The aesthetics of early fashion photography were still preoccupied with the habits of still life painting. Its habits mostly highlighted the apparent singular aura of the garments. Models posed as stiffly as those of old portraits against plain cloth backdrops or in bucolic settings. As in the portraiture of royalty, the clothing worthy of photography sought to present fashion as a preeminent symbol of the upper social classes, punctuated by the lazy rhythms of privileged leisure that good breeding bestowed on those genetically gifted.
But the emerging counter-cultural movements in the west during the 1960s, its participants the children of the booming working classes that were creating the then-novel category of the middle class, changed the visual grammar of fashion imagery forever. Settings shifted from stagnant landscapes to the urban rhythms of developing first-world cities. Models now mirrored the industry’s most exciting customer base—teenagers—and were pictured dancing, running, and entertaining themselves in parks, movie theaters, and bars. Literature, visual art, and film also saw significant experimentation with the irony of postmodernism, the exploded fomlessness of abstract expressionism, and the stretching of staple Hollywood genres. Practitioners challenged every existing aesthetic convention, often with knowing references to their actions of undoing.
The filmmaker and photographer William Klein (b. 1926, d. 2022) explored many of these currents in his most famous works, whether it was his commercial work for Vogue, his experimental fiction films such as Mr. Freedom, or photo essays that documented the transformations of major cities in the 1950s and 1960s. Trained as a painter by Fernand Léger at the Sorbonne, Klein quickly moved into camera-based media, applying the modernist techniques he learned in France with his prints. Klein could not help himself: Even in his contract work for Vogue, his images satirized the very products he was supposed to highlight. “The intention was to show how phony the poses were. But nobody complained. I always made sure that you could see the dress.”
One of Klein’s most known photographs from this era, “Antonia + Simone + Barbershop, New York (1962),” depicts two young female models posing on either side of a barbershop pole. Their cinched waistlines accentuate the straight lines of their dresses, balancing their rising beehive and French twist hair styles, and a collar necklace made from oversized stones glamorize their outfits. This is how it appeared in the pages of Vogue, but when the original photograph was eventually exhibited, viewers saw Klein's true intention. In the adjacent front window display, the man from the neighboring store sits solitary in a chair, his arms crossed, expression somewhere between bemused and impatient. In another version, the man is obscured behind the spread of a newspaper, its front page headline legible through the window: “BITS OF GIRL’S BODY IN SEWER: HUNT DOCTOR.”
Klein sought to disabuse the viewer of the rhetoric of the image by insisting on its reality principles. Without the headline citing the time of the photograph, the image becomes a timeless, ahistorical fiction, existing as comfortably in the 1960s as it might now in 2025. But the headline interrupts the fantasy, pointing to the fleetingness of the trends inherent in the dresses. The violence of its subject highlights the socio-cultural destruction Klein saw from the vantage of a Parisian expat in New York City, and perhaps the insignificance of a marketing photograph.
Klein's incisive style is best exemplified in his series of photobooks that documented Rome, Moscow, New York, and Tokyo at times of major transition. In these, Klein used mixed media, motion blur, telephoto and wide angle lenses, and spontaneous street shots to capture the pace and rhythm of cities in flux, earning him both the reputation as a forefather of street photography and as a fine art practitioner. In 1961, Klein traveled to Tokyo, three years before it was due to host the 1964 Summer Olympics, which put a fine point on postwar Japan’s recovery from the devastation of World War II. The time could not have been more ideal for an artist like Klein to visit, one characterized by the rift between tradition and change.
The western imagination of Tokyo obscured the city in the orientalizing tropes of obedience, gentle and serene contemplation, and an almost stubborn defense of its homogeneity. But in Klein’s lens, Tokyo became a maximalist, busy, and almost hedonistic metropolis undergoing a radical, confounding, and thrilling adolescence. Klein imaged white-and-black bodies blurred on the floor of the Tokyo stock exchange. Butoh dancers pose nearly nude in an alley pockmarked with potholes. A passing stranger’s grin turns maniacal in wide-angle perspective. In one of the book’s more famous photographs, visitors to a men’s bath wash themselves behind glass doors, the advertisements of domestic films, businesses, and other local ads in the foreground float above them like privacy curtains pinned up to reveal that which once was hidden. Perhaps the most famous example is “Cineposter,” a dynamic composition assembled from the remnants of movie posters, their tear lines sharp and present. The portions of women’s eyes, cheeks, and chins are layered to create an almost filmic narrative about the rapid transformations in Tokyo.
Tokyo 1961 was the last in Klein’s series of city essays, and was out of print until 2014, where a limited edition of 1,000 copies were produced. LW – C presents one copy of the newest edition.
