In Saint-Ouen, in the home of photographer Louis Stettner | EUROtoday
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C‘is in a small quiet avenue in Saint-Ouen (Seine-Saint-Denis), behind a discreet facade, hidden from a house-worksman stuffed with soul. “This place makes me feel in my place in the world, says Janet Stettner, widow of the American photographer to whom Arles meetings devote a large retrospective entitled “Le Monde de Louis Stettner” (Espace Van Gogh). Louis, who had kept a wonderful memory of the Paris of the 1950s, said that he had the impression of arriving at home when we settled here in the early 1990s. ”“The place is extraordinary, a bit of secret”confirms Virginie Chardin, the exhibition commissioner.
The threshold instantly crossed, a Fougères backyard welcomes the customer. At the underside, a small constructing homes the darkish room the place Louis Stettner himself made his prints, “Sometimes up to twenty copies of the same image, because it was very perfectionist”says Virginie Chardin. On the precise is the workshop, overflowing with pictures but in addition of work and sculptures – a late ardour within the artist, impressed by the African statuettes which he admired youthful. On the left facet stands the household home with its curiosities delivered to the close by flea market.
What a path traveled from the district of Borough Park, in Brooklyn, the place Louis Stettner was born in November 1922! He was born, together with his twin, Irving, in a household arrived from Czernowitz (positioned within the former Austria-Hungary and present Ukraine), ten years in the past. The language of the home will not be English however the Yiddish. Cabinist, the daddy is doing effectively financially sufficient to maneuver his household in an actual home, in Flatbush. Louis Stettner additionally receives a brownie, this very helpful little machine from the time, which permits him to start out taking pictures.
A really private language
” A day, he says in his autobiography, I came across an article by Paul Outerbridge Jr. in a photo magazine. He described the immense potential of photography to interpret the world around you. You could use it to express your feelings in relation to life. I was 12 or 13 years old at the time, and I told myself that photography could become my personal language to communicate to others my discoveries, my sufferings and my joys. »»
A very personal language that transmits emotions, a look at the world: this is indeed the art of Louis Stettner. On the two large tables of the Saint-Ouen workshop, photos are available to us. A dazzling series of 1946 for example, entitled “Subway”: black and white portraits taken in the New York metro. Always the same framework (the photographer is up to his subjects, seated, and places them in the center of the photo), as well as extreme attention to gestures, expressions. In King and Queen of Coney Islandthe man who wears a hat looks straight at us … We are not far, by expressive force, of the Universe of Weegee, the specialist in street crime, a close friend of Louis Stettner.
Louis loved a lot, in France, the freedom of dialogue on social issues.Janet Stettner
In another series, later and still in black and white, here we are at Penn Station, this New York station which connects Manhattan to Boston, Philadelphia and the neighboring suburbs. Louis Stettner seizes a lonely woman’s window out of the train window, as an escape from a table by Edward Hopper, a card player or an exhausted sailor by his day. The photos give off deep melancholy, attention to the hardness of existence. “Louis was committed politically. Besides, he loved the freedom of dialogue in France a lot on social issues “reveals Janet Stettner.
Its Paris, a metropolis of employees
The artist discovers Paris after the battle he made as a photographer. He stayed there for a number of years because of the GI Bill, which pays research for veterans. Paris doesn’t have a photograph college: it should subsequently be the Idhec, the place we study to make cinema, and particularly the road college. “He often takes back people, underlines Virginie Chardin, And seizes many strange, unusual scenes, generally paying attention to the effects of double. Perhaps a distant memory of his twin, this specialist by Henry Miller, so his exact double that they were constantly confused. »»
Stettner’s Paris is not a gap and fun like that of Robert Doisneau, nor sinister and silent like that of the Swedish photographers of which it is close. It is a city of workers where the unexpected can occur, and a place where nature always surprises you. In the years preceding his disappearance, at the age of 94, Louis Stettner became passion for the trees of the Alpilles Massif: the result “Quite magical, with the distinction between the immobility of the soil and the mistral that blows within the leaves”underlines Janet Stettner who judges them “Very revealing of Louis’s character”.
To uncover
The kangaroo of the day
Answer
In his newest textual content – printed in Humanity Fifteen days earlier than his loss of life, in October 2016-, Louis Stettner evokes two photographs which he retains on his bedside desk, in Saint-Ouen: one of many Alpilles exactly, and likewise a picture, present in fleas, of a bicycle employee, leaving for work a day in 1956. “His dazzling smile, which begins on the lips, envelops his whole face and goes to the folds of his eyelids. His face lights up with faith in the future that seems to come from his guts. I am convinced that, as long as there are human beings like this one, we will be on the right path ”writes the photographer. Humanism according to Stettner.
“The world of Louis Stettner”at Espace Van Gogh (Arles), from July 7 to October 5. Publications: “The world of Louis Stettner”, by Virginie Chardin (La Martinière, 2025, 45.50 €); “Louis Stettner”, coll. “Photo pocket” (Actes Sud, 2025, 144 p., € 14.50); Louis Stettner, “Photofile Collection” (Thames and Hudson, 2025).
https://www.lepoint.fr/culture/a-saint-ouen-dans-la-maison-du-photographe-louis-stettner-06-07-2025-2593784_3.php