“First, I would shoot the model. She would hold the pose, and then we’d turn off all the lights in the studio. In a second exposure, lasting just a few seconds, an assistant would use a flashlight to draw shapes in the air around the model’s body. The result was terrific — it brought my early abstract experiments into my fashion work.” — William Klein
HackelBury, London, presents a major retrospective of William Klein opening in September 2026 to mark the centenary of the artist’s birth.
The exhibition offers one of the most comprehensive presentations of William Klein’s work in London in recent years, bringing together celebrated street photography, fashion imagery, portraits, early abstract works and later painted contact sheets to trace his radical reinvention of photography and enduring influence on post-war visual culture.
Klein came to photography almost by chance, initially studying painting under Fernand Léger in Paris — an experience which profoundly influenced his visual language and experimental approach to image-making. His early geometric abstractions reveal a foundational interest in light, form, movement and graphic composition which would later define both his photography and filmmaking.
Working for Vogue from the mid-1950s to the mid-1960s, Klein revolutionised fashion photography by taking models out of the studio and into the street, introducing a raw immediacy and spontaneity that broke with the conventions of the time. His later innovative use of light and double exposure developed into a signature visual technique.
Following his years at Vogue, Klein returned increasingly to filmmaking and street photography, using his deliberately grainy, blurred aesthetic and wide-angle lens to capture the energy and contradictions of urban life. The exhibition traces these connections across decades of work, from the experimental abstractions of the 1950s to the monumental painted contact sheets of his later years, in which enlarged and overpainted frames transform iconic images into dynamic works in their own right.
References to movement, fragmentation and narrative echo throughout Klein’s celebrated films, including Broadway by Light and Who Are You, Polly Maggoo — vivid explorations of the spectacle, speed and visual intensity of modern city life.
Moving between New York, Paris, and London, the exhibition presents the city as a charged theatre of crowds, signage, glamour and confrontation, while fashion emerges as a form of performance in which gesture, flash and movement become a graphic line.
