The brash, bleak urban visions of photographer William Klein

William Klein was at his best when he was at his worst. Resentful, seething, passionate and prickly, he spent an intense couple of years in the mid-1950s photographing New York as if it were a difficult lover. The snobbish, the downtrodden and the eccentric jostle for attention, forming a group portrait of his endearingly corrupt and beautifully decadent city. Over six decades, Klein worked in Rome, Moscow, Paris and Tokyo, but the photos he sent back from those sojourns lack the same adoring sting and driving rage. Abroad, he was debilitated by respect; only at home could he be energised by irreverence.

In New York, he once said: “I would try to photograph schlock non-events like some crazed paparazzo and print it accordingly.” The rowdy brilliance of that project blazes from the International Center of Photography’s flickering retrospective. Klein has had a long and varied career, and the show surveys it as if from a drone, flitting impatiently through his film work, alighting on a dead-end abstractionist phase, and lingering over inert fashion shoots. The result is more confusing than revelatory.

Klein was born in 1928, at Fifth Avenue and 110th Street. His grandfather owned a clothing business on the Lower East Side, and his father was wiped out in the stock market crash. As a precocious teen, he hung out at MoMA, where he watched Fritz Lang movies and studied Walker Evans. The army shipped him to Germany at the end of the second world war and, once his stint was over, a yen for European bohemia drew him to Paris in 1948. There, he studied with Fernand Léger and dabbled in painting. (He also stole a copy of Evans’ American Photographs from the American Library.)

The ICP has some of these early canvases and they lean heavily on the cubist master, who was by then past his prime. Klein soon made the leap to total abstraction. Taking pictures of his paintings, he discovered the darkroom, where he shaped abstract forms by cutting out circles, squares, and diamonds from sheets that he then jiggled and waved over light-sensitive paper. Long exposures brought the ghostly forms to life, translating the language of action painting to photography. At the ICP, these early efforts go down as pleasingly decorative but unimpressive.

They did, however, catch the eye of Alexander Liberman, Vogue’s art director, who lured Klein back home. After so many years away, six of them in the avant-garde idyll of Paris, New York hit the young artist like an exploding grenade. It was brash, in-your-face and slightly crazy — catnip to its cocky native son.

Klein wandered the streets in what he called a “gluttonous rage”, snapping the grotesque popping of Broadway lights, a grainy mob of shoppers giving him the fisheye, throngs of children leering, sneering or just gazing at him with jaded apathy. As a poor kid in a rough neighbourhood, he’d felt excluded from Manhattan’s glittering promise. Now, he took his revenge, photographing Gotham’s undercurrent of psychosis.

The gun appears as a motif throughout these photos, hinting at violence. A headless adult holds a pistol to a little boy’s temple, presumably in jest. He and his little friends smile guilelessly at the camera: an unfunny punchline. Another boy shoves a muzzle right up against the lens, while his beatific pal looks on in admiration. A tossed stack of tabloids unfurls like a deck of cards, the blaring headline “GUNMAN” repeating ad infinitum.

What makes these photographs powerful is their compression and complexity. Faces crowd the frame, multiplying the point of view. Signs cascade in linguistic and graphic overload. Mystery and boldness vie for primacy. Klein imagined a book modelled on the Daily News: “A tabloid gone berserk, gross, grainy, over-inked, with a brutal layout, bullhorn headlines. This was what New York deserved and would get.” 

Loneliness stalks Klein’s urban vision. A man crosses under the elevated subway tracks from one nowhere to another. Inky black envelops him, except where stray sunbeams dissolve his body into mist. “Office workers & Snowman” is an even grimmer affair. Four young women gathering after work stare at the camera through a glass storefront, each in her own psychic quarantine. In the window between them and the lens, advertisements for cigarettes and a glass of Coke with a grinning cartoon snowman only accentuate the gloom.

Klein did eventually produce his highbrow tabloid tome, but not in the metropolis that obsessed him. Like many American artists, he turned to Europe for validation. Life is Good & Good for You in New York: Trance Witness Revels was first published in Paris. When Federico Fellini saw a copy, he offered Klein a job in Rome as his assistant.

Klein’s career propelled him around the world but the ICP show suggests that he remained a tourist almost everywhere, distracted by the picturesque. In Rome he found priests and nuns, dandies on mopeds and lounging men eyeing each other suspiciously. In Khrushchev-era Moscow we get napping babushkas and athletes sturdy enough to delight an official socialist realist. Even in Paris, where he has lived for decades, he couldn’t seem to connect with the city’s subversive magma.

The show might not be quite fair to him. Jamming his finest photos into poorly illuminated grids, it challenges viewers with its density and glare. One whole floor is dedicated to posters, film stills and clips too abbreviated to make much sense of his moviemaking talents.

And so you’re drawn back to that first torrid rediscovery of his native turf, an encounter that blows past surface and cliché. Before leaving the exhibition, pause at Klein’s furious take on childhood’s non-innocence. A couple of urchins cavort in a bleak, trash-strewn part of New York. The girl’s eyes roll upward and the boy’s head dissolves in a blur of motion. Like dancers in an inner-city tarantella, they look possessed — perhaps by a demon, by silly joy or by a city that has a way of tunnelling into the bloodstream, no matter how hard you try to escape.

To September 12, icp.org

Follow @ftweekend on Twitter to find out about our latest stories first