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The Face in the Crowd


“The face is a picture of the mind with the eyes as its interpreter.” 



I came across the work of the photographer William Klein the other week after watching the BBC Imagine programme charting the life of  the 80 year old iconic photographer

 

Klein's early work captures the gritty street life of New York in the 1950s. Here there's something so very unique about his photography of crowds, street life, people, faces in the crowd. Where most photographers are voyeurs, standing back to capture a moment in time, Klein is altogether different: He goes forward, advances into the crowd with his camera, to produce raw, explosive, intense, yet intimate results; where the subjects faces are laid bare for us to interpret.

Sometimes I can get totally lost in a photograph of faces. Who are these people, I ask myself,  Where are they now? What were they doing? what pained them, what pleased them, what was going on in their minds that unique day when Kleins camera captured their vulnerability, I wonder.

Theres an exibition on at the London Tate Modern till early January exhibiting Kleins work. I must pop along and show my face there.

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