Klein recalls that he was
very consciously trying to do the opposite of what Cartier-Bresson was doing. He did pictures without intervening. He was like the invisible camera. I wanted to be visible in the biggest way possible. My aesthetics was the New York Daily News. I saw the book I wanted to do as a tabloid gone berserk, gross, grainy, over-inked, with a brutal layout, bull-horn headlines. This is what New York deserved and would get. The thing I took as my inspiration was all over the place, three million a day, blowing in the gutter, over-flowing ashcans, the New York Daily News. An old buddy. [In high school] I'd done a whole issue of the school paper parodying that paper. I decided to be visible, intervene, and to show it. Shades of Brecht but also the Daily News' Inquiring Photographer. I was never after news, of course, just the dumbest, most ordinary stuff. But I liked, as further distancing, the garish urgency of their front-page scoops. So I would try to photograph schlock non-events like some crazed paparazzo and print it accordingly.
At one point, I discovered in a camera store the wide-angle lens, relatively new at the time. It was love at first sight. I rushed out in the street and shot away, aiming, not aiming, it didn't matter. I could never get enough into the camera. I wanted it all in a gluttonous rage - the wide angle was the solution. The 28mm became my normal lens.
It was a period of incredible excitement for me - coming to terms with myself, with the city I hated and loved, and with pho-tography. Every day for months I was out gathering evidence. I made up the rules as I went along and they suited me fine. Grain, blur, contrast, accidents, cockeyed framing, no problem.
The prints accumulated, I saw a book but editors, in New York didn't. Ech, this isn't photography, this is ****, this isn't New York, too black, too one-sided, this is a slum. What else did they think New York was? Whatever, I went back to Paris, found an editor, did the layout, the cover, the typography, went to the printers.
I wanted the book to look like it ended up looking, and I worked over every detail. I can't conceive of working otherwise. Even with the films I do, I end up doing the sets, the editing, the credits, even the poster. It's not necessarily the best solution, but the spectator couldn't care less. I, on the other hand, do.
The title of this book was LIFE IS GOOD & GOOD FOR YOU IN NEW YORK WILLIAM KLEIN TRANCE WITNESS REVELS. Half Madison Avenue, half headlinese. The last three words said about all I had to say about photography then and, more or less, since. CHANCE = TRANCE. WITNESS = WITNESS. REVEALS = REVELS.
The picture of the two boys, one with a gun pointed at the other, is a self-portrait. Because for me, those two boys are myself. On the one hand, I could play with the gun. On the other hand, I could be the very angelic-looking boy who is hold-ing his hat. And curiously enough, there are a couple of pictures with guns, and the people are always holding bands while they're brandishing guns. . . . It's also part of the fake violence which, in New York, can become real violence in two seconds. But it's very often a psychodrama.
Klein's description of his technical approach to the New York book captures what might be called the epitome of the New York School aesthetic:
The New York book was done with one camera, a 35mm camera, and three lenses. I had a 28mm, a 50mm and a 135. The funny postscript to all this is that I wanted to buy a 35mm camera, because I knew I was going to New York, and I'd been using mostly Rolleiflex. I went to this pictorial service, Magnum, to see whether somebody was selling a second-hand camera. I ended up buying Cartier-Bresson's camera from him because he was getting a whole new set of cameras, so he sold it to me.
I used the wide-angle lens as a normal lens. I had no philosophy about it. When I looked in the viewfinder and realized I could see all the contradictions and confusion that was there with the wide-angle - that was what was great…If I'd had a Rolleiflex with different lenses, I wouldn't have cropped that much. I had no compunction about cropping, because I did my own layouts…[And] I'd use anything in printing. Throw cyanide, white out over things. I approached photography a little bit like a painter would play with a lithograph, fooling around, pouring milk, tea, anything on it. It was the sort of thing that anybody with any sort of strict, classic photographic training would have qualms about. But I had no qualms at all about doing things with photography. First of all, I had no knowledge of it, and I couldn't care less, because I thought the whole photographic world was alien.
This is something, also, that I had against photographers generally. . . . that they would let other people choose their photographs, and they would let other people lay them out. And they would let other people write about them. All these things, I a1way's felt, were not fair. I mean, they're cheating.
It seems to me that the photographic process is something that's complete. You take the photographs, you choose them, you lay them out, you do the book, you do the typography, you do everything, you do the text, and then it becomes a book. I do the same thing with movies. I've never been able to do a film with anybody else's scenario.
