How is William Klein’s approach to street photography different than Henri Cartier-Bresson and his theory of the decisive moment?
the difference between the Henri Cartier-Bresson vs William Klein’s approach to street photography is that William Klein’s approach is very confrontational in peoples face and asking t take pictures of them and the subject of the image is aware that the image is being taken of them he is confrontational, whereas Henri Cartier-Bresson waits for the right moment and try’s to preserve the natural of the present, he doesn’t want to be seen he doesn’t want people to know that he’s taking images he is observational
William Klein
images by William Klein
William Klein is an American born French photographer. He originally trained as a painter and found a lot of success with his early exhibitions of his early paintings, quickly after this he moved on to photography and achieved widespread fame becoming a fashion photographer for vogue magazine and had produced more than 250 television advertisements, despite having no formal photography training.
Klein was born in New York to a Jewish family, after graduating from high school early and enrolled in the City College New York at the young age of 14 to study sociology. And joined the army during WW2 where he was stationed in Germany and then France where when he was discharged he later settled.
Klein published a book on New York which won the Prix Nadar award in 1957 which he took on a brief return to his hometown ,his work was considered revolutionary for its “ambivalent and ironic approach to the world of fashion”
Klein analysis
This is image is taken using a film camera and the genre of this photography is street photography.
The mise-en-scene presents a young boy possibly with his little brother on the streets of New York pulling a gun to the camera. The tone of this image is quite a mid tone overall, however there is quite a lot of dark areas on the image due to their black tracksuits that they are wearing. The use of light in this image is Harsh, because Klein always uses the flash when he is doing street photography. I would say that this image has a large depth of field as you can still see the depth in the image as the hand and the gun is bigger as they are closer to the camera, however only that is blurred because its too close tot he camera so I think it has a large depth of field. The leading lines of the images would be the contrast of the dark tracksuits against the lighter background.
I believe the ISO is 100 as everything is in as most of the image is in focus.
Henri Cartier-Bresson stated; “To me, photography is the simultaneous recognition, in a fraction of a second, of the significance of an event and the precise organization of forms that give that event its proper expression,” And I think that this really comes through in his work as he really thinks about the organization of geometry of the background and the “decisive moment” is the faction of the second that Cartier-Bresson is talking about.
Conceptual
The image could be representing the stages of life. Because in the background you can see there is an adult man walking through the doorway. this could be construed as the future of the boy with the gun standing next to his little brother. As its a younger boy next to a teenage boy next to an adult man could be showing the stages of life.
As well as it could be showing the 2 sides of people ( good and evil / Ego and ID ) as the young boy is looking at what could be his brother with such innocence and purity compared to his older brother threatening someone with a gun.