While living in Paris after World War II, he also found inspiration in a new wave of French photographers, including Robert Doisneau, Brassaï and Henri Cartier-Bresson, whose outlook seemed to dovetail with the league’s. He was particularly taken with Brassaï. “Brassaï showed me that it was possible to find something significant in photographing subjects in everyday life doing ordinary things by interpreting them in your own way and with your own personal vision,” Mr. Stettner told The Financial Times in June.
With an unerring eye for the poetry of the everyday, he trained his camera on subway riders and pedestrians in New York — the unceasing human ebb and flow in the old Penn Station — and ordinary Parisians going about their daily rounds, like the woman walking her dog on a deserted and misty Avenue de Chatillon in 1949. Always, his subjects seemed completely unaware they were being photographed, whether it was the chic woman reading, one elbow pointed outward, in “Elbowing Out of Town Newstand, NYC” (1954); the man leaning back on a bench in “Manhattan From the Brooklyn Promenade” (1954); or the immigrant father and his child, swaddled in blankets on the wind-whipped deck of a ship, in “Coming to America” (1951).
Louis Stettner was born on Nov. 7, 1922, in Brooklyn and grew up in the Flatbush and Bensonhurst neighborhoods. His father, Morris, gave him a box camera when he was a boy, and after reading an article by the photographer Paul Outerbridge Jr. on the camera as an interpreter of reality, Louis realized, he later wrote, “that the camera could become my personal language for telling people what I was discovering, suffering or immensely joyous about.”
He began studying photographs at the print room of the Metropolitan Museum of Art and observing, through the camera’s lens, the streets around him. New York was his subject, the place he described as “a city I love, a city that forgives nothing but accepts everyone — a place of a thousand varied moods and vistas, of countless faces in a moving crowd, each one silently talking to you.” At the Photo League, he took a short course on basic techniques and found a mentor in Sid Grossman, one of its founders, but he was largely self-taught, working initially with an old-fashioned wooden camera on a tripod, using glass plates. Until late in his career, he photographed almost exclusively in black and white. After graduating from Abraham Lincoln High School in Brooklyn, he enlisted in the Army Signal Corps during World War II and served with its photography section in New Guinea, the Philippines and Japan. Mr. Stettner joined the Photo League on returning to New York and became fast friends with the photographers Lewis Hine and Weegee.
A visit to Paris in 1946 turned into a stay of five years. While in Paris, he selected work for a New York exhibition by the Photo League that introduced American audiences to Brassaï, Doisneau and their French peers. He also studied photography at the Institute for Advanced Cinematographic Studies and exhibited his work in a group show in 1949 at the National Library. He returned to New York in 1951, the same year his work was shown at the influential exhibition “Subjective Photography” in Saarbrücken, Germany. He found a night job at a security company, prowling the streets during the day with his camera. To supplement his income, he also photographed for magazines and advertising agencies. He had his first solo show at the Limelight Gallery in Greenwich Village in 1954.
Mr. Stettner taught photography at Brooklyn College, Queens College and Cooper Union in the late 1960s and early ’70s and from 1973 to ’79 was a professor of art at the C. W. Post Center at Long Island University. In the 1970s he wrote a monthly column for the magazine Camera 35. In the 1980s he worked on a series of photographs documenting life on the Bowery, and toward the end of the decade embarked on two projects in New York and Paris, the “Manhattan Wall Series.” and the “Seine Series,” that captured snippets of the urban landscape defined by light and shadow. (SOURCE: New York Times Obituary, October 14, 2016)
