London: Photography Magazine, 1956. First edition. Hardcover, [192]pp., 11.25 x 9 inches.

Near Fine, slight wear to extremities of boards, subtle fading to base of spine. Very Good dust jacket with some chips along top edge and spine, faint crease along front flap. Booklet in Near Fine condition laid in.

William Klein's attempt to capture the kinetic quality of 1950s New York. After serving in the army towards the end of the Second World War, Klein moved to Paris in 1949 on the G.I. Bill and spent six years living there after studying painting, including a brief time with Fernand Léger. In 1954, Alexander Lieberman invited him back to New York to join the Vogue art department as a design assistant.

Rejecting traditional ideas of sharpness, brightness, and composition, Klein experimented with the layout using the Vogue darkrooms and Photostat, which allowed him to try many ideas, such as cutting, pasting, and playing with scale and sequencing, quickly and easily. Neither Vogue nor any American publisher was interested in these photographs. Klein returned to Paris, where he showed them to Chris Marker, then an editor at Éditions du Seuil. The publication of Life is Good & Good For You In New York was the first of several collaborations with Chris Marker. 188 B&W photogravures. 

Text in English and French.