Contacts

Introduction by Robert Delpire.

William Klein’s first love was painting, which he studied with Fernand Léger. He began to see the contact-sheet in a different light, as an object in its own right, isolating the chosen image, enlarging it and framing it with thick slashes of red, yellow and blue paint. There was nothing decorative about his approach, which instead reflected his desire to build a graphic bridge between painting and photography that he insisted should be appreciated in its own right, as an art form artwork unlike any ever seen before.