William Klein – « Klein d’œil »

"As a teenager, I discovered William Klein through "Who are you Polly Maggoo", an iconoclastic film about the world of fashion, starring Dorothy McGowan, who for me was the embodiment of the feminine ideal.

We met twenty years later at the DUPON laboratory in Bastille through Babette, who was printing her colour photos on Cibachrome. We never left each other's side and together we produced some of his biggest exhibitions, whether at the MEP, the Centre Pompidou or the Tate Gallery in London. A second-degree dialogue was established, which for me consisted of outbidding his often acid humour. This dialectic, sometimes surreal, created a professional and personal complicity between us. I loved him for his immense talent, his stature and his biting mischief.

I'll never forget wandering around Perpignan, during his retrospective at Visa, in the heart of the gypsy quarter, where he photographed old gypsies with malice. Then to Clichy, after the riots, for the "Clichy 100 clichés" exhibition, and to Arles where, at the Théâtre Antique, despite his difficulty in standing up, he got to his feet and his repartee had the whole audience laughing at the age of over 90...

This Klein d'œil presents a selection of little-known images that reflect his timeless photographic genius!"
Jean-François Camp

Graphic artist, painter, photographer and film-maker William Klein was born in New York in 1928. He moved to Paris in 1948, where he studied painting with André Lhote and then Fernand Léger. He made a sensational entry into the world of photography in 1956 with his book on New York, "Life Is Good and Good For You in New York: Trance Witness Revels", which overturned the codes of photography at the time and left its mark on generations of photographers. Other works followed: Rome (1959), Moscow (1964), Tokyo (1964), Paris+Klein (2002).
From 1957 to 1967, he worked for Vogue, taking fashion to the streets in playful, dynamic stagings. Here again, true to his taste for provocation, he innovated, far from the conventional poses of studio photography.
In 1968, he made his first film, "Broadway by Light", which was followed by a dozen feature-length documentaries and fiction films, including "Who Are You, Polly Magoo?" which won the Prix Jean Vigo in 1966. In 1980, he returned to photography without abandoning cinema.
At the end of the 1980s, combining painting and photography, he enlarged extracts from his contact sheets and painted directly onto the print, creating what he called "painted contacts".
Klein was awarded the International Hasselblad Prize in Sweden in 1990, and in 1991 was made a Commandeur des Arts et des Lettres in France. His work has been the subject of major exhibitions, notably in 2005 at the Centre Pompidou in Paris, and at the Tate in London in 2012.
He died in Paris on 10 September 2022.