William Klein: Life is Good & Good for You in New York (2012)

William Klein’s Life is Good & Good for You in New York is regarded as one of the most influential and groundbreaking photo-books created in the last half-century. Published in 1956, its visual energy captured the rough-and-tumble streets of New York–a city Klein once described as “the world capital of anguish”–like no photo-book had done before or since. Robert Capa famously declared that if your photographs were no good it was because you were not close enough to your subject, and in Klein’s New York people press themselves up against the lens, dance around it, pull faces, pretend to shoot each other–a visual chaos which is rigorously organized by Klein’s “one American eye and one European eye,” as he once characterized his style. Books on Books 5 reproduces in its entirety Klein’s brilliantly photographed and designed magnum opus.