Klein: Moriyama Research and Review

William Klein

William Klein is an American photographer and filmmaker/documentarian known for his ironic approach to media and extensive use of photographic technique in Fashion photography and photojournalism. Klein was raised in New York city where he regularly visited the MOMA as a teenager. After serving in the army as a radio operator he enrolled at the Sorbonne and has been based in Paris for the last 60 years. Klein was trained as a painter, but after designing a set of rotating architectural panels and photographing their motions in blurriness, he began to get intrigued by what a camera can do. Those early photographs were also displayed at the exhibition.

Klein developed his own distinctive style for street photography, when he began to merge it with Fashion.The ones displayed at the exhibition were the models wearing striped dresses using the zebra crossing in Rome. The chaotic backdrop of the urban environment in contrast with the crazy stripes created photographs that made the patterns "hit" your eyes. The passers by didn't know it was staged for camera "soon men began to think these girls were crazy hookers and they approached them and tried to feel their asses" Klein recalled.

The videos displayed at "Klein and Moriyama" at the Tate showcased a patchwork of his works in fashion,boxing and politics through some clips from his films, Mr.Freedom, The model Couple, Who are you, Polly Magoo?, Grand Soirs et Petit Matins and documentary about muhammad ali.

In Contacts, Klein revisited his contact sheets and he experimented with blowing-up the sheets and pencils. Then he started using enamel paint.
"When I started painting the contacts, it was all brush strokes and jubilation. The jubilation of painting the recalled the celebration of taking the photo. For me,taking a photo was celebration, was physical and gave me a super charge"

Daido Moriyama

Daido moriyama is a noted Japanese Photographer whose works document the post war Japan bustling at the turn of it's cultural movement. He shoots in predominantly black and white with grainy textures. Moriyama was working as an assistant for photographer Takeji Iwamiya when he discovered Klein's New York Photo book, which became a crucial influence to his works.

I went to see his works in "Klein and Moriyama" displayed at the Tate Modern in November 2012.The works displayed there dated from the 1970s to 2012. His photographs explore a whole dark side of the Urban life in contrast to the tiny details we miss in our everyday "urban" life, discarded bottles, clogged drains, electrical wires on grey concrete.   

A slideshow represented photographs taken in Hokkaido. It seems like the photographs he took there tells us a tale about the beauty of the gloominess of his run down surroundings. Moriyama says "My approach is very simple,there is no artistry, I just shoot freely".As a schoolboy when he read about Hokkaido a large northern island of the Japanese archipelago, it seemed, as a schoolboy to him, an exotic place because of the chaos created by the war that had still prohibited any kind of travel across the country. He then started travelling to Hokkaido in the 1960s and the photographs he took there became one of the largest project undertaken by him. His works reflect the true spirit of travelling, straying and capturing the reality of life that was going on around him.

Another eye-catching work was a room full of Polaroid prints which is a recreation of the artist's room in a mosaic grids of square Polaroid prints.