Views & Reviews Tokyo 1961 William Klein Street Photography

William Klein 東京 TOKYO / 日本写真家協会, 名取洋之助 （編集）
1961, Tokyo, 173 pages, 216 x 249 x 17

After documenting the streets of New York, Rome, Paris and Moscow, William Klein is back at the Polka gallery with a series of photographs portraying 1960s Tokyo. Klein first discovered Tokyo in ’61, on an official visit to Japan. Shown around by government representatives, he found a way to sneak off into back streets of Tokyo and captures the essence of the city at a time when Tokyoites were recovering from war and preparing for the 1964 Olympic Games. Klein makes his way through the busy streets observing everyone he meets, from children fighting on a street corner to a Butoh dancer poised in a contorted position and geishas posing in their rooms. Intimate and full of life, Klein's images bear witness to a society in transition. 

William KLEIN
ウィリアム・クライン

Born 1928 in New York. His career as a fashion photographer began in 1955, followed in 1956 by the publication of New York. Breaking taboos in photography, he introduced a new style of audaciously blurry and out-of-focus pictures that went on to influence numerous photographers up to the present day. After New York, the series continued with Roma (‘59), Moscow (’64), and Tokyo (’64). In addition to working as a photographer, he also produced the fashion-related movie Qui etes-vous Polly Maggoo? A solo exhibition at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art in 1995 established his reputation, which he had mainly earned in Europe, also back home in America. In Japan, the Tokyo Metropolitan Museum of Photography showed the ”Paris+Klein” exhibition in 2004, and in 2005, the ”William Klein Retrospective” exhibition was held at the Centre Pompidou in Paris. The exhibition “William Klein + Daido Moriyama” with Daido Moriyama at London’s Tate Modern in 2012-13 created a buzz not only in the realm of photography, but in the fashion and film worlds alike.