William Klein
Pachinko Doorman, Tokyo

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Artist William Klein (French, born United States, 1926–2022)French, born United States, 1926–2022

CultureAmerican

Titles

Pachinko Doorman, Tokyo

Date1961, printed later

Place depictedTokyo, Japan

MediumGelatin silver print

DimensionsImage: 9 13/16 × 14 1/4 in. (24.9 × 36.2 cm)
Sheet: 11 7/8 × 15 7/8 in. (30.2 × 40.3 cm)

Credit LineMuseum purchase funded by Deborah Bay and Edgar Browning in honor of Anne Wilkes Tucker on the occasion of her retirement

Object number2015.247

Not on view

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Department

Photography

Object Type

PHOTOGRAPHS

DescriptionIn 1961, William Klein was invited to Tokyo, where his photographic books New York (1956) and Rome (1959) had already become cult classics for their graphic boldness and high-energy style that mixed documentation and personal diary. Over the course of three months, in more than a thousand photographs, Klein captured the congestion, chaos, and strange coexistence of traditional and contemporary culture that characterized Tokyo at the dawn of the turbulent 1960s. His off-kilter, out-of-focus, grainy images served as a bridge between Western street photography and post-World War II Japanese camerawork, giving license to a new generation of photographers, particularly those associated with the short-lived Provoke magazine (1968) such as Daidō Moriyama. Klein’s photograph of the doorman at a pachinko parlor—something like a pinball arcade—was included in his celebrated 1964 book Tokyo.
Provenance[Howard Greenberg Gallery, New York]; purchased by MFAH, 2015.
Inscriptions, Signatures and Marks

Title, date, and notations in graphite, with photographer’s stamp, verso:

Cataloguing data may change with further research.

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