Weird and Wonderful Photography: Exploring the Legacy of William Klein
The Visionary Photographer Who Redefined Art Across Continents
Be yourself. I much prefer seeing something, even it is clumsy, that doesn't look like somebody else's work.”—William Klein
William Klein often felt out of place as a Jewish kid in an Irish neighborhood. Klein and his friends found refuge from their neighborhood in the New York Museum of Modern Art (MOMA), looking at art and watching films.
Klein served in the army for a brief period before going to Paris to study at the Sorbonne. In Paris, Klein learned to paint and exhibited his paintings around Europe. He then returned to New York, where he photographed all parts of the city, some of which he had never visited. The photographs were published in the book New York Is Good and Good for You. Klein developed a signature style with blur, distortion, graininess, and abstraction in his photos.
Klein went on to photograph for Vogue, where, after some hesitance, they accepted his style. The magazine became very successful in part due to Klein’s photos. In 1965, Klein decided to go into filmmaking, ceasing his photographic work.
Most of Klein’s most well-known photos are monochrome (black and white. Some, however, are in color. The Coppertone ad appeared all over Miami and Miami Beach during the 1960s. I caught one of the last remaining signs in the late 1990s.
Frame Soda Ads or Signs
Just as sodas can cool and refresh, so can pictures of their advertisements. That’s what graphic designers had in mind when they designed them. Some may think photographing a sign or other graphic from the street is just copying it. That’s not the case. When you photograph a sign or an ad, you first have to consider its preservation, how to compose it, and what settings to use on your camera when you shoot it.
In William Klein’s 7UP, 2001, he framed a 7UP sign attached to a tree. The metal is folded and filled with subtle imperfections. In the frame, the sign sits at the bottom, and part of the tree trunk sits at the top. The background is white, filled with leafless twigs. On the sign is “YOU LIKE IT...IT LIKES YOU.” These words make the photograph compelling — they roll across the bottom of the sign as if they were singing. There are groups of bubbles floating around the sign. What’s most powerful about the words is the personification of a soda drink — trying to imagine why a bottle of soda would like you.
A sign for a café called Orange Crush. The vivid text of “Crush” makes an already powerful word even more so. The lighting, too, seems different; it takes a second for the viewer to notice that the photo was taken with a flash. The harshness of the light makes the text stand out in seemingly another dimension. If you look at the image long enough, the “Crush” seems to pop out of the gray elliptical background. Finally, the wires and their shadows stretch diagonally across the bottom of the frame. They could be interpreted as signs of strength, as they hold the sign to the building to which it is attached.
Photograph Active Children
Klein often took blurred, grainy images of children. The blur resulted from his keeping the shutter on his camera while the children were moving. No photographer with any clout had done that before. It was shocking and unprofessional; to others, it was new and innovative. In a 1989 interview, Klein said, “I came to photography from the outside, so the rules of photography didn’t interest me.”
Klein photographed a girl on the street in a loose dress pleated at the waist. Her arms form a diamond, with her head in the middle in the top third of the frame. Her body fills the frame below the waist at the bottom to a bit of white space just above her wrists, bent downward so her hands touch her head. The image is grainy and contains dark black areas. (See the next section, “Make Images Grainy.”)
A girl is caught on a swing. Her image is blurred because the camera is focused on the background, making it sharp, while the girl’s movement contains motion blur, giving a feeling of movement.
Make Images Grainy with Shadowing
Klein worked for Vogue as a fashion photographer, often taking his subjects out into the streets because of his inexperience with studio lighting. While this work is significant, it wasn’t what got him the most attention. Klein worked with fast film (film at high ISO speeds, in digital-speak), often overexposing and blurring his shots — techniques that other photographers of the era avoided, making him controversial among his peers. Klein has been called an anti-photographer because some thought his shots were taken carelessly.
Part of his photographic process was experimenting with different films and printing on various papers, often coming up with mistakes that were compelling photos.
In the linked photo above, Klein photographed a woman turning around instantly. She smokes a cigarette with a long cigarette holder. The image is grainy and soft, with dark blacks and blown highlights. This was the signature of Klein, a photographer who put new meaning into capturing a moment in time by creating an ethereal haze as part of his image.
The Actress Mamie Van Doren was photographed coming into an art opening. The image was blurred due to the movement of her head. I added noise and increased the highlights and shadows to make the image look ethereal. For instructions about how to do this, see the “Photoshop an Ethereal Feeling” sidebar.
Photoshop an Ethereal Feeling
You can take a regular photo of a person, turn it into black and white, add blown highlights and dark areas, and create noise in the image to emulate Klein’s style, as shown in the photo above. This process has been applied to scanned ISO 800 35 mm fast film. You can achieve a similar effect by taking a higher ISO speed photograph.
You can create an ethereal feeling using Photoshop.
Here are the Photoshop/Elements steps to do this:
1. Image > Adjustments > Black & White. Tweak sliders for maximizing shadows.
2. Image > Adjustments > Levels. Slide the middle slider to the right until part of hair becomes solid black.
3. Filter > Blur > Lens Blur. Tweak the sliders in the Iris section (Radius, Blade Curvature, and Rotation) and then tweak the noise.
William Klein frequently interacted with his subjects before taking their picture. He got them to act out a role in front of the camera, yet the subjects chose the role they wanted to play. He’d often use a wide-angle lens and place it very near the subjects he was photographing, causing them to either dance (refer to the “Photograph Active Children” section earlier in this chapter) or duck, as in the image Two Girls, 1961.
His photographs included a prop, often a gun, such as Gun 1, New York, 1955 in the link above, a photograph of a boy pointing a gun at the lens with another, more petite boy looking on from the side. The boy with the gun has an expression of disdain on his face. The boy’s fist wrapped around the gun is much more significant in the frame because of its proximity to the lens.
While at a Tamale Festival in Indio, California, I spotted a man on stilts holding a gun. As he saw me a photo of him, he took on various poses, one of which had the gun pointed at my camera. My camera had been set at f/4 while the focus point was on the man’s face, leaving it sharp, and the gun was blurred due to it being out of focus, which is the same scenario that Klein used in his Gun 1 photo.
Takeaway
William Klein was a remarkable photographer. Studying his wild shots has me on the lookout for an untamed world, which was Klein’s focus in many of his shots.
After serving in the Army, he returned to New York and was commissioned to photograph city life. His work was too risque for an American audience. Afterward, Klein went to Paris, where the work was much more appreciated. The work, dozens of New York street photography images, was published in France under Life is Good & Good for You in New York.
“At the time, no U.S. publisher would touch Life is Good & Good for You in New York. It was tumultuous and wild, with swerving bebop rhythms of editing and no calming white borders” (Campany, 2021).
Focusing on the strange keeps me motivated as a photographer who enjoys offbeat culture and as a human being who loves to focus on the weird and wonderful subjects, objects, and landscapes of photography.
Reference
Company, D. (2021). Life Is good for you in William Klein’s New York. Aperture. https://aperture.org/editorial/life-is-good-for-you-in-william-klein-new-york/
I can just imagine the ads for the Orange Crush Coffee Shop: "A day without Orange Crush is a day without sunshine..."