A purely visual experience, the publication explores just a fraction of the dynamic photograms made by William Klein in 1952 - his earliest darkroom experiments inspired by abstract architectural mural paintings that he made in 1951. First exhibited at the Salon des Réalités Nouvelles in Paris (1953), they prompted Vogue art director Alexander Liberman to hire Klein and facilitate his return to New York, where in 1954 he conceived his seminal first 'city' book of street photography, followed by Rome, Moscow and Tokyo. 

These early abstractions remained largely unknown until Klein's original 1952 book maquette was published as Black and Light in 2012 to coincide with his Tate Modern retrospective. They have since featured prominently in survey exhibitions at FOAM Museum of Photography, Amsterdam, 2013, the Abbatiale Saint-Ouen Rouen, 2016, C/O Berlin, 2017, the Espacio Fundación Telefónica Madrid, 2019 and most recently at the Fundacio Catalunya-La Pedrera, Barcelona, 2020.