WILLIAM KLEIN 1926-2022 - Lot 35

WILLIAM KLEIN 1926-2022 Horn & Hardart, New York, November 1954. Photograph. Posterior silver print signed, titled and dated in pencil on the back. Image: 19.7 x 31.1 cm; sheet: 27.8 x 35.6 cm "My motto in doing the New York was: 'Anything goes'. It still suits me, even today. No rules, no bans, no limits." In 1954, after an absence of eight years, William Klein returned to New York, where he produced a powerful "photographic diary" of his short stay. Juggling feelings of love and hate for his native city, he presents New York as a chaotic, disorderly, almost absurd metropolis. In this major work in the history of photography, we can see how a young abstract painter of 26 seized on the photograph of reality to change all its data. The grain, violent contrasts, complex compositions, decropping, distortions and camera shake of press photography become the elements of a deliberate approach. William Klein rejects documentary objectivity, which was de rigueur at the time, and allows himself a bias that erases any distinction between photographer and subject.