Creative street and fashion photographer William Klein has died at the age of 96

From his earliest years, Mr. Klein said, he had the ability to see the world as a perpetual outsider. He grew up in Depression-era Manhattan, a Jewish boy in an Irish neighborhood that endured poverty and anti-Semitic bullying. His self-confidence and quick eye around him were ways to survive – so was art. At the age of 12, he began visiting the Museum of Modern Art on weekends, where his own work would one day be displayed.

After military service, he settled in France to study painting in the late 1940s. But soon he became fascinated with photography, with its endless possibilities, a new form of abstract art when he learned how to play with exposure. He says the vivid blur it creates, the sensation he feels swirling around it, and his overall view of the world: its gloom, its vibrancy, its beauty, its grotesqueries, are a revelation.

In the years after the war he distanced himself from any school or method of gaining popularity.

“I came from outside, I didn’t like the rules of photography,” he once said. “There were things you could do with the camera, with any medium – grain, contrast, blur, cocked framing, removing or exaggerating gray tones and so on. I thought it would be good to show what’s possible if it’s as accurate as using the camera as traditional approaches.

From 1955 to 1965, Alexander Lieberman, Vogue’s esteemed art director, said he saw in Mr. Klein “a remarkable secret talent,” who was under contract to the fashion magazine from 1955 to 1965. High-contrast printing, and extraordinary perspectives allowed by wide-angle and telephoto lenses.

“Vogue may be the most unpopular fashion photograph ever published,” Mr. Klein told the Observer.

While living on a Vogue allowance, he began a personal project: a series of photographs taken on the streets of New York using the same technique he applied to fashion. Through Mr. Klein’s lens, Streets portrays a chaotic modern world alive with action and opportunity, but also hostile.

Rejected by Vogue and American book publishers, his pictures were published in an idiosyncratic tabloid-style book. The full title, “Life is Good and Good for You in New York: Trans Witnesses Reveals,” was a collection of tabloid headlines.

“New York,” as the book was commonly known, was published in France in 1956, but not in America. Like Robert Frank’s cross-country photography volume, “The Americans” (1959), Mr. Klein’s book turns its eye to the myth of the American Dream at the height of the Cold War. Mr. Klein called it “my diatribe against America.”

Although many American art and photography critics disapprove of Mr. Klein’s style. – One accused him of “cheap sensational photography” – the book had a lasting impact. In the year In 1992, Vicky Goldberg, a photography historian and critic, described Mr. Klein in the New York Times as a born rule breaker who “played a major role in shaping a new vision” in the visual arts.

He often used a wide-angle lens on the edge of the frame to focus on faces or a telephoto lens for close-up and distant images, photographing his subjects before they were fully aware of his presence. He used the growing process to create high contrast and other background effects, and often crop the result.

Mr. Klein’s most reproduced image from the book, known as “Gun 1,” shows a young boy with a fixed, angry expression pointing a gun at the photographer, inches away from the lens. A little angelic boy seems to be trying to stop his friend by putting his hand on the handle. The boys were playing, Mr. Klein explained, but city life seemed to involve emotional drama.

“New York” was a multicultural tour de force featuring many black and immigrant faces. A phone photo titled “4 Heads, New York” shows in one frame Mr. Klein, an Italian police officer, a Hispanic man, and a Jewish mother. And an African American woman wearing a beret.

The design of the book was very experimental. Some photographs bleed from the edges of the page; Others are placed in a grid. A separately bound 16-page booklet containing captions for the pictures and Mad magazine covers, Spaghetti and Brass ads and other ephemera included the volume. This critique of pervasive commercialism predates Andy Warhol’s pop art.

Mr. Klein describes his work as “pseudo-ethnographic, parodic, dada,” the latter referring to the crude art movement of the early 20th century. As he visited other cities – Rome, Moscow, Tokyo – to film, he trained his lens and continued to photograph people who, like him, were the main challengers of culture.

His subjects included boxer Muhammad Ali, Black Panther leader Eldridge Cleaver and rock and roll pioneer Richard Little. In addition to his documentaries, Mr. Klein has created French-language features, including the fashion world’s “Who Are You Paul Mago?” including that. (1966) and the comedy “Mr. Liberty” (1968), about a hero who uses his power to bolster American corporate and military imperialism.

Despite more than 70 years of excellence, Mr. Klein never achieved the recognition in his home country that his peers such as Frank and Richard Avedon enjoyed. The explanation was partly in his absence. But his independent journey helped him cut ties with editors, art directors and managers. It would be decades before his work received major exhibitions in the United States.

Mr. Klein says he is a “foreigner” even in his adopted country, always motivated by the outside observer to see the complexities beneath the inner beauty. In the year His 2002 publication “Paris + Klein” – featuring Rubenesque women in Turkish baths, African-American protesters demanding their rights, Chinese New Year celebrations – undermined the romanticized vision of the City of Lights.

William Klein was born in Manhattan in April 1929. His father owned a tailor’s shop, but it disappeared in the stock market crash of 1929. His mother was a housewife.

A preschool student, he graduated high school at 14 and enrolled at the City College of New York. In the year In 1946 he went to enlist in the army. While in Allied-occupied Germany, he became a cartoonist for the military newspaper Stars and Stripes and, on his account, won his first camera, a professional-grade Roliflex. Basically a poker game.

In the year A few years later, his abstract photographs for the architectural magazine Domus were spotted by Lieberman, who returned to New York to work for Vogue.

Mr. Klein married Jane Florine (also known as Janine) after seeing her in the Left Bank his first week in Paris. She briefly worked as a model and later took over her husband’s schedule. She died in 2005. Survivors include one son, Pierre Klein, and a sister.

Mr. Klein’s first film was ”Broadway Illuminated” (1958), an abstract celebration of the neon nights of Times Square. While continuing to work in cinema, Mr. Klein returned to photography in the 1980s, when the art photography market was establishing and his early work was being discovered by a new generation of street photographers.

Major institutions such as San Francisco’s Museum of Modern Art and London’s Tate Modern have hosted retrospectives of his work. The New York-based International Center of Photography presented him with its Lifetime Achievement Award in 2007.

When the Pompidou Center in Paris opened a major exhibition of his work in 2006, Mr. Klein told the Los Angeles Times that the most reproduced image — the boy with the gun — had been misunderstood for decades.

“Now, I get phone calls all the time, ‘We’re a magazine in Norway and we’re doing something about what our kids are coming to,'” he said. “In that photograph and ‘What are our children coming to?’ I had 30 or 40 covers made with the title? “

The children shown in the photo revealed two aspects of his own character.

“In the next shot you can see the kid is laughing,” Mr. Klein said. “If you actually look at the photograph, it’s just me and the two of them. I was a little naughty girl and I was also a little angel girl.