69 Quotes by William Klein

I have always loved the amateur side of photography, automatic photographs, accidental photographs with uncentered compositions, heads cut off, whatever. I incite people to make their self-portraits. I see myself as their walking photo booth.

Anybody who pretends to be objective isn’t realistic.

I came from the outside, the rules of photography didn’t interest me...

Be yourself. I much prefer seeing something, even it is clumsy, that doesn’t look like somebody else’s work.

I was a make believe ethnographer: treating New Yorkers like an explorer would treat Zulus – searching for the rawest snapshot, the zero degree of photography.

What would please me most is to make photographs as incomprehensible as life.

I thought New York had it coming, that it needed a kick in the balls. When I returned to New York, I wanted to get even. Now I had a weapon, photography.

As a kid, I wanted to be part of the Lost Generation who came to France.

I'm known for fashion photographs, but fashion photographs were mostly a joke for me. In 'Vogue,' girls were playing at being duchesses, but they were actually from Flatbush, Brooklyn. They would play duchesses, and I would play Cecil Beaton.