Exterior. Daylight. Two boys in a doorway. The older, 11 or 12, holds a revolver aimed at your left eye. He is snarling, ready to kill you. The younger, maybe 8, has the face of an angel. It is a grainy black-and-white photograph, staged circa 1954, titled "Gun 1, New York.”
Visual artist William Klein called it a self-portrait. He was both boys, he said. One grew up angry on the streets of New York and was capable of anything. The other, sensitive and intelligent, settled in Paris as a young man and devoted himself to one artistic pursuit after another.
Klein, who caught the wit and energy of great cities and satirized the world of fashion with his strikingly original photographs, and portrayed Muhammad Ali and Eldridge Cleaver as iconic rebels in his documentary films, died Sept. 10 in Paris. He was 96.