Le Petit Magot: William Klein’s Stories
"Beauty is order in an only apparent chaos."
I’m not sure why, but when I heard this phrase in a discussion among photographers and enthusiasts yesterday, my mind immediately went to *Le Petit Magot*, a famous photograph by William Klein. It was taken in Paris on November 11, 1968, during demonstrations commemorating the fiftieth anniversary of the Armistice.
For me, this photograph embodies Beauty and, at the same time, represents the beauty of Photography itself.
How chaotic can a street full of people attending a demonstration be? And yet Klein brings order to it. *Le Petit Magot* tells a story—or rather, many stories. The first is that of the event itself: a cold Monday in November, with Parisians gathering in the streets to watch the parade. I imagine myself standing among them, listening to De Gaulle’s commemorative speech about the need to keep alive the flame of French pride.
Klein organizes this scene, capturing multiple interconnected stories in a single frame—linking lives, glances, and gestures that meet and merge in one moment.
It’s not the "decisive moment" of Cartier-Bresson and the dogmas of classic street photography that Klein sought to break, but it is nonetheless a unique and unrepeatable moment, extraordinary in its seeming normality.
Another story emerges: in the foreground, on the left, a young couple waits somewhat impatiently for the parade to arrive. My first question is, "Where were these two six months earlier, during the uprising of May ’68?" Were they also out on the streets, building barricades and demanding that imagination take power? "Probably," I think—or perhaps they had distanced themselves from the Movement due to different political beliefs or sheer disinterest. Now, they are here, listening to De Gaulle and waiting for the troops to march by, looking bored, almost annoyed.
A second couple, slightly older, appears further back in the frame. They are caught in a moment of intimacy and conversation—both smoking. *Gauloises*, I like to imagine… perhaps because those were the cigarettes my father smoked. I picture myself as a child, fascinated by the sky-blue packet with the helmet emblem on it (I always thought it was Asterix’s helmet). Despite being nauseated by the strong smell of smoke, I was captivated by the sight of my father smoking—unwittingly transporting me to a country I had never known. By simply lighting a Gauloise, he opened up the world for me and shared its stories.
My gaze returns to the foreground, this time on the right. Next to the young couple, there is a man caught off guard as he meets the photographer’s eye. I imagine that, having noticed Klein’s camera, he wants to slip out of the frame. He tries to escape the rectangle of stories Klein is weaving in that fraction of a second, but he too becomes trapped in this orderly beauty. In doing so, he unknowingly grants me another story: around forty years old, short, solitary, dressed in a light overcoat, with thick arched eyebrows—he seems out of place, almost suspicious. A plainclothes officer of the Paris *Securité*?
On the third level of the image, I see other passersby, seemingly without role or direction, yet each perfectly positioned within the chaos. And then there’s *Le Petit Magot*, the Parisian bistro whose glass doors I can almost hear creak open, releasing the warm aroma of coffee. Groups of people perch on the building’s ledge, their eyes eagerly watching and waiting for something.
One of them, a woman dressed in dark clothes, has climbed over the low railing typical of Parisian balconies. It almost seems as if she might lose her footing and fall at any moment.
"It's dangerous," I think to myself.
William Klein was born New York in 1928. During his life, spent between Europe and the United States, he was a sculptor, painter, filmmaker, and photographer, always under the banner of anticoformism.
