Memories. That's the thing about photography. I look at the contact sheet, and it brings back everything: whether I was tired, whether I was full of beans.
— William Klein
I grew up in Manhattan. For Manhattanites, Brooklyn was the sticks, a second-rate civilization. My friends and I, we were so snobby. Living in the Bronx or Brooklyn was incredible... for me, that was like a foreign country.
I discovered that I could do whatever I wanted with a negative in a darkroom and an enlarger.
I wasn't part of any movement. I was working alone, following my instinct.
My sister was brilliant: she was in the 25 top math students in the country. When she finished college, I said, 'Spend a couple of months here in Europe. You'll get another take on life.' She never came - married some schmuck who made clothes for fat women on Seventh Avenue.
When I made 'Polly Maggoo,' it was more or less the end of this collaboration with 'Vogue' because I made a caricature of the editor-in-chief and the fashion people, so they didn't really adore me.
In America, kids would go to college and get out and buy a second-hand car and go across the country and discover America. I never did that; I went from New York to Paris, and New York was my America.
You do things for yourself, and you do things for other people, and you hope that these things coincide.
In the late Fifties and early Sixties, I used to think that most of these fashion creators weren't that great, and if the photograph was good, it was mostly thanks to the photographer.
Don't have rules, taboos, or limits.
Leger was not only the first artist I ever met but also the first pop artist, and he blew our minds.
The best critics of America are Americans.
I had an experience that was kind of backward. Instead of thinking that photography was a step down, it brought me a step up, to transpose and modify things.
When I was a kid in New York, long before saturation sports coverage, the world heavyweight championship was, with the baseball World Series, the great national event.
I thought it would be a good idea to look at New York with this half-European, half-native eye and really do something to get back at this city that I thought really gave me a hard time when I grew up.
Fashion was more of a sideline for me. I did it for the money.
I like film. I'm old fashioned.
As a kid, I wanted to be part of the Lost Generation who came to France.
The digital camera takes photographs in practically no light: it will dig out the least bit of light available. I was amazed to see the results of photographs that I wouldn't take ordinarily. That's the advantage of digital photography.
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.
I'm an outsider, I guess.
My father was convinced that America was the greatest place in the world. I'm afraid I didn't have the family I would have dreamed of.
I was fascinated by the Black Panthers because I'd been in contact with the Nation of Islam, thanks to Muhammad Ali, and their way of talking was that the whites were the devil, and they'd get rid of them once they took over.
What's very funny is when you see amateurs filming something, they do some things no professionals would dare to do. They instinctively do things that are very avant-garde and useful.
I find it satisfying that what I've done in photography has had so much influence in how people take photographs and what they look at and how they look at things.
The English are very exotic to me.
I was a very clumsy Jewish kid.
I didn't really know who Cassius Clay was. I just wanted to show America through a heavyweight championship fight. Ever since my childhood, I'd been fascinated by the way the whole country becomes polarised around this event.
People didn't object to me taking their photo. It was something everybody thought was their due: to be King for a Day, win the lottery and be photographed.
The kinetic quality of New York, the kids, dirt, madness - I tried to find a photographic style that would come close to it. So I cropped, blurred, played with the negatives.
If I didn't have to earn a living somehow, I would never have taken a fashion photograph in my life.
I thought it would be good not to hide the fact that you're taking a photograph, and have people react and come in close and also make a commentary on what's being photographed: 'This is a photo, this is my point of view.'
For my first book, 'New York,' I had one camera and two lenses. It was fotografia povera.
I grew up in New York, in a rough neighborhood where our biggest concern was not getting beat up. I was always far from the center of the Big Apple.
My grandfather and his wife came to America at the end of the 19th century from Hungary. Everyone started out on the Lower East Side. They became embourgeoise and would move to the Upper West Side. Then, if they'd make money, they'd move to Park Avenue. Their kids would become artists and move down to the Lower East Side and the Village.
When you use film, you use accidents, but there aren't any accidents with digital photography. I don't mind that it's easy. But I do mind that there is a sort of consensus with the camera and the subject and the light, and you look at something, and you photograph it, and you get what you see.
Photography led me to experiment in graphic work and, actually, painting.
I had no real respect for good technique because I didn't know what it was. I was self-taught, so that stuff didn't matter to me.
I always dreamed of working in Paris, of going to the Coupole and slapping Picasso or Giacometti on the shoulder.
I was making a film on Muhammad Ali in 1964, and I went to Miami to film everything around the fight for the world championship with Sonny Liston. I had the good luck of flying down to Miami, and there was one empty seat, and the guy sitting next to this empty seat was Malcolm X.
I think that Damien Hirst putting a shark in a bath of formaldehyde is nothing.
I did a film on Muhammad Ali before he was champion. I was there when he became champion in 1964. I was happy to be able to document the development of a real American hero.
I like festivals of all kinds: in 1969, I made a film about the first Pan-African festival in Algiers, which celebrated the countries that had been liberated 10 years earlier. There was a tremendous feeling of kinship.
Most of the other soldiers were older than me and sent money back to their families, so they were more prudent.
My complaint is that Americans drive me crazy, and the politics drive me crazy.
This is supposed to be the Big Apple, with neighborhoods where the houses are all good-looking and the skyscrapers and everything. But to me, New York is kind of shoddy and uncomfortable.
If a film is a real knockout like 'Raging Bull,' it does not matter that it might not have happened like that.
I always thought I was going to be an artist. I used to draw, and I would read Russian novels until 3 or 4 in the morning.
I like dark humor. I think the world is very funny and tragic, and my photographs are basically dark Jewish humor.
In fashion, you have assistants, flashes; you can make sets. There are people running around doing things for you. But I can take it or leave it.
