william klein interview

I’m known for fashion photographs, but fashion photographs were mostly a joke for me.

Interview Magazine: The Crystal Ball of Pop

His first film, Klein, now 84, lives in Paris, and hasn’t stopped shooting. But in those days, color was offbeat. The film-maker and photographer was born in the former, but has lived in the latter for more than 60 years, where I meet him at home. Orson Welles had never shot a film in color until that time.SMALL: Yeah! When you were going around, did you have to explain to people what your job was?KLEIN: Today, everybody’s photographing everybody else. 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. I didn’t think that the fashion photographers were that good, except for Penn and Avedon, but they had their technique. But Liberman said, “Look, we’re a fashion magazine, and we’re financing your funky photographs of New York. For me, it was the contrary. When writer Aaron Schuman first arrived at William Klein’s apartment, five stories above Paris’s rue de Médicis, he was ushered into Klein’s living room by his assistant. Photography gave another aspect to the compositions of geometrical paintings.

When you take photographs on the street, how do you know when to click the camera?WILLIAM KLEIN: Well, you know, I have a special relationship with God.

And when I take the right photograph, God gives me a little KLEIN: I had no photographic training at all. RACHEL SMALL: A lot of your early work is street photography, and inherent in that is spontaneity—an element that, to an extent, defines your greater body of work.

And what I had in the back of my mind is that one day, you’d be able to take fashion photographs which would be offbeat, and we could use. This was KLEIN: Very technically good photographs. But in those days, sometimes people would be surprised and say, “What are you doing?” I’d say I was doing a book that would be like the KLEIN: Well, you know, my wife was very, very beautiful. I said, “Hey, I can say what I want about life around me,” which I couldn’t with these geometrical paintings. A guy does paintings, and discovers that his paintings are pretty shitty, and he says, “What else can I do?” He goes to photography, which is a step down. Photography led me to experiment in graphic work, and actually, painting. They’re like X-rays, these photographs—I feel that I’m getting an idea of who these people are, the life they lead, and where they’re going. Can you tell me about making the film?KLEIN: I just rented a camera, and went out to shoot the signs at nighttime. It inspired Louis Malle to ask me to work on SMALL: I’d love to hear more about your street photography in New York. He said, “What does your husband do?” She said, “Oh, he’s a painter.” He said, “Can I come to the studio?” And Avedon came, and he dug what I was doing. Klein, eighty-seven, had been up until four thirty in the morning the night before and was having a rest. “His assistant pleaded, ‘But he’s come all the way from England!’”Finally, Klein entered the room, eyes wide and shining. 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. So I said, “Maybe I could do something with photography.”What’s funny is that it’s usually the other way around. 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.

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. 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.

With forays into experimental photography, fashion photography at Towards the late 1950s, Klein began working with film, often using the medium to subtly criticize the frenetic energy of a New York increasingly entrenched in consumerism. 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. Then he said, “You two must be the most beautiful couple I have ever seen.” [SMALL: What’s your favorite part about taking photos?It’s the excitement of discovering people.

The geometrical forms in the paintings blurred. All Rights Reserved.

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william klein interview