Photography gave another aspect to the compositions of geometrical paintings. It inspired Louis Malle to ask me to work on SMALL: I’d love to hear more about your street photography in New York. This was KLEIN: Very technically good photographs. William Klein has always colored outside the lines. When I was working in Paris, at Fernand Léger’s studio, he’d say, “You guys are all obsessed with collectors and museums and galleries, but all that’s bullshit. Then I started to become interested in what you could do in the darkroom, and I realized that this blur was adding something to painting. So the works I did in the darkroom were a step away from traditional painting that was fashionable at the time—Picasso and Miró and Léger, and so on.
I realized I had no technique. Klein, eighty-seven, had been up until four thirty in the morning the night before and was having a rest. Photography led me to experiment in graphic work, and actually, painting. And when I take the right photograph, God gives me a little KLEIN: I had no photographic training at all. Can you tell me about making the film?KLEIN: I just rented a camera, and went out to shoot the signs at nighttime. I’m known for fashion photographs, but fashion photographs were mostly a joke for me. William Klein has always colored outside the lines. “By the tone of his voice, I could tell that he had just woken up, and was reluctant to join me,” Schuman said. We took what Léger told us seriously.
ウィリアム・クライン（William Klein, 1928年 4月19日 - ）はアメリカ合衆国の写真家・映画監督。主にフランスで活動している。 ニューヨーク出身。 ニューヨーク市立大学で学び、アメリカ陸軍に入隊しドイツとフランスに駐在。 除隊後、パリのソルボンヌ大学で学び、更に絵画を学ぶようになる。 I didn’t think that the fashion photographers were that good, except for Penn and Avedon, but they had their technique. What you should do is take a look at what painters did in the 15th century in Italy.” There were books on the Quattrocento, but they were expensive, and we didn’t have money so we stole them.
So I said, “I’ll do something very beautiful, which would be the contrary to the look of the New York book but would say the same things.” So I did a film which I called SMALL: What are your thoughts on Orson Welles describing KLEIN: Nowadays, to do a film in black and white is offbeat. And Resnais said to me, “Listen, you, you just made a book, you have a new way of looking at things, why don’t you do a film?” And I said, “Yeah, why not?” So, I went with a camera, and I did a film which would be opposite of my book on New York, because a lot of people criticized the fact that my book on New York was very harsh, black and white, and grungy. William Klein is an American artist and filmmaker known for his unconventional style of abstract photography depicting city scenes.
But Liberman said, “Look, we’re a fashion magazine, and we’re financing your funky photographs of New York. Alexander Liberman, who was the art director of These photographs, they were kind of weird, funky, grungy… I showed them to Liberman, and he said “Well, we’ll do a portfolio.” They never did a portfolio, because these photographs were the least publishable photos possible. An excerpt of an interview from the fall issue of Aperture magazine, conducted by Aaron Schuman with the trailblazing photographer William Klein AS: Before shooting any fashion photographs for the magazine, you also published a series called “Mondrian Real Life: Zeeland Farms” in Vogue in 1954. This would be the first of two visits with Klein for this interview, which touches on the course of his remarkable career: his now-classic books on cities, including his hometown in In this excerpted portion of their conversation, he speaks about his remarkable career, now in its seventh decade, about dreaming in black-and-white, and his celebrated fashion photography.Klein’s wife Janine with painted turning panels, Milan, 1952All work is copyright of respective owner, otherwise © 2020 Aperture Foundation.Aperture, a not-for-profit foundation, connects the photo community and its audiences with the most inspiring work, the sharpest ideas, and with each other—in print, in person, and online.Along the Dinosaur Road: A Conversation with Yto Barrada