Louis Stettner (Photofile)

The perfect primer on American photographer Louis Stettner.

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 and befriended Sid Grossman and Weegee. In the Second World War he served as a combat photographer, and the fight against fascism strengthened his faith 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.

About the Author

Virginie Chardin writes widely on photography and is the author of Elegance: The Seeberger Brothers and the Birth of Fashion Photography.