The Young Generation on Klein

Mat Jacob: "He’s a cult photographer, it was him who made me want to make pictures, to get right into it. I love his purity and frankness, he got straight to the point in his work. He never stopped working on the idea of the Henry Cartier-Bresson’s ’moment’. He pushed the boundaries with his books. I was also fascinated by his grain and subject matter, the power of the poetry and voice of his images, which were at once joyful and sad, every single one contained a great deal of feeling. In New York, he found his ideal subject. The anti-Klein is the shy Robert Frank. They were looking at the same things at the same time, but did it very differently."

Bertrand Meunier: "For me, first and foremost, Klein is a book: ’New York’, a monumental book, the hard slap of modernity. He remains relevant because of his form, his graphical ability, and his perturbing model, an avant-garde model. The photos come right out of the page at you, densely contrasting full-page images, his use of the wide lense to get right inside an image leave me full of admiration even today. New York and The Americans (by Robert Frank) are two books which revolutionised the photographic landscape of the 1950s.»