William Klein obituary: celebrated photographer who brought his eye for teeming imagery to the cinema

“I rented a camera and just filmed what I saw,” William Klein said of his first film, completed in New York in 1958 with some assistance from his friends Alain Resnais and Chris Marker. Broadway by Light is an entrancing 12-minute study of the nighttime tungsten and neon circus of Times Square advertising. To a startled soundtrack by Maurice Le Roux, some of the expected slogans and motifs blare out of the dark, signalling the wares of Pepsi, Budweiser, Planters peanuts.

More enigmatic texts gleam and flicker too – “flaming … fresh … fascination” – and despite Klein’s laconic account of his methods, the film makes complex use of time lapse, superimpositions, graphically playful silhouettes of workers. Two years earlier, he had published (via Marker) his first photobook, Life Is Good and Good for You in New York: Trance Witness Revels, a work of street photography so kinetic and odd, almost cartoonish, that no US publisher would touch it. He hoped Broadway by Light would be shown in mainstream theatres, but a cousin who worked for United Artists assured him people would flee before the main feature.

Klein, who has died in Paris at the age of 96, spent the first decades of his career saying yes to each new and unfamiliar artform that came his way. He was born in 1926 to a poor Jewish family in a mostly Irish neighbourhood on the edge of Harlem. He finished high school young, and liked to hang around the Museum of Modern Art. He joined the US Army at the end of the Second World War, drew cartoons for the Stars and Stripes newspaper, was stationed in Germany and then France. Discharged in 1948, he settled in Paris. 

He wanted to be a painter, but his teacher Fernand Léger urged him to get out of the studio, into the streets, to pay attention to posters and adverts. In 1952, in Milan, the Italian architect Angelo Mangiarotti was impressed by an exhibition of Klein’s abstract paintings, and asked him to design the panels of a room divider. Now Klein was a graphic designer, making cover art for Domus magazine. But he also became a photographer: after photographing his own abstractions, he came up with a bright new style of photogram, which soon caught the eye of Alexander Liberman, art director of Vogue in New York.

At Liberman’s invitation, Klein returned to his native city. Vogue published his photograms and his images of shoes and textiles, before he was allowed free reign with fashion shoots proper. He took models and clothes on to the roof of the Condé Nast building: a dance of mirrors and gazes unfolds atop the city. He sometimes had abandoned storefronts repainted to match or clash with the colours of the dresses; in one such picture, Vogue editors kept the elegant white models but excised the young Black man Klein had asked to sit in a barbershop window beside them.

In downtime from his magazine work, and a little in advance of Robert Frank’s more famous The Americans, he took the astonishing street photographs that went into his first book. Grainy, blurred, frequently packed with incident to the edge of the frame, Klein’s is a joyous and intimate view of the city: his wide-angle lens gives us a teeming crowd, but there is often a single individual thrust, out of focus, into the foreground – none of the serene isolation of Henri Cartier-Bresson’s ‘decisive moment’. The New York book was followed by equally teeming, energetic studies of Rome, Moscow and Tokyo.

Klein’s first feature film, Who Are You, Polly Magoo? (1966), was an insider’s satire of the fashion business, and marked the end of his relationship with Vogue. A second satirical feature, Mr Freedom (1968) starred Delphine Seyrig, Donald Pleasance and Serge Gainsbourg in a portrait of an all-American ‘fascist meddler’ (played by John Abbey).

Klein had begun making documentary films for French television in the early 1960s. In 1964 he flew from New York to Miami for a world-heavyweight fight between Cassius Clay and Sonny Liston, and happened to sit beside Malcolm X on the plane: an introduction to Clay (soon to be Muhammed Ali) followed. The resulting film, Cassius the Great was extended in 1969 to become the feature-length Muhammad Ali: The Greatest – the first of three film portraits of storied Black Americans. Invited to Algeria in 1969 to film the Pan-African Cultural Festival, he met the fugitive activist Eldridge Cleaver and made a separate film about him, Eldridge Cleaver, Black Panther (1970). Completing the accidental trilogy was The Little Richard Story (1980), another happy accident: Klein had travelled to Nashville to make a film about Dolly Parton, but she pulled out – Richard was in town, down on his luck, and a perfectly flamboyant subject alongside whom to explore an America the exile Klein hardly knew.

Klein had returned to photography by the end of the 1970s; his street photographs of the 1950s were belatedly honoured in the US, and there began a run of new commissions, exhibitions, books and awards that saw him through to his nineties. At Tate Modern in 2012, a major retrospective paired him with the Japanese photographer Daido Moriyama, in recognition of Klein’s dark, overprinted influence on the Provoke photographers and beyond. It felt like a fitting punctuation mark to a long and extraordinarily varied career – the collaborative political films, the TV commercials – but a decade later he was subject of a generous survey show at the International Center of Photography in New York. He died just a few days before the exhibition was due to close.

• William Klein, 19 April 1926 to 10 September 2022

Brian Dillon’s Affinities, which includes an essay on William Klein, will be published in February 2023 by Fitzcarraldo Editions.