William Klein: Life is Good & Good for You in New York: Books on Books No. 5

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.
Errata Editions' Books on Books series is an ongoing publishing project dedicated to making rare and out-of-print photography books accessible to students and photobook enthusiasts. These are not reprints or facsimiles but complete studies of the original books. Each volume in the series presents the entire content, page for page, of an original master bookwork which, up until now, has been too rare or expensive for most to experience. Through a mix of classic and contemporary titles, this series spans the breadth of photographic practice as it has appeared on the printed page and allows further study of the creation and meanings of these great works of art. Each volume in the series contains illustrations of every page in the original photobook, a new essay by an established writer on photography, production notes about the creation of the original edition and biographical and bibliographical information about each artist.