To Value What is in Front of Us
Louis Stettner, Fundación MAPFRE 2023, Thames & Hudson, 2024
Essay commissioned for the catalogue of the retrospective exhibition Louis Stettner, Fundación MAPFRE, Spain.
Published in English by Thames & Hudson, 2024.
To value what is in front of us. On the photography of Louis Stettner.
David Campany
extract:
An image is capable of being like life at its very best –
moving us deeply without our knowing fully why.
Louis Stettner
Photographs, particularly those of the kind made by Louis Stettner, show what they cannot explain. The world’s appearance – captured and organised as a picture– is preserved, factual yet poetic and elusive. Faces encountered by chance on the subway. Hats on heads thinking thoughts we shall never know, and which the photographer could not have known either. A street corner with memory longer than ours, and much more obscure. In a window display from 1951, a black cat looking mysterious and quite contemporary, as black cats in photographs always seem to do. Café tables, awaiting or recovering from coffees and conversations. A worker’s arm, taut and purposeful. Newspapers brimming with old urgencies. Figures standing, walking or running between the life before and the life after. A ray of light. A crashing wave. We can marvel at Stettner’s spontaneous and empathetic artistry, making pictures out of the almost nothing of everyday life, turning non-moments into something momentous. But photographs have a way of covering their tracks, of cutting themselves free from the life stories from which they came, but which we will never really know: the stories of those people and things photographed, and the photographer’s own story too. Story, or narrative, is what is sacrificed in the making of a still photograph. It is not a loss. What we gain is our own occasion to respond, to fill in the missing pieces for ourselves, or to enjoy what is missing.
If would be fair to say that Louis Stettner’s photographs have, thus far, achieved more recognition than he did. Many of his images are well known but his name is not, at least not to a wider public, despite recent efforts to redress this. In our present era, in which name recognition and personality are what oil the market of culture, the relative obscurity of Stettner could be seen as refreshing, even subversive. But it must be said that for audiences who have grown used to understanding art through its maker, it is also a little perplexing.
In truth, Louis Stettner was not an altogether obscure or isolated figure, although there were many moments when felt he was. He was extremely connected, accumulating across the many years of his creative life a great network of friendships and acquaintances, as well as a few notable enemies, in the worlds of commercial and artistic photography centred around New York and Paris. On top of this network, there is another kind of connection, broad but harder to define, that was entirely to do with the qualities and character of the photographs that Stettner made. His visual sensibility was so varied, so protean that it overlapped with just about every other photographer of his era who worked as he did, in the mode of lyric observation of daily life. One could make an exhibition pairing his pictures with similar works by a wide range of great figures, among them Roy DeCarava, Willy Ronis, Louis Draper, Aaron Siskind, Walker Evans, Lisette Model, Morris Engel, Edouard Boubat, Shawn Walker, Jerome Liebling, André Kertész, W. Eugene Smith, Dorothea Lange, Beuford Smith, Robert Frank, Robert Doisneau, Sid Grossman, Henri Cartier-Bresson, Brassaï, Bill Brandt, Izis, Louis Faurer, William Klein, Weegee, and Ruth Orkin. There is something of Stettner’s work in theirs, and theirs in his. 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.
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