William Klein died Saturday in Paris at the age of 96. He was an American photographer whose pictures strongly influenced fashion and street photography in the second half of the 20th century. His son, Pierre Klein had confirmed the news of his death.
Klein grew up in Manhattan and studied sociology at the City College of New York. He had served in Europe with the U.S. Army during World War II, he moved to Paris to study painting under the G.I. Bill.
In 1954, he became interested in photography after who studied briefly with French painters Andre Lhote and Fernand Leger, had his first solo exhibition of paintings in Brussels in 1951, and another in Milan a year later.
He meet Alexander Liberman in the same year, he was an artistic director at Vogue, and began a 10-year collaboration with the magazine.
Klein was also a noted filmmaker, producing several documentary and feature films throughout his career.
Klein first ventured into cinema in 1956, when Italian director Federico Fellini, impressed by Klein’s raw images of New York City street life, had asked him to work on his 1957 film “Nights of Cabiria,” about a prostitute in Rome.
