Come On, Baby, Do the Locomotion

By Richard Lacayo

For Americans, William Klein is the least palpable of their great photographers, like one of the ectoplasmic figures in his own blurry street shots. Nowadays every history of photography gives his wild pictures of the early 1950s their due. But though born in New York City, Klein, 58, has lived in Paris since 1948, when he arrived packing the camera he won in a G.I. poker game. Living abroad made him less of a presence in the camera circles of his native country. So did the truculent novelty of his early work. Klein's debut volume of New York street photography, published 31 years ago in France, has yet to be issued in the U.S.

It hardly helped matters that in 1965 he quit picture taking for nearly 15 years to make films, mostly documentaries. With Klein threatening to become the missing link of American photography, the San Diego Museum of Photographic Arts has come to the rescue with a retrospective of his work, on view through April 5. There are tentative plans for it to travel to other cities, and it should, to spread the word again that Klein was crucial to the camera world's postwar taste for more offbeat and haphazard imagery; he helped set the mood from which photographers like Garry Winogrand and Diane Arbus sprang.

Klein came to photography by way of painting, having studied briefly with Fernand Leger. Once he turned to the camera, the former sociology major from New York's City College showed a deep instinct for the urban demotic, with its links to the police blotter, the tabloid and the B movie. With money earned by doing Vogue fashion spreads in France, he made a picture-taking trip to New York in 1954, equipped with both the expatriate's eye for its psychic stresses and the native's complicity in them. Without resorting to the bizarre, he got the profoundly unsettled, the unearthly demeanor of sidewalk crowds, the implacability of children at play.

Klein worked with a locomotive verve and an indifference to the holy writ of camera technique. At a time when the nondistorting 50-mm lens (the kind that is still standard on most 35-mm cameras) was deemed the only fit instrument for recording truth, Klein used a wide angle to collect as much incident as possible within the frame. He favored a flash at long exposure, for its jittery harshness. He also went in for blurred images: smudged bodies in motion, heads so close to the lens that they dissolve into gaseous globes. The archetypal Klein photo is Minigang, Amsterdam Avenue, 1954. A boy with his face screwed into a fury pokes a blurry gun straight at the camera, while a young friend at his arm questions the act with his eyes. In the brief catalog that accompanies the San Diego show, Curator Arthur Ollman reads this image as a metaphor for Klein the photographer: "The aggressor and the intimate voyeur," Ollman calls him. "Both the provocateur and the calm student of provocation."

Klein also took to plunging in among crowds to shoot point blank, so that faces meet the lens with mostly tentative expressions. As Manet had done a century earlier in his paintings, Klein recognized in the suspended gaze one of the chief signifiers of the modern temper. But judged by the canons of good photography, those pictures looked fumbled, invertebrate. Klein's anarchic strengths went unappreciated by eyes looking for nice tonal gradations and the standard ironies. Where were the compositional ligaments that held even the airiest Andre Kertesz photo in an iron fist? Where was the fine printing? For that matter, where was the subject?

Even so, in the later 1950s and early '60s, Klein won a following among younger photographers, and his books devoted to Rome, Tokyo and Moscow all were published in the U.S. The vastly popular "Family of Man" photo show at New York's Museum of Modern Art in 1955 had set the authorized tone for treating global humanity, a tone that to some photographers seemed cloying and official. In the anxieties and feral pleasures that link the Tokyo doorman to the Roman on his Vespa, Klein found his own underpinnings of human affairs. He offered intimacy without violins, civic life without trumpets, humanism with a human face.

Even in Moscow, Klein took pictures free of cold war cliches or internationalist pieties. Though with less success than in his New York work, he got his Russians unabashed, not least in Bikini, his 1959 picture of a young woman dishing out elan vital while her elders deflate behind her. Even | Muscovites have brass, Klein seems to be saying. Even Communism has its bikinis. Though his pictures were once scorned as too subjective, they look now among the least predisposed, the most inquiring and inclusive. Klein has been known to call his camera variously a weapon, a mask, a disguise. None of those terms do justice to his real genius in handling a camera. He uses it as a question mark.