Alan Kleinberg was born in the Bronx in 1942, the son of a Jewish comedian. His interest in photography began as a teenager, when one of his friends bought a Leica camera. “It looked like the greatest thing I ever saw in my life,” Kleinberg remembered. After graduating from high school, Kleinberg trained as a hairdresser in Scarsdale, New York. In 1964, he joined the hair-and-makeup crew of the Broadway touring production of Camelot. When he returned to New York, newly married and broke, he walked into the Manhattan salon of Kenneth Battelle and asked for a job. At Kenneth Salon, whose high-profile clients included Jackie Kennedy and Nancy Sinatra, Kleinberg got his first taste of New York society. He bought his own camera and began photographing street life after his shift. 

Through Kenneth, Kleinberg was hired as a studio hairdresser for Glamour, Mademoiselle, Vogue, The New York Times, New York Magazine and Theater. Working with notable photographers such as Richard Avedon, Irving Penn and Saul Leiter, he learned how to handle a camera and develop his own film. He credits Leiter in particular, along with Louis Faurer, with influencing his approach to photography and his interest in human subjects. 

In the early 1970s, Kleinberg left Kenneth to pursue photography full-time. Behind the camera, he shot fashion spreads for The New York Times Magazine, Mademoiselle, New York Magazine, Details and the original Interview. He also photographed the installation and opening of Avedon’s 1978 retrospective at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Kleinberg’s ties to the fashion world and his expanding circle of friends gave him access to New York’s celebrity nightlife and the downtown scene in hangouts like The Mudd Club, Max’s Kansas City and Studio54. On black-and-white film, he captured the intersecting social worlds of Andy Warhol, Bianca Jagger, Gerard Malanga, Cheryl Tiegs, Lauren Hutton, Kathryn Bigelow, David Hockney, Julian Schnabel, Diana Vreeland, Karl Lagerfeld and others. 

His work as a photographer gave him the opportunity to produce music videos and films. In 1984, he partnered with Academy Award-winning director Zbigniew Rybczynski to produce two short experimental videos for NBC’s The New Show. Rybczynski and Kleinberg also produced music videos for Grandmaster Flash, Chuck Mangione and Rickie Lee Jones. Their 1984 video for The Art of Noise single “Close (to the Edit)” won MTV Video Music Awards for Most Experimental Video and Best Editing. Kleinberg’s work with Rybczynski got him noticed by Jim Jarmusch, who hired him to produce the motion picture Down By Law. The film won multiple Best Foreign Film awards and opened as the feature film during the 1986 New York Film Festival. During this period, Kleinberg also produced music videos for Paul Simon and Talking Heads, including the 1988 Grammy-nominated Storytelling Giant, a compilation of Talking Heads’ music videos. Later, Kleinberg served as touring photographer for Simon and Garfunkel’s 1994 world reunion tour. 

Kleinberg’s work is archived with the Richard Avedon Foundation and other private collections. In 2014 he had his first solo exhibition of photographs from the lates 1970s that focused on artists, writers and musicians of the downtown NYC art scene. Most of his career he lived in the Gramercy Park neighborhood until his passing April 26, 2020.