HackelBury, London, presents a major retrospective of William Klein opening in September 2026 to mark the centenary of the artist’s birth.
The exhibition offers one of the most comprehensive presentations of William Klein’s work in London in recent years, bringing together celebrated street photography, fashion imagery, portraits, early abstract works and later painted contact sheets to trace his radical reinvention of photography and enduring influence on post-war visual culture.
Klein came to photography almost by chance, initially studying painting under Fernand Léger in Paris – an experience which profoundly influenced his visual language and experimental approach to image-making. His early geometric abstractions reveal a foundational interest in light, form, movement and graphic composition which would later define both his photography and filmmaking.
Working for Vogue from the mid-1950s to the mid-1960s, Klein revolutionised fashion photography by taking models out of the studio and into the street, introducing a raw immediacy and spontaneity that broke with the conventions of the time.