4/10/2023 0 Comments Shutterbug subscription![]() These are startling constructions: blown-up strips of negatives, bathed and looped in bright paint, as if the photographer, gambling on the standoff between chance and control, wanted to up the stakes… Klein has made more than twenty films. In his hands, it made the world fatten and bulge nothing was safe from his reinvention, not even the fashion scene, to which he has continually cleaved, with a mixture of scorn and raucous glee… Until June 9th, the Howard Greenberg Gallery, on Wooster Street, is running a formidable exhibit of Klein’s work, including vintage prints from his city books… At the same time, the Charles Cowles Gallery is tracing a more recent departure, Klein’s painted contact sheets. It did not appear in America, a laughable omission that remained uncorrected until the book was reprinted in 1995… Until he came along, the wide-angle lens was largely the preserve of landscape photographers, or a witty aid to social perspective. ![]() …The result was "Life Is Good and Good for You in New York: Trance Witness Revels," which was published in 1956-published in France, that is, to instant acclaim. By 1954, the prodigal son was back in New York, on a five-month stay, with a dream brief: come and work for Vogue, carte blanche, two hundred bucks a week, limitless photographic supplies, and while you’re about it, shoot the city. I am not so experienced a naturalist as to know whether he hails from the species hep, but, like anyone else, I know catness when I see it… Describes how he wound up at the Sorbonne, and became a painter… In 1952, some of Klein’s murals were shown in Milan, where he took photographs of them it was not the first time he had picked up a camera-in a myth that he confirmed to me as accurate, he had won a Rolleiflex in a poker game with other G.I.s-but it was only then that he understood the firepower of his new weapon…. Meeting him face to face, I realized that he belongs to a genus now so rare, so closely identified with another age, that you could be forgiven for thinking it extinct. He is a big, loping fellow with a mane of white hair swept back over his collar, a roaring laugh that hangs around in his throat, and a pair of Reebok ankle boots on his hind paws. Klein speaks English with a French trip of the tongue and French with a hefty American curve to his vowels. One is tempted to say that he is the American in Paris: a more authentic example of the type than even Gene Kelly could pretend to be. AT THE GALLERIES about photographer William Klein, born 1928… He and Richard Avedon are the two top photographers… The difference is that Avedon operates out of New York City, whereas Klein, who will take any cliché you like and bust it wide open, is an American in Paris.
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