PHOTOGRAPHY BY WILLIAM KLEIN
WHERE YOU WANT TO BE IN NOVEMBER
November
01
GO: The latest Highlights from the Photography Collection is open now through April 30, 2023, in galleries L10 and L11 at the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art. Free.
“CRANE” TO SEE
William Klein’s “Yellow Coat + Bus + Crane,” which is among the images in the Nelson’s latest show of highlights from its peerless collection of photography, was originally taken while he was working for Vogue magazine. That was not his preference, says April Watson, the curator who put together the show. “Klein really wanted to pursue his own work, and though he was very good at fashion photography, it was not his first love,” she says. In the 1950s, Watson says, photographers weren’t yet treated as artists by the gallery and museum world, so the best photographers of the day worked for magazines out of necessity. While the images were snapped for magazines, photographers like Klein and his well-known contemporaries Robert Frank and Richard Avedon handled the assignments their own way. Klein, Watson says, “upended the way typical fashion photographs were made,” shunning studios with controlled sets and lighting and instead taking models out into the streets of New York, “using the gritty, everyday realities of the city as a natural backdrop.” That background adds depth and richness to the very striking “Yellow Coat + Bus + Crane.” The work juxtaposes with another piece from this show, Richard Avedon’s “Dovima with Elephants, Evening Dress by Dior, Cirque d’Hiver,” which Avedon shot in Paris in 1955 for Harper’s Bazaar. It’s part of Avedon’s body of work that portends much of contemporary high-end fashion photography. —MARTIN CIZMAR
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