“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.
After graduating from high school, Stettner enrolled in classes at the Photo League. But war was brewing in Europe. “At the age of 18, I became an artist-soldier,” he said. “[We] had to learn another trade—how to kill and avoid being killed.” In the barracks, he read in the evening. Sleeping, he had a recurring nightmare: while reading Plato in an Army hospital, the tent burned to the ground around him.
But the fight against Fascism—side by side with compatriots who were fishermen, industrial workers, storekeepers—gave him faith in humanity. In 1947, Stettner landed in Paris to study at the Institut des Hautes Études Cinématographiques under the G.I. Bill. He photographed the tired arrondissements at odd angles, evoking Giorgio de Chirico’s empty plazas, ghostly reminders of those who had perished. In 1950, Life magazine called Stettner its top new photographer. He would live in Paris on and off for the rest of his life.
In the late 1960s and early 70s, Stettner spent extended periods in New York City, shooting students protesting the Vietnam War. Later, the stoic, leather-clad members of the Black Panther Party welcomed him into their circle. He would tour factories in the United States, France, and England for the rest of the decade, photographing mill and line workers. He didn’t mean for his portraits to evoke pity or glory. Stettner saw a heroic beauty in the working class.
Earlier this year, Barcelona’s Fundación Mapfre exhibited 190 images spanning the entirety of Stettner’s career—from the early subway portraits to the tranquil, late-night shots of the French Alpilles mountains. The photographs from that show have now been collected into a dazzling new book.
“My way of life, my very being,” Stettner said, “is based on images capable of engraving themselves indelibly in our inner soul’s eye.” —Elena Clavarino
Elena Clavarino is a Senior Editor at AIR MAIL
