William Klein

Born in Manhattan in 1928, William Klein is a versatile artist living in Paris. He studied sociology in the United States and later at the Sorbonne in 1948 after his military service. Starting out as a visual artist, he then became Vogue magazine’s regular fashion photographer in 1954. Innovative and provocative, he also photographed the streets of New York and its population with a distinctive style that became his trademark and made him an emblematic figure of the 20th century photography. In 1958-1959, he published the book Rome and shot his first short film, Broadway by Light. During the 1960s, he abandoned photography for cinema. His films are notable for their activism, especially championing the black cause with movies such as Muhammad Ali the Greatest (1964) and The Pan-Africain Festival of Algiers(1969) . He also had a critical view of fashion – a milieu he had been part of for a long time – with In and Out of Fashion (1998). He has won a large number of prestigious awards and the Centre Pompidou devoted a retrospective to his work in 2005. In 2008, he published Contacts, a collection of his best photographs revamped by adding paint to enlarged contacts.