Author: nakedcitiesjournal

Naked Cities Journal attempts to bring together a number of passions that have captivated me over a lifetime: a love of exploring the urban landscape and its extraordinarily diverse range of places and spaces; a love of journeys both internal and external; a love of keeping writer’s notebooks; and a love of Urban Studies an intellectual discipline – Marcus D. Niski
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Paul Auster — The Vale of Soul-Making

Impossible, I realize, to enter another’s solitude. If it is true that we can ever come to know another human being, even to a small degree, it is only to the extent that he is willing to make himself known. A man will say: I am cold. Or else he will say nothing, and we will see him shivering. Either way, we will know that he is cold. But what of the man who says nothing and does not shiver? Where all is tractable, where all is hermetic and evasive, one can do no more than observe. But whether one can make sense of what he observes is another matter entirely. 

— Paul Auster, The Invention of Solitude. (Sun Publishing 1982)

Paul Auster — The Vale of Soul-Making

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The Picture is The Title – by wallyRe

wallyRe is an Austrian sound artist, poet and photographer. This poem – the third part of a triptych – pays homage to the works of the Dada and Surrealist poets as well as the technique of chance operations as articulated by artists such as John Cage. More about wally Re can be found at her website: wallyre.net  

Image & Poem Text © wallyRe 2021

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Legendary Street Photographers – William Klein

by Marcus D. Niski

William Klein is a legendary American Fashion and Street Photographer based in Paris who is regarded amongst the great pioneers of genre of the Street Photography.

Renowned for his framing and exceptional compositions, his empathy with his subjects, and his up-close approach to photographing subjects on the street, Klein’s career has spanned throughout the ’50s to the present day, including stints as a Vogue fashion photographer. His extraordinary signature fashion work often incorporated his models amongst busy and sometimes chaotic street scenes that included locational shoots in New York, Paris and Rome.

Kleins’ provocative approach and his exceptional natural rapport with his models lead to the creation of iconic images that challenged the conventional boundaries of photography at the time and introduced new techniques into the field including the use of telephoto lenses to capture his subjects from a distance so as to create a more free and ‘anonymous’ effect in his style of composition.

In October 2012, The Tate Modern presented an important retrospective dedicated to both William Klein and Daido Moriyama that featured Klein’s re-interpretations of his own work in the form of hand-painted overlays of some of his iconic contact sheet images that were scaled-up to large and very striking wall-mounted images.

The film below captures Klein’s charming and fiercely iconoclastic personality at interview with a fellow legend in the form of documentary film maker Alan Yentob, known for his groundbreaking early BBC portrait of David Bowie entitled Cracked Actor.

The Many Lives of William Klein – Alan Yentob

Marcus D. Niski, July 2021