William Klein, a photographer who captured the energy as well as the glamour of New York, died Sept. 10, in Paris. He was 96.

Mr. Klein was one of his generation’s most celebrated photographers, represented in museums across Europe and the United States. Mr. Klein began his career as a restless postwar American in Paris, who took a studio on the Left Bank, defied traditions and plunged into his anarchic visions of painting, sculpture, street and fashion photography, feature films and documentaries

He painted whirling murals and sculptured shapes that moved. His photos looked like accidents. He overexposed negatives, bleached out contrasts, and posed subjects to fake illusions of spontaneity. “Klein broke half the rules of photography and ignored the other half,” Jim Lewis wrote in Slate magazine in 2003.