William Klein
PhotographerKnown for: Life Is Good and Good for You in New York (1956); wide-angle street photography
William Klein left New York for Paris after World War II service, studied painting with Fernand Léger, and returned to New York in 1954 to make a book of photographs — Life Is Good and Good for You in New York (1956) — that used wide-angle distortion, motion blur, and the confrontational close-up to produce images that violated almost every convention of fine-art photography. He subsequently made similarly transgressive books on Rome, Moscow, and Tokyo before moving into fashion photography at Vogue and feature filmmaking.
Gear & Materials(1)
Leica
The M6, produced from 1984 to 1998, was the first M-series Leica to include a through-the-lens exposure meter. It retained the mechanical shutter and M bayonet mount of earlier cameras, maintaining full compatibility with decades of Leica M lenses.
“Klein used Leica rangefinders for his street photography, extending the camera to extreme wide angles — 21mm and 28mm lenses used closer than their natural distance — that produced the distorted, confrontational images in his New York, Rome, Tokyo, and Moscow books. His Leica use is documented in "William Klein: ABC" (2003) and in interviews given to the International Center of Photography.”
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