William Klein Documentary Response

I really liked the photograph of the boy pointing the gun towards the camera because of how natural/un-staged it looked. While I believe that it was staged in at least the sense that Klein had the boy point the gun towards the camera (also, in the documentary they show the attempts at this photo that didn’t make it that sort of show different positions the boy was in), the boy’s face in this photo still very much looks like a boy playing with a gun, pretending to aim it at a target. This element of authenticity is definitely what makes Klein’s photos so revolutionary and also compelling. I’m sure that this was a very new idea back when Klein first started doing these types of photographs, but one can definitely still see the influence it has had in photography today and art in general (where being candid and raw emotions are very common—it’s almost as if it is its own aesthetic).

With that being said, I find street photography, especially that where people are the main subjects of the photos, can be very polarizing. On one hand, it can do some good by raising awareness of certain living conditions that have to be seen to be believed or simply raise awareness of a culture that is under-represented. Sometimes, the photographs simply just look cool. But at the same time, I feel like a lot of this photography is done with poor/oppressed people as the subjects (Klein went to Harlem to take many of his photos), and it is sometimes difficult to draw the line between showing people in a certain light through art (already a bit taboo) and exploiting people for the sake of art. Klein himself alluded to it a little in the documentary when he recalls people’s discomfort with having a white man walk through Harlem (a predominantly (poor) black neighborhood). While I think that Klein’s photography was done well and did not really exploit his subjects, I feel like it birthed a style of photography that has little regard for its subjects and is simply framing people a certain way for the sake of having a certain look.