Art & Photography: Klein

Friday, 12 October 2012

William Klein + Daido Moriyama - Tate Modern

William Klein, Club Allegro Fortissimo, Paris, 1989

William Klein + Daido Moriyama is at Tate Modern until 20 January 2013.

Although dismissed by Klein as "kind of stupid" (O'Hagan) the pairing of the Paris based American and the Japanese photographers seems both obvious and inspired - acording to Russell Ferguson writing in Open City, it was seeing a Japanese edition of Klein's groundbreaking book Life is Good and Good for You in New York: Trance Witness Revels (1956) that inspired Moriyama to spend his time on the streets,

"mixing myself in with the noise and the crowds, doing nothing except clicking with abandon the shutter of a camera which I seized from a friend." (Ferguson, p13)

Klein: "I saw the book I wanted to do as a tabloid gone berserk, gross, grainy, over-inked, with a brutal layout, bull-horn headlines." (Ferguson, p13)

"Klein even printed aggressively, using bleach and white out on his prints. This harshness, his use of grainy texture and aggressively high contrast, tight cropping and almost solid black tones, proved to be inspirational...

Moriyama's Shibuya (1967) and Yokosuka (1970) are as harsh and as powerful as anything by Klein ... Moriyama has continued to push his own technique even harder, often using scratched and otherwise damaged negatives as well as re-photography to create what has become a unique and truly personal body of work. (Ferguson, p13)

This promises to be a terrific show.

Read a review by Sean O'Hagan; read William Klein's My Best Shot, and Daido Moriyama's My Best Shot.

Watch William Klein's 1958 film Broadway by Light, watch videos about Klein and Moriyama on ASX (American Suburb X); read feature and see videos at TimeLightBox; see also blog entry below on Klein.

References:

Ferguson, R. (2001) ‘Open city: possibilities of the street’, in Brougher, K. and Ferguson, R. (eds.) Open city: street photographs since 1950. Oxford: Museum of Modern Art Oxford, pp.9-21

O'Hagan, Sean (2012) William Klein: 'I was an outsider, following my instincts', The Guardian, 28 April

William Klein, 4 Heads, Thanksgiving Day, New York, 1955

William Klein, Gun 2, New York, 1954

William Klein, New York, 1954

William Klein, Installation view of graphic work for book covers, film posters and magazines, 1952-2005

Daido Moriyama, Misawa, 1971

Daido Moriyama, Smash Up, 1969 [photographed from a road safety poster]

Daido Moriyama, Yokosuka,1971

Daido Moriyama, Memory of Dog 2, 1982

Daido Moriyama, Yokosuka, 1970/2003

Daido Moriyama, Tights, 2011

Monday, 30 April 2012

William Klein - Outstanding Contribution to Photography

William Klein, Antonia Simone Barbershop, New York, 1961

William Klein has been given the Outstanding Contribution to Photography Award at the Sony World Photography Awards 2012 (see below).

A great photographer; a great artist.
Some work is on show at Someret House as part of the Sony World Photography Awards exhibition until 20 May. More excitingly he will be the subject of joint retrospective with Daido Moriyama at Tate Modern in October. The pairing seems a good one, but Klein's comment to Sean O'Hagan was "I think it's kind of stupid". Read the full article here.

I would look at my contact sheets and my heart would be beating, you know. To see if I’d caught what I wanted. Sometimes, I’d take shots without aiming, just to see what happened, I’d rush into crowds – bang! bang! I liked the idea of luck and taking a chance. Other times I’d frame a composition I saw and plant myself somewhere, longing for some accident to happen.
Klein, William (1981) Photographs: An Aperture Monograph, New York: Aperture, p16