William Klein: Fashion + Light

William Klein: Fashion + Light, on view at HackelBury Fine Art, 9 March – 2 June, 2018. This stunning studio work was originally created for Vogue Magazine in 1962 and has only recently been fully rediscovered.

Klein started making abstract light images from 1952. On the strength of this work, Alexander Liberman invited him to join Condé Nast in 1954. With an assured income from Condé Nast, Klein was able to embark on a personal project of street photography which he published in 1956 as Life is Good and Good for You in New York. That same year, Vogue Magazine printed several of his most iconic fashion images. In 1962 Klein combined his fashion photography with the light abstraction techniques he had pioneered a decade earlier. In 2015 HackelBury persuaded Klein to revisit this body of work and he agreed to release it for the first time.