William Klein

William Klein was born in 1928, growing up in the "mean streets" of Manhattan. At age 18 he entered the U.S. Army for a two-year stint (a year and a half of which were spent at the Sorbonne at the invitation of the French government), and then set himself up in Paris, where he worked briefly with Fernand LÈeger. In 1954, after six years of painterly research, he returned to New York to embark on a guerilla confrontation with his estranged native city. The result was the remarkable photo-journal New York, which won the 1957 Prix Nadar in France but was never published in the United States. Over the next few years, Klein produced three new photo books and worked intermittently for Vogue magazine, then, in 1958, abandoned photography for for film and documentary work. In the 80s he returned to the still camera and produced three new photo books, followed by a new, greatly expanded version of New York, and a book on his films. Over the course of his multidisciplinary career, Klein has been honored with a Hasselblad Prize, a Guggenheim Foundation grant, a Grand Prix National in France, and an Agfa Award.

ACTIVE BACKLIST

WILLIAM KLEIN: LIFE IS GOOD & GOOD FOR YOU IN NEW YORK
Text by Max Kozloff, Jeffrey Ladd.
ERRATA EDITIONS
ISBN: 9781935004080 | US $39.95
Pub Date: 2/28/2010
Active | In stock

WILLIAM KLEIN: ROME
Texts by Alberto Moravia, Pier Paolo Pasolini, Ennio Flaiano, Federico Fellini.
APERTURE
ISBN: 9781597111195 | US $85.00
Pub Date: 12/31/2009
Active | Awaiting stock

WILLIAM KLEIN ABC
HARRY N. ABRAMS
ISBN: 9781419707490 | US $40.00
Pub Date:
Active | Limited Quantity

OUT OF PRINT LISTING

WILLIAM KLEIN: PARIS + KLEIN
Photographs by William Klein.
D.A.P./DISTRIBUTED ART PUBLISHERS, INC.
ISBN: 9781891024696 | US $75.00
Pub Date: 3/2/2003
Out of print | Not available

William Klein

William Klein: Life is Good & Good for You in New York

Books on Books No. 5

Text by Max Kozloff, Jeffrey Ladd.
Published by Errata Editions

William Klein's Life is Good & Good for You in New York is regarded as one of the most influential and groundbreaking photo-books created in the last half-century. Published in 1956, its visual energy captured the rough-and-tumble streets of New York—a city Klein once described as “the world capital of anguish”—like no photo-book had done before or since. Robert Capa famously declared that if your photographs were no good it was because you were not close enough to your subject, and in Klein's New York people press themselves up against the lens, dance around it, pull faces, pretend to shoot each other—a visual chaos which is rigorously organized by Klein's “one American eye and one European eye,” as he once characterized his style. Books on Books 5 reproduces in its entirety Klein's brilliantly photographed and designed magnum opus.
Errata Editions' Books on Books series is an ongoing publishing project dedicated to making rare and out-of-print photography books accessible to students and photobook enthusiasts. These are not reprints or facsimiles but complete studies of the original books. Each volume in the series presents the entire content, page for page, of an original master bookwork which, up until now, has been too rare or expensive for most to experience. Through a mix of classic and contemporary titles, this series spans the breadth of photographic practice as it has appeared on the printed page and allows further study of the creation and meanings of these great works of art. Each volume in the series contains illustrations of every page in the original photobook, a new essay by an established writer on photography, production notes about the creation of the original edition and biographical and bibliographical information about each artist.

William Klein: Rome

Texts by Alberto Moravia, Pier Paolo Pasolini, Ennio Flaiano, Federico Fellini.
Published by Aperture

In 1956, a 28-year old William Klein arrived in Rome, fresh from the debut of his now classic monograph Life Is Good & Good for You in New York, to assist Federico Fellini on his film Nights of Cabiria. Filming was delayed, and so Klein instead strolled about the city in the company of Fellini, Pier Paolo Pasolini, Alberto Moravia and other avant-garde Italian writers and artists who served as his guides. It was on these walks that Rome, a pioneering and brilliant visual diary of the city, was born. First published in 1959, Klein's Rome features the quirky extended captions that distinguished his New York book, interspersed with observations about the city by Stendhal, Michelet, Mark Twain, Henry James and others. Today it is one of the most celebrated photography books of the twentieth century. To celebrate the fiftieth anniversary of Rome's publication, Aperture (in close collaboration with Contrasto) has produced a revised edition, which includes previously unseen fashion pictures made in Rome and an updated text by the photographer. Redesigned to encompass two volumes in a special PVC slipcase, this new edition offers audiences another chance to celebrate one of the great photobooks. As Fellini said, "Rome is a movie, and Klein did it."
After graduating from university, William Klein (born in New York, 1928) settled in Paris and became a painter. He returned to New York in 1954, and made a photographic logbook which was published two years later, and which won him world-wide acclaim: Life Is Good & Good for You in New York (Prix Nadar, 1956). Later, he produced books dedicated to Tokyo, Moscow and Paris. Painter, photographer, moviemaker and graphic designer, Klein currently lives in Paris.

William Klein: Paris + Klein

Photographs by William Klein.
Published by D.A.P./Distributed Art Publishers, Inc.

William Klein always dreamed of living in Paris, like Henry Miller, Gertrude Stein, and other like-minded artists and writers. In 1948, stationed by the United States Army in Paris, he stayed--and fled his family and America to become a painter. He quickly found another family and recognition for his talent. Today, one is tempted, like critic Anthony Lane, to say that he is "the American in Paris." PARIS + KLEIn gathers together hundreds of photographs shot by Klein from the time he first picked up a camera in the 1960s until he put it down, momentarily, to put together this book. In his signature color and black-and-white compositions, jostled to the brim with more information than a single camera lens was ever expected to take in, we find: men in the street, celebrities, demonstrations, fashion, the police, politics, races, the m»tro, soccer, death. . .The whole life of a capital seen through the lively, acidic, melancholic, humorous, irnoical, and moving eyes of William Klein.

William Klein ABC

Published by Harry N. Abrams

Born in New York in 1929, William Klein is one of the leading photographers of the postwar era, as well as an influential filmmaker, painter, and graphic artist. This astonishing book, selected and designed by Klein himself, offers a visual survey of his long and varied career. It includes his poetic street photography of New York, Moscow, Rome, Tokyo, and Paris; his exciting fashion photography; stills and posters from his bitingly satirical films; and his graphically powerful painted contact sheets.

Klein, whose achievement puts him on a level with Robert Frank, Richard Avedon, and Irving Penn, lives in Paris and is revered in Europe. This is the first comprehensive book on his work published in the United States in 20 years.