HIS KIND OF TOWN.(Brief Article)(Illustration)

Some folks have all the luck. If you're a writer, though, or a movie director, or the sharpest kind of photographer, you can make the luck happen, and transform your art into news. As "Minority Report" came out, issues of incrimination--how and why you should detain a man because you don't like the look of his mind--were all over the press, and the happy coincidence turned Steven Spielberg into a seer. And so it is with William Klein. On April 16th, le tout Paris--or, at any rate, that portion of it that gets to muscle into private openings--thronged the Maison Europeenne de la Photographie, in the Fourth Arrondissement. People stared at walls that clamored with images, and the images stared right back. The exhibit was called "Paris + Klein," a retrospective covering three floors and more than thirty years, and it was accompanied by a hefty, caustic book of the same name. Here is your city, Klein was saying: a place that all of you recognize, that some of you claim as your own, and that others don't want to know about. If you can't take the heat, get out of the gallery.

Klein's attitude has always been infectious, as in his pump-up-the-volume shots of New York in the fifties, but this new show was something else: a picaresque with the bite of a polemic. Then, five days after the opening night, its tune changed into a battle cry. In the first round of the French Presidential elections, on April 21st, the far right, in the unsavory person of Jean-Marie Le Pen, came in second, vaporizing the challenge of the Socialist Prime Minister, Lionel Jospin. The youth of Paris, aghast at the rise of political extremity--and ashamed, perhaps, that more had not been done at the ballot box to quell its growth--took to the streets. Heaven knows how many times, during the past two centuries, the capital has witnessed such venting of fear and complaint, but on this occasion an artist--and an American to boot--had got there first. Those who inspected "Paris + Klein" could beat a path to the Place de la Bastille, a few hundred yards away, where the ranks were massing, and see for themselves that Paris had become one big Klein.

The photographs displayed on the following pages are a small selection of close encounters between the riot of urban living and the click of a Leica, no louder than a kiss on the cheek. Before the April elections, few Americans--even Francophiles on regular trips--would have had the chance to grasp the sprawl and rancor of racial politics in Paris. Photography, it must be said, has played its part in applying the blinkers; when a first-time tourist, fed on the genius of Doisneau and Cartier-Bresson, arrives in town, all that he or she will see--or want to see--is pairs of ...