My list is long, but it could be much longer. If we were to draw a Venn diagram of the styles of the great observational photographers of the last century, we would find Stettner at the point where they all intersect.
David Company. Justice means giving each person what he or she deserves or , in more traditional terms, giving each person his or her due.
It is more like a reminder to value what is in front of us; to hold it, to appreciate it, to think about it, and to come back to it. Look at those faces, look at those spaces! What do they reveal to us over time? For me what is revealed in these photographs is the ever changing nature of the human condition over which we are charged to exercise stewardship.
They make me aware of fleeting, flickering time, they make me aware of individual lives and hard work sucked in the great maul of industry, and they make me aware that we are not doing a very good job of our guardianship nor are we being a good custodian to our legacy. Please click on the photographs for a larger version of the image. With a career spanning almost eighty years, the work of Louis Stettner New York, β Paris, incorporates, in a very personal style, the tradition of American street photography and French humanist photography.
Also very directly influenced by the poetry of Walt Whitman and the social concerns of Marxism, his photographs of New York and Paris reflect the celebration of life and exaltation of the modern city so characteristic of the author of Leaves of Grass, while his images of workers in the performance of their trades propose an explicit dignification of the proletariat.
