained as an abstract painter. In 1954 a Vogue art director came across his work and Klein started taking pictures for the magazine. His raw, experimental and often provocative images of New York, Paris, London and Tokyo sometimes appalled critics (one such series on Soho in London appeared in The Sunday Times Magazine in 1980). Perhaps Klein’s most famous image was Gun 1, 103rd Street — taken in New York in 1954, depicting two young boys, one brandishing a handgun. Unsettling and unflinching, it encapsulates his bold approach. As do the Rubensesque swimmers he discovered at a municipal pool in Paris: strong and defiant, his subjects subvert conventional notions of beauty. His fashion photography, meanwhile, broke the mould in telling stories that were barely about the clothes. A multifaceted artist, he was also a celebrated film-maker, famed for documentaries such as Muhammad Ali: The Greatest (1975).
William Klein: Yes is published by Thames & Hudson on Thursday at £65
