Louis Stettner

A major new monograph on the American photographer Louis Stettner (1922–2016), published to accompany the largest retrospective on his work to date.

Brooklyn-born Louis Stettner (1922–2016) created thousands of images over the course of a career that spanned almost eighty years. Acquiring his first camera as a young teenager, he quickly made a name for himself at New York’s famous Photo League, where he formed friendships with Sid Grossman and Weegee. He served as a combat photographer in World War II, and the experience of fighting fascism left him with a lasting belief in the fundamental humanity of the common man. After the war, Stettner arrived in Paris in 1947, where he stayed for five years. During this time, he forged a lasting relationship with Brassaï, the city and its people.

Stettner’s work defies categorization, containing elements of both the New York street photography aesthetic and the lyrical humanism of the French tradition. A lifelong Marxist, Stettner celebrated the working class and was inspired by his reading of Walt Whitman and the inner humanity that constantly drew him to the lives of ordinary men and women. For all its diversity, however, Stettner’s work is thematically consistent: he sought out beauty in common people and their everyday life.

Accompanying the largest retrospective on Stettner’s work to date, this substantial monograph at last gives his work the recognition it deserves. Essays by David Campany, James Iffland, Karl Orend and Sally Martin Katz chart Stettner's work chronologically from his early days in New York and Paris, through to his later use of colour photography, to his final meditations on the landscape of Les Alpilles. Showcasing more than 150 photographs spanning his entire career, the book also includes previously unpublished images and some of his hitherto almost unknown colour work, as well as a selection of Stettner’s writings.

Texts © The authors

Photographs © Louis Stettner / Louis Stettner Estate