Louis Stettner (Photofile)

Brooklyn-­born Louis Stettner (1922–­ 2016) first took up a camera as a teenager and went on to establish an extraordinary career that lasted almost eighty years. After photographing life on the streets of New York, he joined the famous Photo League, a cooperative of photographers who shared artistic and social ideals, and befriended celebrated lensmen including Sid Grossman and Weegee. During World War II, he served as a combat photographer, and the fight against fascism strengthened his belief in Marxism and the working class.

Living between New York and Paris, he amassed a huge body of work that combined elements of New York street photography with lyrical humanism in the French style. His subjects were many and varied: passengers on the subway and tourists in the streets, Spanish fishermen and American beatniks, protests and demonstrations, landscapes and trees. But no matter where he found himself, he looked for beauty in the everyday and never lost his fundamental compassion and solidarity with ordinary people.

This volume in the Photofile series brings together a selection of Stettner’s most important images from throughout his long and prolific career.