After New York (1956) and Rome (1959), Moscow became the third city to which William Klein dedicated a city portrait. At the time, I wanted to make a book on Moscow, and, as an American during the Cold War, I thought I'd encounter some problems. I was wrong, I never ran into any trouble. People were not used to seeing someone with a camera walking amongst them, the photographer recalls. His photographs in the then capital of the USSR show his radical spontaneity, his preference for unusual cropping and composition, deliberate blurring and interactions with the subjects. In the present scene, taken in the Gorky Park amusement park on the right bank of the Moskva River, the shimmering light falling through the trees heightens the effect of his artifice. Klein's wide-angle lens allows the spectators at the edges of the picture to perform as unsuspecting protagonists; only the uniformed man in the centre looks into the camera.
