Curated by Alessandra Mauro, the monograph traces the artist’s relationship with the cities that shaped his life and his artistic research: Milan, where he began his career in the early 1950s; Rome, where in 1956 he truly discovered himself as a photographer, invited by Fellini as an assistant for a film in preparation; New York, where he was born and where he created his first, extraordinary “visual diary”; Paris, his adopted city where he chose to live, and then once again Moscow and Tokyo. Different places, inhabited at different moments of his long career, thus become milestones of a single journey. That of a photographer capable of plunging into urban chaos and following its rhythm, to render it through dynamic and deeply personal images.
William Klein was born in New York in 1926, later arriving in Paris around the age of twenty, where “everything” happened: meeting Jeanne, his lifelong companion, choosing to become an artist, and attending Fernand Léger’s studio starting in 1948. In the early 1950s, he moved to Milan, making his debut with his first solo exhibition of abstract works in the foyer of the Piccolo Teatro and subsequently at the Galleria Il Milione. In the Lombard capital, he came into contact with the architect Angelo Mangiarotti, who commissioned him to create large, decorated revolving panels. It was precisely to document this work that Klein picked up a camera for the very first time.
In 1954, he returned to New York, summoned by the then art director of Vogue, Alexander Lieberman. Life is good and good for you in New York, the visual diary of his return, became one of the most celebrated books in the history of photography.
Buoyed by this success, Klein was invited to Rome by Federico Fellini as an assistant for Nights of Cabiria (Le notti di Cabiria). Thus was born the second of his visual diaries, in which the artist narrates an unfamiliar city through images, observing its inhabitants and plunging into the existential flow that runs through it.
