Comparison chamber – Newspaper Kommersant No. 169 (7370) of 09/14/2022

In Paris, at the age of 97, the legendary American-French photographer William Klein died. From the beginning of his career in the 1950s, he broke the rules of photography so confidently that the shots he shot – grainy, out of focus, sometimes blurry, sometimes too contrasty – forever changed the language of street and fashion photography. Special thanks to Klein for the photo album “Moscow” (1964), a unique portrait of the “thaw” capital, taken by a photographer of this rank.

In 1945, 18-year-old William Klein had to drop out of his studies as a sociologist at the City College of New York and go overseas to serve in the army, first in Germany and then in the south of France. The outcome of the Second World War was decided, the service was mainly reduced to drawing cartoons in the army newspaper. Later, Klein did not like to go into memories of this period, but the post-war chaos definitely influenced his photographic style. Demobilized in 1948, he did not return to his homeland, but moved to Paris, entered the Sorbonne, studied painting and worked in the studio of Fernand Léger.

Who knows, maybe Klein would have become a decorative artist if he had not won a camera in poker.

His first experiments in photography were in line with experimental art: in the early 50s, Klein took moving abstract drawings, which also resulted in abstractions, but intricately blurred. With such a portfolio, he turned to Alex Lieberman, art director of Vogue magazine, then especially competing with Harper’s Bazaar, which by that time had already revolutionized magazine typography (cropped shots, collages, “broken” layout, large white margins), and received an invitation to cooperate.

In 1954, Klein returned to New York to work for Vogue, shooting models, and for himself, shooting the city. Both of them came out categorically differently from his predecessors and competitors. Models in hats and dresses from the latest collections posed on the streets of Manhattan, not at all embarrassed by the crowd, traffic, or shabbily dressed passers-by, smoking cigarettes and sipping coffee, and all this without a staged light, with all the flaws in photographic quality like a “twitching camera” . Shooting New York, Klein thought of as a “hard Dadaist attack on the city”, which appeared as a crowd of some distraught people: rows of housewives with shopping carts in supermarkets, advertisements interrupting city views, a child aiming a gun at the camera, residents of Harlem and nightclubs. In these black-and-white shots, sometimes out of focus, sometimes sharply shot, making you feel like you’re inside the movie and not in front of the prints, New York, even in daylight, turned out to be a gloomy place. And although the shooting was sponsored by Vogue, American publishers completely refused these photographs – the book was published only in 1956 in Paris, making him famous along the way.

Klein not only photographed, but also did the layout of his books: all of them, dedicated to big cities (and this is also Rome, Moscow and Tokyo), acquired the status of collector’s editions – and became textbooks for street photographers of subsequent generations, of course.

Moscow was especially lucky: he came here more than once in recent years, to the opening of his exhibitions at the Multimedia Art Museum, which managed to show his most famous series. But it all started with visits in the late 50s and early 60s, when Klein saw the Soviet capital with a much more favorable look than New York. Thaw Moscow is also a city of people in everyday life: playing ping-pong in the yard, leaving GUM, hurrying at the Kievsky railway station.

“While photographing the celebration of May 1 in Moscow, William Klein tells me how Russian people dress (after all, I don’t know anything about it): I notice a big cap on the head of one young man, a tie on another, a scarf on the head of an old woman, a teenager’s haircut, and the like. ”, – describes one of his Moscow shots in his book “Camera Lucida” philosopher Roland Barthes.

The picture was taken from a very close distance, from which Soviet people are seen as just people, and this was a discovery not only for the rest of the world: it looks to them even now.

Klein’s photographs, as if taken by a nervous, restless hand, nevertheless always hit the target, showing the world not paradingly frozen, but, on the contrary, changing in an almost cinematic way right before the viewer’s eyes.

Igor Grebelnikov