His are some of the iconic images of the 20th century, but Louis Stettner (Brooklyn, 1922-Paris, 2016) is one of the great masters of photography that is most unknown to the public. A photographer who worked between New York and Paris, where he would end up settling. A Marxist who lived through the Great Depression, who at the age of 18 enlisted in the army as a war photographer in the Pacific, who opposed the Vietnam massacre and supported the Black Panthers and who always carried with him, like his bible, a copy of Walt Whitman’s collection of poems Leaves of Grass.
A giant with whom he shared the belief that it was possible to find the beauty of the world in ordinary people and the everyday: “Whitman’s faith in his fellow men, his understanding of the full cycle of life and death, and his worldview have been contagious to me,” he said. And he added that he “celebrates men and women and is not afraid, perhaps one of the reasons why I have never stopped photographing in the streets, wherever there are human beings.”
“He went to war and the experience of the fight against fascism convinced him that the common, ordinary man is heroic”, emphasizes Sally Martin, curator of the exhibition on Stettner that until August 27 presents the Mapfre Foundation in Madrid, the first in Spain and the largest carried out on the photographer to date, with 190 photographs. Which show that Stettner would photograph ordinary people all his life. “He explored many styles and themes, but there is a common thread, he finds beauty in ordinary people, there is admiration for the ordinary man, an ode to humanity,” says Martin.
A look that has a peak moment in the exhibition with the images he took in the 1950s in the train carriages at Penn Station: each snapshot seems like a frame from a film, a vital plot stopped and condensed in an instant, charged, alive and that the viewer would like to see in its entirety.
Unlike the series on the New York subway in 1946, in which he took the photos from the inside and disguised, pretending to adjust his Rolleiflex, in the series on Penn Station in 1958 he portrayed the passengers from the outside of the carriages. Through the windows, she captures groups of men in suits and hats reading the news in huge broadsheet newspapers. Others play cards. There are passengers who have freed themselves from their shoes and rest their legs on the walls of the train. There are women who look pensive and others who dream while her white-gloved hand lightly props up her cheek. And lone marines staring as far away as a septuagenarian who seems the only one who can still think while everyone in the car seems to have something to do or read. Even in the most frequented places Stettner manages to reflect the personality of the individuals.
They gave him a camera at the age of 13 and at the Metropolitan he began to appreciate the images of the names that made photography an art, such as Alfred Stieglitz or Paul Strand. He would end up in Stieglitz’s circle and in the Photo League, the New York collective of photographers who combined art and politics and promoted photography as a social complaint. There he would become friends with Weegee and in Paris, where he would arrive in 1947 for a film course of a few weeks but would stay for five years, from Brassaï. A Paris from which he takes melancholic images at dawn of an empty capital that has just freed itself from the Nazis. There Cartier-Bresson would impact him.
He would travel around Spain, photographing children in the squares and people strolling in Torremolinos and Malaga. And in 1956 she would accompany two Ibizan fishermen, Pepe and Tony, on their work day. The frames of him show dignity, strength and vitality. I would do the same with the many workers she photographed at his workplace, also in the USSR: not the machine, always the person. But there is much more. Beatniks, anti-war protesters, New York life, Paris poetry. And shocking series like the homeless from the Bowery series, Bob, Willy, Rose, which are not examples, but people whom he makes known.
He would end his days in France and no longer able to roam the streets of the cities, the show ends with his nature photographs of the Alpilles, in Provence, in 2013, where with the trees that contort to resist the wind and the intimate spaces of the forest, he manages, at ninety years old, to also humanize the landscape.
