“With Tokyo I found myself confronted with an unpredicted problem. A book on Tokyo, how could I be sure I knew what that meant? I was just looking and depending on instinct and feeling. This wall, that step, are they what they seem? How to be sure? For the first time I was photographing unknown scenes and objects. I was faced with making sense of what I was seeing. I was depending on my feelings and obliged to make photographs of the non-identified, of another world. I guess this was-the -test of photography.
I took the challenge "
~ William Klein
(1926-2022)
“William Klein took his camera and unrelentingly ventured into the Japanese capital of Tokyo, right in the midst of the chaos of rapid economic growth, and with the Olympic Games coming up three years later. The various shots of just about everything he could seize hold of in his rampant shooting style he eventually put into one single book. Indeed a photographer with the wild eye and sensibility of a young William Klein was still to emerge at a world class-level.
Looking at the photographs collected in “TOKYO” for the first time in a while. I caught myself feeling vaguely jealous.And once agin, I thought that “these were pics I wanted to shoot”
This series of William Klein’s photos of cityscapes will eternally remain my bible”
~ DaidÅ Moriyama
This is my favorite image from Bill’s Tokyo series and book. A sea of white shirts in the intense bull pit of trading in one of the bastions of global capitalism.
Can’t you just hear the noise level of frantic human activity?
