'Captures the essence of Roman life through stark contrast and tight frames'
--Amateur Photographer
Product Description
In 1956,William Klein, who had recently published his now classic Life is Good & Good for You in New York, arrived in Rome to assist Federico Fellini on his filmNights of Cabiria. As filming was delayed, Klein instead strolled around the city with Fellini, Pier Paolo Pasolini, Alberto Moravia, and other avant-garde Italian writers and artists serving as his guides. It was on these walks that Rome, a radical and brilliant visual diary of the city, was born. To celebrate the 50th anniversary of Romes release, Thames & Hudson is pleased to publish a revised edition. Now redesigned to encompass two volumes in a special slipcase, and featuring never-before-seen fashion pictures and updated text by the photographer, this new edition offers audiences another chance to celebrate this groundbreaking work.

New York and Rome, also Moscow and Tokyo, also elsewhere

Legendary photographer William Klein is well known in the U.S. for his groundbreaking style of gritty, expressionistic images of street scenes and fashion culture. But the French revere the American-born Klein -- who's lived in Paris since 1946 -- for his revolutionary avant-garde films, all of which he wrote and directed, and often produced.Imagine whimsical Woody Allen crossed with Spike Lee, and situated in the late 60s. With such classics as Mr. Freedom, Qui Etes-vous Polly Maggoo?, Le Couple Temoin, and Muhammad Ali: The Greatest, Klein's films blazed a broad trail of cultural dislocation, black nationalism, and misplaced trust in authority and the notion of progress.

Born in New York in 1928, William Klein is one of the leading photographers of the postwar era, as well as an influential filmmaker, painter, and graphic artist. This astonishing book, selected and designed by Klein himself, captures the essence of his life's work. It includes selections from his powerful photo books on New York, Moscow, Rome, Tokyo, and Paris; his dynamic fashion photography that used the city as a stage for glamour; stills and posters from his bitingly satirical films, including his send up of fashion magazines, Who Are You, Polly Magoo; and the graphically powerful painted contact sheets that he has exhibited around the world. Klein, whose achievement puts him on a level with Robert Frank, Richard Avedon, and Irving Penn, lives in Paris and is revered in Europe. This is the first comprehensive book on his work published in the United States in twenty years.

In 1956, William Klein's NEW YORK, one of the most important books in the history of photography, was published. The work created a veritable revolution. Breaking with the medium's taboos and traditions, Klein developed a radically new way of taking pictures, inventing a violent, graphic style combining black humour, social criticism, satire, and poetry. "For the first time, wrote the poet and critic Alain Jouffroy, photographs led the evolution of the visual rats. Klein developed practically all of the themes dealt with later by Pop Art and the New Realism..". The book whose original title was NEW YORK IS GOOD & GOOD FOR YOU became a legend, an entry in rare book catalogues... and impossible to find. Therefore, a group of six European publishers, with Japanese and American partners, planned a re-edition. The design and content of this new version are considerably changed - almost a hundred more pages and dozens of never before published pictures. Painter, photographer, movie maker, American in Paris, William Klein escapes pigeonholes, categories, movements. Born in New York in 1928, Klein grew up on the mean streets of Manhattan, shuttling between blackboard jungles, experimental schools, pool halls and the Museum of Modern Art. At eighteen, he graduated from New York's City college and, at twenty, after serving for two years in the US Army in Europe (of which one was at the Sorbonne!), he settled in Paris to become a painter. He worked briefly with Fernand Leger and in the early fifties did kinetic murals for Italian architects, absorbing along the way European visual history from Masaccio to the Bauhaus. In 1954, after six years of experimenting in painting, graphic design, andabstract photography, he returned to New York, where he embarked on a complicated love-hate affair with his native city that became an unique photographic adventure. Half amazed foreigner, half streetwise New Yorker, he set out to record on film his vision in a photographic diary.

In 1956, a 28-year old William Klein arrived in Rome, fresh from the debut of his now classic monograph Life Is Good & Good for You in New York, to assist Federico Fellini on his film Nights of Cabiria. Filming was delayed, and so Klein instead strolled about the city in the company of Fellini, Pier Paolo Pasolini, Alberto Moravia and other avant-garde Italian writers and artists who served as his guides. It was on these walks that Rome, a pioneering and brilliant visual diary of the city, was born. First published in 1959, Klein's Rome features the quirky extended captions that distinguished his New York book, interspersed with observations about the city by Stendhal, Michelet, Mark Twain, Henry James and others. Today it is one of the most celebrated photography books of the twentieth century. To celebrate the fiftieth anniversary of Rome's publication, Aperture (in close collaboration with Contrasto) has produced a revised edition, which includes previously unseen fashion pictures made in Rome and an updated text by the photographer. Redesigned to encompass two volumes in a special PVC slipcase, this new edition offers audiences another chance to celebrate one of the great photobooks. As Fellini said, "Rome is a movie, and Klein did it."
After graduating from university, William Klein (born in New York, 1928) settled in Paris and became a painter. He returned to New York in 1954, and made a photographic logbook which was published two years later, and which won him world-wide acclaim: Life Is Good & Good for You in New York (Prix Nadar, 1956). Later, he produced books dedicated to Tokyo, Moscow and Paris. Painter, photographer, moviemaker and graphic designer, Klein currently lives in Paris.