High heels and low lives

Good Americans, they say, go to Paris when they die; for most of the 20th century, many of the best chose not to wait that long. In 1948, 20-year-old New Yorker William Klein showed up to study with the artist Fernand Léger on the GI Bill; he met a beautiful girl, Jeanne Florin, on his second day, married her and has been there ever since, photographing, painting and making films. An exhibition,

In 1956, Klein went back to New York, at the invitation of the US Vogue art director Alexander Liberman, who offered him a free rein to photograph his hometown. 'The kinetic quality of New York, the kids, dirt, madness: I tried to find a photographic style that would come close to it,' says Klein. 'So I cropped, blurred, played with the negatives.' He worked crazily, printing 50 photos a night and washing them in his bathtub; he claimed he imagined his pictures lying in the gutter like the New York Daily News. Unsurprisingly, the results weren't very Vogue.

Klein had grown up the son of poor Hungarian immigrants, a Jew in an Irish neighbourhood; he had been away for eight years (he had been drafted as a horseback radio operator shortly after the end of the Second World War, and sent to Germany, then France, where he won his first camera in a soldiers' poker game). He thought the Big Apple was pretty rotten, and his reckless, funky photographs showed that. 'The editor's reaction was: "These aren't photos, these are shit! You show New York as a slum!" I said: "Well, New York is a slum!" ' Which was hardly the image of post-war prosperity Eisenhower's America was trying to promote. The magazine rejected them, as did every American publisher. Klein's book, with its tongue-in-cheek title Life is Good and Good For You in New York: Trance Witness Revels, came out in Paris, two years before Robert Frank had the same experience with his mould-breaking book The Americans. Extraordinarily, Klein's New York book, a jazz album on paper if ever there was one, didn't find an American publisher until 1995.

Still, Vogue stuck with him: his attitude was bad but his pictures were marvellous. His images are like miniature dramas whose characters happen to be well-dressed. He used wide-angle lenses and shot from far away. In Rome, he photographed the models from a rooftop, which caused problems when various male pedestrians assumed that the well-dressed, pretty women loitering on the street must be high-end hookers.

Periodically, Klein would abandon fashion photography to concentrate on film. Orson Welles called his first short, 1958's Broadway by Light, 'the first film I've ever seen in which colour was absolutely necessary', and Klein parlayed that praise into a collaboration with Louis Malle on the crazy New Wave movie Zazie Dans Le Métro, about a young girl exploring Paris on her own, and an assistant-directing job with Fellini, finding and photographing the pimps and prostitutes who had cameos in his Nights of Cabiria. Klein's own films are inventive low-budget productions: his 1966 fashion industry satire, Who Are You, Polly Maggoo?, is one of director Pedro Almodovar's favourites, and there is still a suitably grubby bar in Paris called Polly Maggoo's, with the original posters on the walls.

In 1964, Klein wanted to make a documentary about a young black boxer, because the politics interested him. 'Here were these guys who were a slice of the power structure of the South, who had bought this kid like an investment, like a racehorse,' Klein said. He didn't think much of the guy as a boxer, and he was no charmer either, calling Klein 'England' because the film-maker came from Europe and that was the only bit of the continent he knew. But the kid's name was Cassius Clay, until he changed it to Muhammad Ali, and one fight later, Klein had a heavyweight champion of the world on film. As if that weren't enough for one documentary, he caught the same plane to the fight as Malcolm X. Nobody wanted to sit next to the activist because they were all terrified of him, but Klein had no such hang-ups; the result is Malcolm X, on film, talking about the impact it will have on race relations if Clay wins. Within a year, Malcolm X was dead.

Klein made a precursor of a reality TV show, The Model Couple, in 1977, about a couple tracked 24/7 in a national experiment; film critic Jonathan Rosenbaum called his Mr Freedom, a 1968 poke at America's role as global policeman, conceivably the most anti-American movie ever made. His last film, a mere decade ago, was a version of Handel's Messiah featuring police choirs and drug addicts' choirs and only failing to incorporate a Mafia dons' choir because Klein couldn't find one.

Klein, now 82, still paints, throwing cyanide, Wite-Out, milk or tea on his own photographic collages. He considers most photographers' approach to Paris dishonest. 'You never see a black or Chinese person, or an Algerian. It's really a racist view of Paris,' he maintains, and he combated this with a 2002 book, Paris + Klein, that shows his adopted city in Technicolor: voluptuous women in Turkish baths, Africans protesting, Chinese New Year celebrations. When his New York book finally got the acknowledgement it deserved, with a show at San Francisco's Museum of Modern Art in 1995, he drove the curators to distraction dictating every detail, until the staff were afraid to read his faxes.

Still, if immense age and a worldwide reputation don't entitle you to be dictatorial, what does? Klein still lives in Paris, in an apartment overlooking the Jardin du Luxembourg, where the composer Francis Poulenc was once a neighbour. Florin, with whom Klein had a son, Pierre, and who he called 'the most beautiful woman in the world', died in 2005. Klein is still handsome in his jeans and bandana. These days he takes few photographs. 'People are obsessed by the image now,' he remarks, without specifying whether he feels that constitutes progress. Maybe it is just that the world has finally caught up with William Klein.

Threads: Six Masters of Fashion Photography is at Diemar/Noble Photography, Wells Street, W1, until 10 July