William Klein
20 December 2013 – 12 March 2014

Foam finishes 2013 with a unique retrospective exhibition of the work of William Klein. The entire museum will be dedicated to the life and work of this legendary photographer, filmmaker and designer. The career of William Klein (b. 1928) spans more than sixty years. His work had an immense influence on photography during the second half of the twentieth century. The exhibition gives ample coverage to Klein’s ground-breaking work in New York in the 1950s while also displaying work made in Rome, Moscow and Tokyo. His work for Vogue shows Klein was a great innovator in the field of fashion photography. In addition to his early experiments with abstract photography, his large-scale, painted-on contact prints that he’s been creating in more recent years will also be on view in Foam. A selection of Klein’s feature films and documentaries will be shown in Foam’s 3h library space. This exceptional William Klein retrospective exhibition has been curated by Foam and can be seen exclusively in Amsterdam.

In 1956, William Klein turned the photographic conventions of his day upside-down with his book Life is Good for You in New York – Trance Witness Revels. He revealed a society that didn’t match America’s image of itself. The controversial book was revolutionary, its photography as well as its subject matter, and over the years it’s never lost its power. Between 1956 and 1964, in a period of eight years, William Klein produced four city books that completely unsettled the still-young photographic traditions. New York, Rome, Moscow and Tokyo are filled with grainy, brusque photos which depict the four cities in a way that had never been seen before. His images of life in these cities have a ruthless realism and at the same time visually reverberate the psychological, social and economic mood of that time. These books, and New York in particular, has had an unprecedented influence on subsequent generations of photographers and designers of photo books.

In the years following the Second World War, William Klein joined the Allied Forces in Europe. After he finished his service in 1948 he settled in Paris, where he studied with Fernand Leger. He later met Alexander Liberman, the legendary art director of the American magazine Vogue. Via Libermann, Klein went to work for Vogue and earned a name for himself with his ambivalent and ironic view of the fashion world. Much of this work was just as ground-breaking and controversial as his so-called independent work, which he was doing at the same time, and is now considered one of the milestones of fashion photography.

William Klein has also been extremely innovative and influential in the field of film. Since the 1960s he has made many feature films and documentaries, such as Who Are You, Polly Magoo, Cassius the Great, Mr. Freedom and Le Couple Témoin. He also has directed more than 250 commercials. Klein has received a number of prestigious awards for his work, including the Prix Nadar, the Hasselblad Award and last year the Outstanding Contribution to Photography Award in the annual Sony World Photography Awards. William Klein’s work has been exhibited in numerous museums and galleries worldwide, such as in Italy, France, Russia, Spain and Germany. A retrospective exhibition of his work was on show at the Tate Museum in London until the beginning of this year.

Throughout his long and extremely productive career, William Klein has always remained his own man: independent, unconventional, enigmatic and contrary, but in everything exceptionally talented. Sizeable exhibitions of his work can seldom be seen in the Netherlands – the last one was held in the Stedelijk Museum in 1967. Foam is therefore particularly proud to present this retrospective exhibition filling the entire museum on the Keizersgracht for three months, doing justice to the life and work of one of the greatest masters of photography.

More info: foam.org/visit-foam/calendar/2013-exhibitions/william-klein

Foam is sponsored by the BankGiro Loterij, De Brauw Blackstone Westbroek, Delta Lloyd, Gemeente Amsterdam and the VandenEnde Foundation.