From his earliest years, Mr. Klein said, he was attuned to seeing the world as a perpetual foreigner. He grew up in Depression-era Manhattan, a Jewish boy in a largely Irish neighborhood where he endured poverty and antisemitic bullying. Self-reliance and a quick eye for his surroundings were means to survival — and so was art. At 12, he began spending weekends roaming the Museum of Modern Art, where his own work would one day be displayed.

After military service, he settled in France in the late 1940s to study painting. But he was soon captivated by photography when he realized how playing with exposures could form, with endless possibilities, a new kind of abstract art. The vibrant blurs he created were a revelation, he said, of the mood he felt swirling around him and his vision of the world in general: its grit, its vibrancy, its gorgeousness, its grotesqueries.

He proudly distanced himself from any school or method as he came to prominence in the postwar years, favoring raw instinct over any established technique.

“I came from the outside, the rules of photography didn’t interest me,” he once said. “There were things you…