Chance witness reveals. Life is Good & Good For You in New York changed the parameters of what a book of photographs could be, representing 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. Klein returned to New York. He didn't take the role with Vogue but spent eight taking photographs whilst rediscovering New York. 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. Six years later, Klein and his wife Janine appeared as 'men of the future' in Marker's seminal film La Jetée (1962), with Klein providing the English narration.

[With:] KLEIN, William. William Klein Prix Nadar 1957. [Paris], [no publisher], [1957].

Klein designed this scarce publication to commemorate the 1957 Prix Nadar prize, awarded to him for his book Life is Good & Good for You in New York Trance Witness Revels (1956). Klein had considered the possibility of including coloured acetate sheets such as those present here in the original book, but the publisher refused, probably for financial reasons. Therefore, this publication would appear to give the only indication of Klein's original intentions for his ground-breaking first book. Aside from a reproduction of the cover of the original caption booklet, the only text is an edited version of the caption for the photograph on p.22-23 in Life is Good & Good for You in New York, which also appears here.

First edition; 4to (276 x 204 mm, 10¾ x 8 in); black-and-white photographs printed in gravure by Roto-Sadag, Geneva; photo-illustrated endpapers, black cloth-covered boards, titles stamped in white on spine, colour illustrated dust-jacket, light wear, laminate lifting at spine with light rubbing and creasing to head, 16pp stapled leaflet of illustrated captions laid in as issued, oxidation to staples, fine in a near-fine dust-jacket; 189, [3]pp.

Regards à travers Le Livre 117; The Book of 101 Books pp140–2; The Photobook: A History I, p243; The Open Book pp164–5; Errata Editions: Books on Books 5; New York in Photobooks pp66–73.