Photograph by William Klein / Courtesy Howard Greenberg Gallery

“I saw the book as a tabloid gone berserk,” William Klein wrote of “Life Is Good and Good for You in New York,” a collection of his street photographs, which became a sensation when it was published, in France, in 1956. (It was too unconventional for any American publisher to touch.) Now it’s the centerpiece of “William Klein: YES,” a knockout retrospective at the International Center of Photography, on view through Sept. 12. Klein, now ninety-four and living in Paris, went on to create other iconic city-focussed photo books, on Rome (1959), Moscow (1964), and Tokyo (1964), each of which gets its own gallery here. But the views of New York steal the show. Klein’s best pictures are cinematic character studies, with every face and every figure singular, animated, and vividly present for his camera—a gaggle of kids with baseball cards and bubble blowers, a sidewalk full of distracted businessmen, a dapper young man sprinting through Harlem. The accumulated effect is terrific, if relentless and a little overwhelming. A corridor devoted to his fashion work provides something of a diversion. Klein had no use for the conventions of fashion photography, but he had a fine time undermining and spoofing them—teasing the artificiality of a pose or a setup, as seen in “Evelyn and Nina and Isabella and Mirrors” (above), taken for Vogue in 1959, in which a clutch of models appears on a rooftop in the company of their reflections.