Brooklyn-born Louis Stettner (1922– 2016) first took up a camera as a teenager and went on to establish an extraordinary career that lasted almost eighty years. After photographing life on the streets of New York, he joined the famous Photo League, a cooperative of photographers who shared artistic and social ideals, and befriended celebrated lensmen including Sid Grossman and Weegee. During World War II, he served as a combat photographer, and the fight against fascism strengthened his belief in Marxism and the working class.
Living between New York and Paris, he amassed a huge body of work that combined elements of New York street photography with lyrical humanism in the French style. His subjects were many and varied: passengers on the subway and tourists in the streets, Spanish fishermen and American beatniks, protests and demonstrations, landscapes and trees. But no matter where he found himself, he looked for beauty in the everyday and never lost his fundamental compassion and solidarity with ordinary people.
This volume in the Photofile series brings together a selection of Stettner’s most important images from throughout his long and prolific career.
Reviews
An economical way to build a library of great photography. Each of the 50 books in the series focuses on a single photographer and features 60-plus pictures, an essay, a biography and a bibliography. The pictures are perfectly readable in spite of their small size; the selections are retrospective, so readers get bits of each artist’s entire career.
— William Meyers, The Wall Street Journal
A crisp ode to American photographer Louis Stettner [and] a worthy celebration of an important chronicler of 20th century city life.
— Publishers Weekly
Contributors
Virginie Chardin
Author
Virginie Chardin writes widely on photography and is the author of Elegance: The Seeberger Brothers and the Birth of Fashion Photography.
