“I am,” Louis Stettner once said of himself, “the world’s best-known unknown photographer.” While the names of his contemporaries roll off the tongue—Henri Cartier-Bresson, Dorothea Lange, Walker Evans—Stettner’s work, since his death, in 2016, has been discussion material in academia’s dusty halls. But make no mistake—his career was illustrious.
Stettner was born in 1922, in Brooklyn, to a family of Ukrainian immigrants. His father was a cabinetmaker, and Stettner learned cabinetry, too, so he could earn money to buy his first handheld camera—a Kodak Brownie. After school, camera in tow, he took the subway to the Metropolitan Museum, where he pored over work by the era’s greats: Alfred Stieglitz, Paul Strand, and Clarence H. White.
