The nine lives of photographer William Klein

As a photographer he is a rebel, as a filmmaker he's an equally contrarian activist. With his creative vision, William Klein has been colouring outside the lines for the past 60 years. His exposition '5 cities' opens this Thursday in Botanique. We sat down with the master who revolutionised our vision of photography, photobooks, and film.

William Klein makes me wait. I already finished my coffee, took a careful look at his record collection with mostly classical music, and admired the view of Parc du Luxembourg. But then I hear shuffling in the hall and the photographer and film maker enters his spacious but cluttered living room with his walker, wearingfaded jeans and a baggy jumper.

"How old are you," he asks, when I meet him in his Paris apartment. "Twenty-five, thirty?" I repeat "forty" three times, and Klein laconically responds: "Oh, that's old." He may be 88 and hard-of-hearing, but he still tells it like it is. After painfully falling into an armchair, he adds with a chuckle that it depends on the person whether forty is actually old.

William Klein, who was born in New York in 1928, has lived almost his entire life in Paris. After his military service during the Second World War, he received a grant from the American army to study art at the Sorbonne. When he was eighteen years old, Klein also met his future wife in the City of Light, the Belgian Jeanne Florin. "She was the most beautiful girl I ever saw," he says with twinkles in his eyes and a big smile, "The love of my life." She died in 2005. Her blue-toned paintings of people and animals decorate the free walls of Klein's living room and keep him company.

Bright lights, big cities
At the Sorbonne, William Klein was taught by the French painter, sculptor, and filmmaker Fernand Léger, who encouraged him to go further than painting and sculpture. He chose photography. His first steps did not go unnoticed. "I had a show of experimental abstract photography and Alexander Liberman, the art director of Vogue, contacted me afterwards. When I met him in his office he asked me if I would like to work for Vogue. He suggested that I become his assistant or that I do special projects for the magazine. Since I wasn't making any money at the time, I decided to accept. When I came to New York, Liberman asked me what kind of project I had in mind. I told him that I had been living in Paris, that I knew what it was like to live in another country and another culture, and that given what I had learned, I would like to look at New York in a different way. He suggested I do a portfolio on the subject, but I told him I would prefer to do a book. I'd never done a book but Liberman agreed and financed it. So Vogue actually funded my first serious work." [Laughs]

"You know what's funny? At the time, there were two guys in New York, one of them was Alexander Liberman, the other one was Alexey Brodovitch. They were two Jewish designers and graphic artists who left Moscow during the Russian Revolution, travelled to Berlin and Paris, and then ended up in New York working for Vogue and Harper's Bazaar. The work they did in the magazines: the lay-outs, the topography, the concept was very special. With their knowledge of the avant-garde, those two Jewish refugees influenced publications for generations in America." [Laughs]

Life is Good & Good for You in New York (1956), the first book that he made for Vogue, made Klein an immediate cult figure. The raw, grainy, grungy black-and-white photography perfectly reflected the energy, the hustle and bustle of modern urban life. "Urban life is something that excites me. I always felt at home in cities, all cities." Throughout the 1960s, he made books about Rome, Moscow, and Tokyo – places that, together with New York and Paris, make up the "5 Cities" of his exhibition at the Botanique.

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He also did fashion shoots for Vogue in his own unique style. He took the models outside, made them run around in the city, or take the bus or a taxi. City residents often featured as extras in his tableaux. He experimented with telephoto lenses, wide angles, flashes, mirrors, colour, and black and white. He constantly pushed the boundaries of his visual language, not only with respect to form but also content.

But America struggled with the Vogue photographer. His book on New York depicted a drabness and realness that people didn't want to see. Many of the photos that appeared in the European Vogue did not make it into the American edition. Too controversial. But the aversion was mutual and it still runs deep. Paris is fabulous and life in New York is incredibly hard. During the crisis in the 1930s, Klein's father, a tailor, lost everything. The Jewish immigrant family was forced to live in a dump on the West Side, not far from Harlem. Klein: "The story of my father reads more or less like Death of a Salesman. He was a guy who thought New York was the centre of the world. When I moved to Paris, I realised there is another way to live in a city. I figured out that the city I was born in was actually not a good place for people like my father who had very little education and no contacts to help him. Life was hard for him. When I looked around the subway in Paris I saw as much of a melting pot as in New York. In Paris you have Africans, Vietnamese, Chinese, you name it. I discovered that this idea that New York is the melting pot was simply not true."

Tell it like it is
William Klein, always looking for something new, shot his first film in 1966: a fictional satire of the fashion industry, Who Are You, Polly Maggoo? "Did you know the film was almost voted best film of the year by Belgian critics? I remember filmmaker André Delvaux wrote a good article about it. We became friends. There are interesting things happening in Belgium. You guys have Magritte and good food. I love a pistolet aux crevettes for breakfast." [Laughs]

Klein later made numerous short and feature-length documentaries, about Muhammad Ali, Little Richard, and the Black Panthers, for example. Far from Vietnam, a documentary about an anti-war rally in New York cost him his job at Vogue, but Klein continued to openly criticise American society and its foreign policy. "The elections in America prove that America is not a democratic country. It's a scandal. After Obama, America is taking a step backwards. Having a man like Trump become president is crazy. This is a tremendous fuck-up. He claims that all our problems come from Mexico, from China. A billionaire who didn't pay his taxes is giving America a lesson on how to live and to see the world. But you know the institutions in America are pretty solid. When Reagan was elected president, I thought it was the end of the world but it wasn't. Life continued as it was before. It would have been better to have an intelligent liberal president, but unfortunately that didn't work out because the public is really stupid. People want and need a demagogue and now they've got one. I think it's bad but it's not a tragedy. We'll see what happens."

Klein has never shied away from expressing his blunt and honest opinion. When he talks about his own work, though, he is much less vocal. Klein: "What's so special about me? You know my photographs, you know my films. Why do you ask? I don't have an agenda. I don't have any contact or relationships with the people I photograph. I photograph what I see and what I feel." When I say he is a pioneer and an innovator, and that I am looking forward to his exhibition at the Botanique because a Klein exhibition is more than a retrospective, but a real show with big formats, blown-up and painted contact prints, and film fragments, he simply shrugsand says: "I just like big formats."

On the other hand, when I mention his vinyl collection and ask about his favourite music, his eyes light up. "I listen to everything: classical, pop, but also jazz. Do you like jazz?" "Yes, Mr Klein, I love jazz." He laughs and gives me a firm handshake. "Sorry, I can't get up," he says when I leave, "My body plays tricks on me. I've got a bad foot and knee. Just don't forget to close the door behind you."

> William Klein. 5 cities. 15/12 > 05/02, Botanique, Sint-Joost-ten-Node