William Klein was an influential American-born French photographer and filmmaker known for his ironic approach to media and innovative use of photographic techniques. Born in New York City to Hungarian-Jewish immigrants, he studied sociology at the City College of New York before serving in the U.S. Army during World War II. After moving to France, he initially trained as a painter under Fernand Léger before transitioning to photography. Klein gained widespread fame for his fashion photography for Vogue and his photo essays on various cities, including New York, Rome, Moscow, and Tokyo. His work is characterized by an uncompromising rejection of traditional technical norms, frequently employing wide-angle lenses, natural lighting, and motion blur to capture urban vitality. He was a pioneer of street photography and directed numerous documentaries and feature films, often satirizing American society and the fashion industry.[1,2,3,4,5,7,8,9,10,11,12,13,14]
