William Klein

William Klein was born in Manhattan into an impoverished Jewish family and served in the United States Army in occupied Germany and France during World War II. Settling in Paris in 1948, he studied painting under Fernand Léger and married Jeanne Florin. Armed with a 35mm camera, he turned to photography without formal training, using wide-angle lenses, blur, high contrast, and grain to capture raw street vitality.

Commissioned by Alexander Liberman at Vogue in 1954, Klein created provocative, unconventional fashion photographs on city streets while documenting New York's visceral urban pulse. His 1956 photobook Life Is Good & Good for You in New York broke every classical rule of photography and won the Nadar Prize. He created similar revolutionary photo city-portraits of Rome, Moscow, and Tokyo, and directed pioneering films including the fashion satire Who Are You, Polly Maggoo? (1966) and the monumental 1969 documentary Muhammad Ali, the Greatest.