“I’m an outsider, I guess”: William Klein
The original draft for this post was long and rambling, but to be honest, the documentary above and the photographs below say more than enough.
William Klein is someone I first discovered through his photographs of 1950s New York City, and his 1966 film Who Are You, Polly Maggoo?, an amusing satire of the fashion industry that I would highly recommend watching (think of it as the OG Zoolander). He worked at Vogue for ten years, and his iconic fashion imagery has the playful quality that comes with a photographer who does not actually care about fashion. While his “street” photography (I realise that term is loaded, but I use it for ease of communication) dealt with reality as he saw it in the moment, his fashion imagery reveled in the artifice of a constructed scene to great effect. He also did documentary work, with notable films on Muhammad Ali and Eldridge Cleaver. Basically, he has done it all, and I really do wish I had attended the Tate Modern exhibition in 2012 that looked at the relationship between his work and that of Japanese photographer Daido Moriyama.
Harlem, New York City, 1955
42nd Street, New York City, 1955
42nd Street, New York City, 1955
New York City, 1955
Paris, 1968
Rome, 1956
Rome, 1956
Tokyo, 1961
Tokyo, 1961
Vogue, 1956
Vogue, 1956
Piazza di Spagna, Rome, 1960
Vogue, 1960
Vogue, 1960
Who Are You, Polly Maggoo? (1966), dir. William Klein
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