William Klein

A first edition copy of William Klein's Life Is Good & Good for You in New York.

• William Klein (American-French).
• Paris: Éditions du Seuil, Album Petite Planète 1, 1956.
• 189 pages.
• Quarto.
• Includes black-and-white photographs printed in gravure by Roto-Sadag.
• 16 page stapled leaflet of illustrated captions laid in as issued.
• Bound in black cloth-covered boards, with photo-illustrated endpapers, titles stamped in white on spine, in color illustrated dust jacket.

Life Is Good & Good For You in New York changed the parameters of what a book of photographs could be, representing William Klein's attempt to capture the kinetic quality of 1950s New York. After serving in the army towards the end of the Second World War, Klein moved to Paris in 1949 on the G.I. Bill and spent six years living there after studying painting, including a brief time with Fernand Léger. In 1954, Alexander Lieberman invited him back to New York to join the Vogue art department as a design assistant. Klein returned to New York. He didn't take the role with Vogue but spent eight taking photographs while rediscovering New York. Rejecting traditional ideas of sharpness, brightness and composition, Klein experimented with the layout using the Vogue darkrooms and Photostat, which allowed him to try many ideas such as cutting, pasting and playing with scale and sequencing quickly and easily.

Neither Vogue nor any American publisher was interested in these photographs. Klein returned to Paris where he showed them to Chris Marker, then an editor at Éditions du Seuil. The publication of Life Is Good & Good For You In New York was the first of several collaborations with Chris Marker. Six years later, Klein and his wife Janine appeared as "men of the future" in Marker's seminal film La Jetée (1962), with Klein providing the English narration.