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Klein also took to plunging in among crowds to shoot point blank, so that faces meet the lens with mostly tentative expressions. As Manet had done a century earlier in his paintings, Klein recognized in the suspended gaze one of the chief signifiers of the modern temper. But judged by the canons of good photography, those pictures looked fumbled, invertebrate. Klein's anarchic strengths went unappreciated by eyes looking for nice tonal gradations and the standard ironies. Where were the compositional ligaments that held even the airiest Andre Kertesz photo in an iron fist? Where was the fine printing? For that matter, where was the subject?
Even so, in the later 1950s and early '60s, Klein won a following among younger photographers, and his books devoted to Rome, Tokyo and Moscow all were published in the U.S. The vastly popular "Family of Man" photo show at New York's Museum of Modern Art in 1955 had set the authorized tone for treating global humanity, a tone that to some photographers seemed cloying and official. In the anxieties and feral pleasures that link the Tokyo doorman to the Roman on his Vespa, Klein found his own underpinnings of human affairs. He offered intimacy without violins, civic life without trumpets, humanism with a human face.
Even in Moscow, Klein took pictures free of cold war cliches or internationalist pieties. Though with less success than in his New York work, he got his Russians unabashed, not least in Bikini, his 1959 picture of a young woman dishing out elan vital while her elders deflate behind her. Even | Muscovites have brass, Klein seems to be saying. Even Communism has its bikinis. Though his pictures were once scorned as too subjective, they look now among the least predisposed, the most inquiring and inclusive. Klein has been known to call his camera variously a weapon, a mask, a disguise. None of those terms do justice to his real genius in handling a camera. He uses it as a question mark.