Walking in the Crowd

Episode 16 looks at a photograph made by William Klein during the St. Patrick’s Day parade in New York City in 1955.

Rather than photographing the crowd from a safe or distant position, Klein moves directly into it. Faces press toward the surface of the image, space compresses, and the photograph begins to feel less like observation and more like physical encounter.

The episode explores how Klein’s background in painting — including his studies with Fernand Léger in postwar Paris — shaped his approach to photography through form, pressure, and proximity. It also considers how walking operates within the image itself: not as solitary movement, but as negotiated movement among others, inside the density of public space.

Along the way, the episode reflects on Klein’s landmark 1956 photobook Life is Good & Good for You in New York, and on how his work departs from the more classical model of street photography associated with Henri Cartier-Bresson and the “decisive moment.”

Walking in the Crowd continues the broader trajectory of Photography and Walking by exploring how movement shapes not only what photography records, but how images themselves come into being.

Related images and references:
photographyandwalking.com

 Dans l’épisode 16, nous nous intéressons à une photographie réalisée par William Klein lors du défilé de la Saint-Patrick à New York en 1955.

Plutôt que de photographier la foule à distance ou depuis une position protégée, Klein entre directement à l’intérieur de celle-ci. Les visages semblent poussés vers la surface de l’image, l’espace se comprime, et la photographie commence à ressembler moins à une observation qu’à une rencontre physique.

L’épisode explore comment la formation de Klein en peinture — notamment ses études auprès de Fernand Léger dans le Paris d’après-guerre — a influencé son approche de la photographie à travers la forme, la tension visuelle et la proximité. Il réfléchit également à la manière dont la marche agit à l’intérieur même de l’image : non pas comme un déplacement solitaire, mais comme un mouvement négocié parmi les autres, au cœur de la densité de l’espace public.

Au fil de l’épisode, il est aussi question du livre marquant de Klein publié en 1956, Life is Good & Good for You in New York, ainsi que de la manière dont son travail s’éloigne du modèle plus classique de la photographie de rue associé à Henri Cartier-Bresson et à l’idée du « moment décisif ».

Walking in the Crowd poursuit ainsi la réflexion plus large de Photography and Walking sur la façon dont le mouvement façonne non seulement ce que la photographie enregistre, mais aussi la manière dont les images elles-mêmes prennent forme.

Images et références liées à l’épisode :
photographyandwalking.com 

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:00

During a St. Patrick's Day parade in New York City, William Klein made this photograph in the middle of a crowd. And almost immediately, you can feel that this is not a picture taken from a safe distance. A group of men fills the frame. Coats, hats, faces turned in slightly different directions, one man looking forward with a firmness that catches the eye right away, while others seem drawn towards something happening just outside the picture, somewhere beyond the edge of the frame. The space is tight, compressed, already dense with bodies and attention, and whether the parade is passing or is just passed almost becomes secondary. Because what matters is that we are not looking at this scene from the outside. We are already inside it, and that changes how the picture begins. So this photograph, made in New York in nineteen fifty five during the St. Patrick's Day Parade by William Klein, clearly does not offer the comfort of distance. It does not step back and allow the scene to organize itself clearly in front of the camera, but instead comes close and then closer still until the picture begins to feel less like an observation and more like an encounter. Klein had returned to New York in the mid-1950s after several years in Europe, where he had moved in nineteen forty eight and studied painting with Fernand Legis, a central figure of modernist painting associated with Cubism. That formation matters because when Klein returns to photography, he does not approach it as a neutral recording tool, but brings with him a strong sense of form, compression, and pictorial force that continues to shape how the image meets us. Here, space does not recede gently into the background, and figures do not sit comfortably within perspective. Everything seems to gather forward, pressed toward the surface of the photograph, as if depth itself had been reduced in favor of contact. That sense of flattening, of bringing elements onto the same plane, echoes something of the pictorial logic of Cubism, where the image is no longer a window into space, but a surface activated by relationships between forms. Klein carries that into the street, and it becomes fully visible in the photographs he made in New York in the mid-fifties, many of which would appear in his 1956 book Life is Good and Good For You in New York, now recognized as a key work in the history of street photography. In those photos, and in this one, the camera does not wait for order. It advances. At the center of the frame, a young man faces forward. His expression is firm, concentrated, almost resistant. His light coat catches enough brightness to anchor him visually without isolating him from the crowd around him. To the left a man holds a cigar, while behind him another face appears only partially, emerging from the density, and to the right a figure in a dark coat and hat occupies the edge of the image, still within the pressure of the scene, but held slightly apart. Above them appears the word grace on a storefront sign, hovering above the crowd, detached from the bodies below and yet quietly binding the picture together. It does not explain anything, but it introduces a tension between what is written and what is seen, between language and presence, between signage and the physical fact of the street. Below the sign, the crowd is entirely male and entirely white, which is not incidental. It reflects the composition of the gathering at that moment, but also points towards something larger, about who occupies public space, who becomes visible within it, and under what conditions. At the same time, there is a generational layering in the photo, with younger men in the foreground, more direct in their stance, and older men behind them, their expressions more varied, sometimes more withdrawn, sometimes more observant, so that a structure begins to circulate quietly through posture, through gaze, through proximity. In the upper right corner an American flag enters the frame, not centrally, but unmistakably, and with it the scene opens slightly outward, linking this dense local moment to a broader national context. Still, what holds the photograph together is not symbolism, it is proximity. Klein is working with a wide angle lens, wider than the classic thirty five millimeter associated with much street photography. And that choice is decisive, because his lens pulls the foreground forward, compresses space, and reduces the distance between camera and subject. It is not simply a technical decision, but a position, a way of being in the scene, and this photograph could not exist without that closeness. This is where the picture begins to connect directly to walking, because what we are seeing is not simply a photograph of a crowd, but the result of moving within it. There is no fixed vantage point from which this image could have been made at such proximity. It requires a body navigating through other bodies, adjusting position, negotiating space, finding an opening, however brief, from which the photograph can occur. Walking here is not open or expansive, but negotiated, taking place within density, within contact, within the presence of others who are also moving, also occupying space, also pressing back. And Klein's photograph carries that condition within it. You can feel it in the way the frame holds together, in the way faces press forward, in the absence of any clear separation between the observer and those observed. Klein is not passing through the scene and selecting it from a distance. He is inside it, and this is one of the reasons the photograph feels so different from the more classical model of street photography often associated with Henri Cartier Bresson, and the idea of the decisive moment, that so brief alignment where everything in the frame comes into place at once. In Klein's photo, there is no single instant resolving into clarity, no formal alignment that stabilizes the scene. Instead, the picture accumulates, gathering multiple directions, multiple attentions, multiple gestures that do not neatly fit into one another, but remain in tension. Klein does not wait for the scene to become legible. He enters before that happens, and doing so, he also shifts the role of photography itself. Photography here is no longer a matter of framing the world from a position of separation, but becomes a way of entering it, of meeting it at close range, of accepting that the picture will emerge from contact rather than distance. The photograph is no longer a window, but a trace of an encounter, a record of being there within a situation that does not pause or arrange itself for the camera. And that shift changes the status of the picture itself, because it now follows movement and depends on it. And in that sense, even if William Klein's work appears very different from what we encountered in the previous episode with Hamish Fulton, there is still a connection worth holding on to. In Fulton, the walk precedes everything and remains the work itself, while here, with Klein, the image returns, but under a different condition, emerging from proximity, from movement, within the crowd, from a form of walking that is no longer solitary, but shared, constrained, and at times almost confrontational, a walk among others, a walk in which space is never yours alone. There is something in this photograph that resists distance even now, because you do not stand outside it comfortably. Your eye moves through it the way a body would, shifting from one face to another, searching for space, adjusting to density, never fully settling, so that the picture remains active as something that continues to unfold in perception. And with this photo, we see how William Klein does not extract an image from the world. He meets it at close range, without buffer, without distance, and the photograph does not settle what is happening but holds it, bringing us into another form of walking, not the solitary walk, but the walk among others, where space is shared, where distance collapses, and where the world presses back. You've been listening to Photography and Walking. I'm Philippe. You can find related images and references at photographyandwalking.com, and if you'd like to receive occasional notes connected to the episodes, you can leave your email through the contact page on the website. Thank you for listening and see you next time.