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Fashion + light

...First, I would shoot the model. She then held the pose and we turned off all the lights in the studio. In a second exposure, lasting a few seconds, an assistant would use a flashlight to draw shapes in the air around the model’s body. The result was terrific, I thought. It brought those early abstract experiments into my fashion work.

- William Klein, 2017

Fashion with Lights and Abstract Photography

Installation image from HackelBury Fine Art at Paris Photo, 2015

Fashion

‘At Vogue in 1956, Klein was encouraged to try his hand at fashion photography. He admired the controlled elegance and consummate technique of Irving Penn and Richard Avedon but on the whole he felt the studio was its own little bubble. So he pricked it, blowing up faces to emphasize the grain, asking models to suck on their cigarettes rather than holding them like quills.

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He understood the rhythms and edginess of the street so that’s where he took the models. Up on the roof of Avedon’s studio, tall and elegant mirrors multiply the tall and elegant women, echoing the skyscrapers behind. On the crowded black and white crosswalk of the Piazza di Spagna, Rome, two models pass each other in black and white dresses by Capucci. Painting a shop front shocking pink sets off the season’s outfits and the street becomes a studio. Posing models in front of a blown-up photo of the city, the studio becomes a street. Moving lights around the models in long exposure, Klein could revisit his earliest photo experiments. He sustained this level of invention until 1967 when his work for Vogue came to an end (his contribution to the multi-director film Far From Vietnam caused a scandal in New York).’

© David Campany/Contrasto, from William Klein: Paintings, Etc Published September 2012. All rights reserved, not to be reproduced without prior permission.

formfit_install

Dorothy + Formfit (left) | Wings of the Hawk + Selwyn (right)

Abstract Photography

'...Then I realised that there was something that could be done with blurriness in photography…And I thought maybe this is a way out of the rut of geometrical forms, curves, straight lines, triangle and whatever.'

In 1952, Klein’s paintings were exhibited in Milan at the Galleria del Milione - which, by chance, led to his first real experiment in photography. He was preoccupied then with changing forms, with ominous geometrical shapes that could be used as murals. The Italian architect Mangiarotti saw Klein’s work and asked him to adapt it into reversible panels that could move or divide a room, creating many chance combinations and multiple patterns.

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When they were finished, Klein took several photographs of them, and stumbled on photography. Quite by chance, he spun one of the panels on its pivot during a long exposure. The result gave him an idea. He thought if he could record the movement of these geometrical forms - record their trace in time - then he might discover a way of escaping the rut of what he calls “the same old paintings of circles, squares and triangles.” So he fixed up a little darkroom and tried to re-create the accidental time exposures on purpose. He cut out geometrical holes in black cardboard and projected light through them while moving the cut-out shapes at different speeds over photographic paper. The trace left on the paper was a geometrical time exposure. It was a picture.

Klein had discovered for himself a way of literally drawing with light. The results weren’t objects recording themselves in white on black like Man Ray’s photograms. They were controlled projections in which shapes came out black (depending on the exposure of light) and their trace in time (the vision in motion) different shades of gray. When the results were photographed and blown up, they became photomurals.

John Heilpern, from the Aperture monograph William Klein, published 1981

Abstract Photography

installation image from William Klein: Paintings Etc at HackelBury Fine Art, 2012

Broadway by light

Klein's first film Broadway by Light is a dizzying and dazzling study of a night in the life of New York's Great White Way. Focusing on the play of lights and shadows, colours and forms in motion, the camera jumps between the flashing bulbs and neons of Times Square's iconic advertising and the silhouettes of men at work on theatre marquees, as they re-arrange letters on the lightboxes, poised like acrobats on their stepladders.

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London

Moscow

New York

'While journalism was stagnating into sentimentalism and spectacle, Klein had found a new approach. Openly subjective photography combined with vivid captions of insight and thoughtful revelation, leading the reader to the deeper truths of four very different postwar societies'

© David Campany/Contrasto, from William Klein: Paintings, Etc Published September 2012.

All rights reserved, not to be reproduced without prior permission.

William Klein New York install shot

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