William Klein
William Klein (1926–2022, born New York City) was a photographer, filmmaker, and graphic designer of exceptional range whose work across street photography, fashion, and film produced one of the most formally radical and culturally engaged bodies of visual art of the twentieth century. Trained as a painter under Fernand Léger in Paris, Klein brought to photography a sensibility shaped by abstraction and graphic design, developing a visual language of distortion, grain, and confrontational proximity that transformed urban life into something urgent and viscerally alive.
His street photography and his fashion work for Vogue existed as two dimensions of a single restless practice, each informing and disrupting the other. Where his street images brought rawness and aggression, his fashion work introduced wit, theatricality, and a sharp awareness of image-making as performance. His films carried both qualities into moving image, completing a practice of rare breadth and consistency that resisted categorization throughout his long career.
His work is held in the permanent collections of the Museum of Modern Art, New York, the Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris, and the Victoria and Albert Museum, London.