William Klein: At Home In New York City
William Klein; William Klein: New York 1954-55; Marval, Paris; 1995; ISBN 2-86234-183-5; Dewi Lewis Publishing, Manchester; ISBN 1-899235-25-6; Braus, Heidelberg; ISBN 3-89466-140-2; Peliti Associati, Rome; ISBN 88-85121-27-6; Lunwerg editores, Madrid; ISBN 84-7782-360-X; 256 pages; 134 monochrome photographs. New York 1954-55 is the recent re-issue and re-edit of one of the most influential photography books of our time, one that leapt immediately into the canon of great works on publication in Paris, 1956. Its original title in full was Life is Good and Good for You in New York: Trance Witness Revels, as loaded, cryptic, twisted and graphic as Klein's conception of it as his way of getting back at the town that raised, alienated then spat him out, while also being the homage of a frustrated homecoming lover. Klein dive-bombed the streets of New York with wide-angle lensed Leica, thrusting it into the faces and places of the city while shouting in reply to bemused victims: "It's OK! I'm from The Daily News! I'm the Inquiring Photographer!" This brash approach, as crude as the culture he came from, was dismissed along with the grainily graphic pictures Klein made by the American critics and editors. "This isn't photography. This is shit!" they retorted when he knocked in search of a book deal, then they turned back to their contemplation of correct photography, the genteel aesthetising photojournalism of Life, Look and Time. The critics' assessment didn't change until just recently, even though he's been admired by photographers for years. Now Klein is a hero and a much-courted star even in New York itself, and with a retrospective at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. His meisterwerk still stands up against the other book of the era that was held in opposition to it, Robert Frank's The Americans, with its gentler, poetic Swiss precision vision. Back then in the '50s and '60s you were either for Frank or Klein, never both at the same time, but now their similarities are more obvious. There's a directness Klein can never achieve again in a city now inhabited by Son of Sam and body-collecting multiple murderers, a naïvety and innocence in the faces of people who could once genuinely trust a stranger in the streets with a flashgun in his hand. Written 1996. © Copyright Karl-Peter Gottschalk 1997.