Louis Stettner

With the current exhibition Fundación MAPFRE presents the most comprehensive retrospective to date in Spain of photographer Louis Stettner (New York, 1922–Paris, 2016). Produced by Fundación MAPFRE and curated by Sally Martin Katz, the exhibit offers a complete survey of this artist’s photographic oeuvre.

Louis Stettner created thousands of images over the course of a career that spanned almost eighty years. Acquiring his first camera as a young teenager, he was soon drawn to the streets of his native city. Stettner quickly made a name for himself at New York’s famous Photo League, where he formed friendships with Sid Grossman and Weegee. He served as a combat photographer in World War II, and the experience of fighting fascism left him with a lasting belief in the fundamental humanity of the common man. After the war, he arrived in Paris in 1947, intending to visit for three weeks, but ultimately staying for five years, studying cinematography on a G.I. Bill. During this time, he forged a lasting relationship with Brassaï, the city, and its people.

Throughout his career, Stettner moved between New York and Paris, before finally settling in Paris in the 1990s. His work defies categorization, containing elements of both the New York street photography aesthetic and the lyrical humanism of the French tradition. A lifelong Marxist, Stettner celebrated the working class and was inspired by his reading of Walt Whitman and the inner humanity that constantly drew him to the lives of ordinary men and women. As the exhibition shows, he explored a range of subjects, often returning to the same themes many years later. For all its diversity, however, Stettner’s work is thematically consistent: he sought out beauty in common people and their everyday life.

The exhibition, which includes around 190 photographs in addition to documentary material, is organized chronologically and charts his work from his early days in New York and Paris, includes his later use of color photography, and ends with his final meditations on the landscape of Les Alpilles.

Bringing together works that reflect the richness of Stettner’s artistic vision, the exhibition sets out to underline his importance within the history of photography and to secure for him his rightful place within the canon.

The exhibition has been made possible thanks to the collaboration of the Louis Stettner Archive, Paris, and Centre Pompidou, who have all generously loaned their works.