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European photographic research tour exhibition: ‘Berenice Abbott: Portraits of Modernity’ at Huis Marseille, Amsterdam Part 2

Exhibition dates: 7th September – 1st December 2019

Visited September 2019 posted June 2020

Curator: Estrella de Diego, Professor of Modern Art at the Complutense University of Madrid

Installation view of the exhibition Berenice Abbott: Portraits of Modernity at Huis Marseille, Amsterdam
Photo: Dr Marcus Bunyan

Old New York, new New York

This was an impressive exhibition from this powerhouse of a photographer in that most beautiful of galleries, Huis Marseille in Amsterdam. While her debt to that French master photographer Eugène Atget (1857-1927) is acknowledged through Abbott’s statement that she planned “to do for New York what Atget did for Paris,” Abbott’s photographs and her ‘point of view’ differ significantly to that of her Parisian hero.

Inflections of the influence of the Parisian master are present in the work, but in the project Changing New York Abbott develops a unique visual language through her representation of city life. Her photographs of shop fronts are more static and formal than that of Atget, more interested in the multiplicities of form than they are of reflections in glass, or ghostly people standing in doorways. Further, Atget would never have taken a photograph such as Gunsmith and Police Department, 6 Centre Market Place, Manhattan (1937, below) because the angle of the composition looking upwards is too severe, too modernist. Similarly, the placement by Abbott of the lamppost and U.S. Mail box in Old Law Tenements, 35-47 East 1st Street (1937, below) as the focus of attention, make this photograph uniquely her own.

Abbott photographs the co-mingled elements of old New York and new New York – the crowded tenements, rushing people, and “grand canyons” lined with monolithic skyscrapers of the bustling metropolis – as a city caught in the shadows of a piercing New York light. If you have been to New York you know that the city has that light, a hard, clinical light that bounces off surfaces until it sinks into the deepening shadows and recesses of overshadowed buildings. In her vital, still, intense, renditions of the cityscape Abbott’s photographs capture this light.

But what really changes her attitude (or altitude you might say) to the city is Abbott’s depiction of those edifices of modernism that are the crowning glory of New York: the skyscraper. Paraphrasing Karen Chambers from her article, “Paris to New York: Photographs by Eugène Atget and Berenice Abbott,” we can say that Abbott’s photographs of skyscrapers are different from the human scale of Atget’s photographs and of Abbott’s of a disappearing New York. Whether looking up from the bowls of the city (Canyon: Broadway and Exchange Place, 1936 below); across at the regimented forms of building (New York Telephone Company’s Lower Broadway Building, 1930-31 below); or down from a God-like perspective (Waterfront, from roof of Irving Trust Company Building, 1938 below), Abbott’s photographs of skyscrapers and the spaces they inhabit perfectly capture the layered forms and walls of isolation of the contemporary working metropolis, complete with Tempo of the City automatons.

Through the meritocracy of her talent, Abbott’s vision soars and plunges, meticulously, into the utopian / dystopian fabric of the city, Atget influences subsumed into American light, form and culture… the brooding hulks of towering skyscrapers; the skeletal form of bridges; and Abbott’s clear persistence of vision – seeing modernity clearly, with focus, in focus.

Dr Marcus Bunyan

All iPhone photographs by Dr Marcus Bunyan. Please click on the photographs for a larger version of the image.

“When Abbott returned to New York in 1929, she planned “to do for New York what Atget did for Paris.” The project became known as ‘Changing New York’, and in her application for funding from the Federal Art Project (FAP), a part of the Farm Security Administration, best known for sending photographers, including Dorothea Lange and Walker Evans, into the American heartland to document rural poverty, she wrote that the purpose of the project was “to preserve for the future an accurate and faithful chronicle in photographs of the changing aspect of the world’s greatest metropolis”.”

Karen S. Chambers. “”Paris to New York: Photographs by Eugène Atget and Berenice Abbott,” Taft Museum of Art, through January 20, 2019,” on the AEQAI website October 28th, 2018 [Online] Cited 08/06/2020

Installation view of the exhibition Berenice Abbott: Portraits of Modernity at Huis Marseille, Amsterdam showing Abbott’s Gunsmith and Police Department Headquarters 1937
Photo: Dr Marcus Bunyan

Berenice Abbott (American, 1898-1991)
Gunsmith and Police Department Headquarters (installation view)
February 4, 1937
Gelatin silver print
International Center of Photography
Photo: Dr Marcus Bunyan

Berenice Abbott (American, 1898-1991)
Gunsmith and Police Department, 6 Centre Market Place, Manhattan
February 4, 1937
Gelatin silver print
Wikipedia Commons, Public domain

Installation view of the exhibition Berenice Abbott: Portraits of Modernity at Huis Marseille, Amsterdam
Photos: Dr Marcus Bunyan

Berenice Abbott (American, 1898-1991)
New York Harbour (installation view)
1938
Gelatin silver print
International Center of Photography
Photo: Dr Marcus Bunyan

Berenice Abbott (American, 1898-1991)
Waterfront, from roof of Irving Trust Company Building (installation view)
1938
Gelatin silver print
The Miriam and Ira D. Wallach Division of Art, Prints and Photographs, Photography Collection
The New York Public Library, Astor, Lenox and Tilden Foundations
Photo: Dr Marcus Bunyan

Berenice Abbott (American, 1898-1991)
Daily News Building, 42nd Street between 2nd and 3rd Avenues, Manhattan
1935
Gelatin silver print
The Miriam and Ira D. Wallach Division of Art, Prints and Photographs, Photography Collection
The New York Public Library, Astor, Lenox and Tilden Foundations
Photo: Dr Marcus Bunyan

Berenice Abbott (American, 1898-1991)
New York Telephone Company’s Lower Broadway Building (installation view)
1930-1931
Gelatin silver print
Courtesy of Howard Greenberg Gallery
Photo: Dr Marcus Bunyan

Berenice Abbott (American, 1898-1991)
New York Telephone Company Building, 140 West Street, Manhattan (installation view)
1936
Gelatin silver print
The Miriam and Ira D. Wallach Division of Art, Prints and Photographs, Photography Collection
The New York Public Library, Astor, Lenox and Tilden Foundations
Photo: Dr Marcus Bunyan

Berenice Abbott (American, 1898-1991)
Canyon: Broadway and Exchange Place
July 16, 1936
Gelatin silver print
The Miriam and Ira D. Wallach Division of Art, Prints and Photographs, Photography Collection
The New York Public Library, Astor, Lenox and Tilden Foundations
Photo: Dr Marcus Bunyan

Installation views of the exhibition Berenice Abbott: Portraits of Modernity at Huis Marseille, Amsterdam
Photos: Dr Marcus Bunyan

Berenice Abbott (American, 1898-1991)
R.C.A. building (installation view)
c. 1932 (printed before 1950)
Gelatin silver print
Courtesy of Howard Greenberg Gallery
Photo: Dr Marcus Bunyan

Berenice Abbott (American, 1898-1991)
Manhattan Skyline: I. South Street and Jones Lane (installation views)
1936
Gelatin silver print
The Miriam and Ira D. Wallach Division of Art, Prints and Photographs, Photography Collection
The New York Public Library, Astor, Lenox and Tilden Foundations
Photos: Dr Marcus Bunyan

Berenice Abbott (American, 1898-1991)
Manhattan Skyline: I. South Street and Jones Lane
1936
Gelatin silver print
The Miriam and Ira D. Wallach Division of Art, Prints and Photographs, Photography Collection
The New York Public Library, Astor, Lenox and Tilden Foundations
Public domain

Berenice Abbott (American, 1898-1991)
Old Law Tenements, 35-47 East 1st Street (installation view)
February 11, 1937
Gelatin silver print
Courtesy of Howard Greenberg Gallery
Photo: Dr Marcus Bunyan

Berenice Abbott (American, 1898-1991)
Old Law Tenements, 35-47 East 1st Street
February 11, 1937
Gelatin silver print
Public domain

Berenice Abbott (American, 1898-1991)
Shelter on the Waterfront, Coenties Slip, Pier 5, East River, Manhattan (installation view)
1938
Gelatin silver print
The Miriam and Ira D. Wallach Division of Art, Prints and Photographs, Photography Collection
The New York Public Library, Astor, Lenox and Tilden Foundations
Photo: Dr Marcus Bunyan

Berenice Abbott (American, 1898-1991)
Provincetown Playhouse, 133 MacDougal Street, Manhattan (installation view)
December 29, 1936
Gelatin silver print
Courtesy of Howard Greenberg Gallery
Photos: Dr Marcus Bunyan

Berenice Abbott (American, 1898-1991)
Country Store Interior (installation view)
October 11, 1935
Gelatin silver print
Gift of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1948
Photo: Dr Marcus Bunyan

Berenice Abbott (American, 1898-1991)
Country Store Interior
October 11, 1935
Gelatin silver print
Public domain

Installation views of the exhibition Berenice Abbott: Portraits of Modernity at Huis Marseille, Amsterdam
Photos: Dr Marcus Bunyan

Berenice Abbott (American, 1898-1991)
Charles Lane, between West and Washington Street (installation view)
September 20, 1938
Gelatin silver print
The Miriam and Ira D. Wallach Division of Art, Prints and Photographs, Photography Collection
The New York Public Library, Astor, Lenox and Tilden Foundations
Photo: Dr Marcus Bunyan

Berenice Abbott (American, 1898-1991)
Charles Lane, between West and Washington Street
September 20, 1938
Gelatin silver print
The Miriam and Ira D. Wallach Division of Art, Prints and Photographs, Photography Collection
The New York Public Library, Astor, Lenox and Tilden Foundations
Public domain

Berenice Abbott (American, 1898-1991)
Newsstand, 32nd Street and 3rd Avenue, Manhattan (installation view)
1935
Gelatin silver print
The Miriam and Ira D. Wallach Division of Art, Prints and Photographs, Photography Collection
The New York Public Library, Astor, Lenox and Tilden Foundations
Photo: Dr Marcus Bunyan

Berenice Abbott (American, 1898-1991)
Newsstand, 32nd Street and 3rd Avenue, Manhattan
1935
Gelatin silver print
The Miriam and Ira D. Wallach Division of Art, Prints and Photographs, Photography Collection
The New York Public Library, Astor, Lenox and Tilden Foundations
Public domain

Berenice Abbott (American, 1898-1991)
Cheese Store, 276 Bleecker Street, Manhattan (installation view)
1937
Gelatin silver print
The Miriam and Ira D. Wallach Division of Art, Prints and Photographs, Photography Collection
The New York Public Library, Astor, Lenox and Tilden Foundations
Photo: Dr Marcus Bunyan

New York must have seem to Abbott extremely photogenic, with its skyscrapers and street vendors on Hester Street on the Lower East Side. It is a city of contrasts; of light and shade, and bustling squares; of all manner of shoes overflowing with bread, bric-a-brac, ricotta in Little Italy, rope, metal objects… Abbott depicts a city that heralds the consumer society and its abundance – its excess, even.

Berenice Abbott (American, 1898-1991)
Cheese Store, 276 Bleecker Street, Manhattan
1937
Gelatin silver print
The Miriam and Ira D. Wallach Division of Art, Prints and Photographs, Photography Collection
The New York Public Library, Astor, Lenox and Tilden Foundations
Public domain

Berenice Abbott (American, 1898-1991)
A & P (Great Atlantic & Pacific Tea Co.), 246 3rd Avenue, Manhattan (installation view)
1936
Gelatin silver print
The Miriam and Ira D. Wallach Division of Art, Prints and Photographs, Photography Collection
The New York Public Library, Astor, Lenox and Tilden Foundations
Photo: Dr Marcus Bunyan

Berenice Abbott (American, 1898-1991)
Hardware Store, 316-318 Bowery (installation view)
1938
Gelatin silver print
Courtesy of Howard Greenberg Gallery
Photo: Dr Marcus Bunyan

Berenice Abbott (American, 1898-1991)
Pingpank Barber Shop, 413 Bleecker Street, Manhattan (installation view)
1938
Gelatin silver print
The Miriam and Ira D. Wallach Division of Art, Prints and Photographs, Photography Collection
The New York Public Library, Astor, Lenox and Tilden Foundations
Photo: Dr Marcus Bunyan

Berenice Abbott (American, 1898-1991)
Pingpank Barber Shop, 413 Bleecker Street, Manhattan
1938
Gelatin silver print
The Miriam and Ira D. Wallach Division of Art, Prints and Photographs, Photography Collection
The New York Public Library, Astor, Lenox and Tilden Foundations
Public domain

Berenice Abbott (American, 1898-1991)
Sumner Healey Antique Shop, 942 3rd Avenue and 57th Street, Manhattan (installation view)
1936
Gelatin silver print
The Miriam and Ira D. Wallach Division of Art, Prints and Photographs, Photography Collection
The New York Public Library, Astor, Lenox and Tilden Foundations
Photo: Dr Marcus Bunyan

Berenice Abbott (American, 1898-1991)
Sumner Healey Antique Shop, 942 3rd Avenue and 57th Street, Manhattan
1936
Gelatin silver print
The Miriam and Ira D. Wallach Division of Art, Prints and Photographs, Photography Collection
The New York Public Library, Astor, Lenox and Tilden Foundations
Public domain

Berenice Abbott (American, 1898-1991)
Union Square, 14th Street and Broadway, Manhattan (installation view)
1936
Gelatin silver print
The Miriam and Ira D. Wallach Division of Art, Prints and Photographs, Photography Collection
The New York Public Library, Astor, Lenox and Tilden Foundations
Photo: Dr Marcus Bunyan

Berenice Abbott (American, 1898-1991)
Union Square
July 16, 1936
Gelatin silver photograph
6 7/8 x 8 7/8 in. (17.5 x 22.5cm)
Brooklyn Museum, Brooklyn Museum Collection
Public domain

Installation views of the exhibition Berenice Abbott: Portraits of Modernity at Huis Marseille, Amsterdam
Photos: Dr Marcus Bunyan

Berenice Abbott (American, 1898-1991)
Lewis Hine (installation view)
1930
Gelatin silver photograph
International Centre of Photography
Purchase with funds provided by the Lois and Bruce Henkel purchase Fund, 1984
Photo: Dr Marcus Bunyan

Berenice Abbott (American, 1898-1991)
Edward Hopper (installation view)
1949
Gelatin silver photograph
International Centre of Photography
Gift of Jonathan A. Berg, 1984
Photo: Dr Marcus Bunyan

Installation views of the exhibition Berenice Abbott: Portraits of Modernity at Huis Marseille, Amsterdam
Photos: Dr Marcus Bunyan

Berenice Abbott (American, 1898-1991)
Manhattan Bridge, Manhattan (installation view)
1935
Gelatin silver print
The Miriam and Ira D. Wallach Division of Art, Prints and Photographs, Photography Collection
The New York Public Library, Astor, Lenox and Tilden Foundations
Photos: Dr Marcus Bunyan

Berenice Abbott (American, 1898-1991)
Penn Station, Manhattan (installation view)
1935
Gelatin silver print
The Miriam and Ira D. Wallach Division of Art, Prints and Photographs, Photography Collection
The New York Public Library, Astor, Lenox and Tilden Foundations
Photo: Dr Marcus Bunyan

Berenice Abbott (American, 1898-1991)
El’: 2nd & 3rd Avenue lines, looking W. from Second & Pearl St., Manhattan
1936
Gelatin silver print
The Miriam and Ira D. Wallach Division of Art, Prints and Photographs, Photography Collection
The New York Public Library, Astor, Lenox and Tilden Foundations
Public domain

Photography Collection, Miriam and Ira D. Wallach Division of Art, Prints and Photographs
The New York Public Library, Astor, Lenox and Tilden Foundations
Gift of the photographer

Huis Marseille
Keizersgracht 401
1016 EK Amsterdam
Phone: +31 20 531 89 89

Opening hours
Tue – Sun, 11 – 18 h

Huis Marseille website

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Exhibition: ‘Louis Faurer’ at the Fondation Henri Cartier-Bresson, Paris

Exhibition dates: 9th September – 18th December 2016

Curator: The exhibition has been curated and organised by Agnès Sire, director of the Fondation Henri Cartier-Bresson in association with the Estate of Louis Faurer in New York, Howard Greenberg Gallery in New York and Deborah Bell Photographs.

Louis Faurer (American, 1916-2001)
Accident, New York
1952
Gelatin silver print
© Louis Faurer Estate, Courtesy Deborah Bell

Life, love and loneliness in the big smoke.

Champions and accidents.

Home of the brave, land of the fractured and destitute.

Unemployed and Looking.

Both * eyes * removed
Wounded

I AM TOTALLY BLIND.

Marcus

Many thankx to the Fondation Henri Cartier-Bresson for allowing me to publish the photographs in the posting. Please click on the photographs for a larger version of the image.

“However, with shocking suddenness in 1976 I came to believe that American photography of the moment of mid-century belonged to Louis Faurer.”

Walter Hopps

“I have an intense desire to record life as I see it, as I feel it. As long as I’m amazed and astonished, as long as I feel that events, messages, expressions and movements are all shot through with the miraculous, I’ll feel filled with the certainty I need to keep going. When that day comes, my doubts will vanish.”

Louis Faurer

Louis Faurer (American, 1916-2001)
Champion, New York
1950
Gelatin silver print
© Louis Faurer Estate, Courtesy Howard Greenberg Gallery

Louis Faurer (American, 1916-2001)
Orchard Street, New York
1947
Gelatin silver print
© Louis Faurer Estate

Louis Faurer (American, 1916-2001)
New York
1949
Gelatin silver print
© Louis Faurer Estate, Courtesy Howard Greenberg Gallery

Louis Faurer (American, 1916-2001)
Untitled, New York
1949
Gelatin silver print
© Louis Faurer Estate

Louis Faurer (American, 1916-2001)
“Win, Place, and Show”, 3rd Avenue El at 53rd Street, New York, New York
c. 1946-1948
Gelatin silver print
© Louis Faurer Estate

Louis Faurer (American, 1916-2001)
Market Street, Philadelphia
1944
Gelatin silver print
© Louis Faurer Estate

Louis Faurer (American, 1916-2001)
Untitled, New York
c. 1948-1950
Gelatin silver print
© Louis Faurer Estate

Louis Faurer (American, 1916-2001)
42nd Street, New York
c. 1949
Gelatin silver print
© Louis Faurer Estate

Louis Faurer (American, 1916-2001)
Staten Island Ferry, New York
1946
Gelatin silver print
© Louis Faurer Estate, Courtesy Deborah Bell

From September 9 to December 18, 2016, The Fondation Henri Cartier-Bresson dedicates an exhibition to the American photographer, Louis Faurer. This show is the occasion to discover this artist who has not been the subject of an exhibition in France since 1992. A native of Philadelphia, Louis Faurer moved to New York after the War, as if irresistibly pulled into the life of Times Square, where he homed in, objectively and pitilessly, on loneliness in the crowd. Reporting held little interest for him, and journalism even less; he was drawn – as the captions to his photographs sometimes indicate – to the poetic side: the fragility of things and the unconscious revelation. He carried out much-admired commissions for leading magazines including Flair, Junior Bazaar, Glamour and Mademoiselle. This gave rise to an unfeigned self-contempt and a paradoxical inner division only humour could counter. These assignments earned a living and helped him pursue a more personal work in New York streets.

Profoundly honest, he refused the excessiveness (or obscenity) of violent scenes that might humiliate his subjects, and deliberately projected himself into the people he photographed; and if he often recognised himself in them, this was the whole point. Sometimes he encountered his double, or even appeared in shot as a reflection. Each of his images was “a challenge to silence and indifference” – theirs and his own.

After studying drawing and being noticed by the Disney Studios at the age of thirteen, Louis Faurer started his professional path by creating advertising posters and sketching caricatures in the seaside of Atlantic City. At the age of 21, he bought his first camera and won first prize for “Photo of the Week” in a contest sponsored by the Philadelphia Evening Public Ledger. Market Street would then be the scene of his first shots. In 1947, he left for New York, as Lilian Bassman, art director for Junior Bazaar, hired him as a photographer. He met Robert Frank who was to become a close friend and with who he would share a studio for a while.

In 1968, he abandoned New York, the scene of his most successful work, for personal and financial reasons. Faurer worked briefly in England, and then in Paris where he struggled doing fashion work, with occasional assignments from Elle and French Vogue. Shortly after Faurer returned to New York in 1974 at the age of 58, he found that photography was being embraced by the art world and was soon to become a commodity in the international art market. The art dealer, Harry Lunn brought his work to public attention through an exhibition at Marlborough Gallery in 1997 and resurrected his career, his contribution then began to be acknowledged. In 1984, a car in New York streets hit Faurer, his wounds prevented him to pursue his career as a photographer. He passed away in Manhattan on March 2, 2001.

Deeply concerned with what he saw, he shares his doubts with us as he chooses anonymous figures spotted amid the ordinariness of the sidewalk: figures pulled out of the ambient melancholy, the film noir, the pervasive distress that seem to have been his personal lot. A remarkably gifted printer, Faurer experimented with blur, overlaid negatives and the marked graininess resulting from his fondness for the nocturnal. His touchiness meant frequent problems with clients and people like the numerous photographers who tried to lend a helping hand; among the latter was William Eggleston, who had discerned the unique depth of Faurer’s work. The issue the elegant Japanese photography quarterly déjà vu devoted to him in 1994 speaks of a rediscovery and a style ahead of its time, and quotes Nan Goldin: “Some people believe again that photography can be honest”.

In 1948, Edward Steichen, Head of the Department of Photography of the MoMA, supported Faurer and included him in In and Out of Focus. Steichen wrote: “Louis Faurer, a new comer in the field of documentary reporting, is a lyricist with a camera, a seeker and finder of magic in some of the highways and byways of life.” Afterwards, Steichen presented Faurer photographs in a few other exhibitions and in particular The Family of Man, in 1955. During his lifetime, Faurer did not have the wherewithal to edit his photographs into a book.

Press release from Fondation Henri Cartier-Bresson

Louis Faurer (American, 1916-2001)
Market Street, Philadelphia
1937
Gelatin silver print
© Louis Faurer Estate

Louis Faurer (American, 1916-2001)
Unemployed and Looking at Rockefeller Center, New York
1947
Gelatin silver print
© Louis Faurer Estate

Louis Faurer (American, 1916-2001)
Eddie, New York
1948
Gelatin silver print
© Louis Faurer Estate

Louis Faurer (American, 1916-2001)
Deaf Mute, New York
1950
Gelatin silver print
© Louis Faurer Estate

Louis Faurer (American, 1916-2001)
Union Square from Ohrbach’s Window, New York
c. 1948-1950
Gelatin silver print
© Louis Faurer Estate, Courtesy Howard Greenberg Gallery

Narrative of my career

My earliest experience in art occurred at the Benjamin Rush Public school in Phila., Penna. Miss Duncan, who seemed to float on a rose petal scent, having requested that numbers be written on paper with lead pencil, was shocked when my sheet yielded a drawing of a locomotive. My next surprise, at the age of 13 arrived in the mail. I had submitted my drawings to Walt Disney and he proposed considering me for a position, although he couldn’t guarantee it, if I travelled to California. It seemed unreachable and so I didn’t go.

After graduating the South Phila. High School for Boys, I enrolled in a Commercial Lettering School. After months of hand trembling, I looked at my first sign, it read “FRESH FISH”. From 1934 to 1937 I sketched caricatures on the beach at Atlantic City, N.J. My interest in photography began in 1937. It was greatly intensified when I was awarded first prize in the Philadelphia Evening Public Ledger for the photo of the week contest. Soon, the Farm Security Administration’s early books became my bible. I was especially taken by Walker Evans’ photography. The world of Harper’s Bazaar also fascinated me.

Later, in New York, I was to meet Robert Frank at the Bazaar Studio. Since I was a commuter, he invited me to stay at his loft together with nine cats. He had recently arrived from Switzerland and was alone. New York enchanted and amazed me. Everywhere a new discovery awaited me. Rejection slips from U.S. Camera were transformed into reproduced pages. My work was being accepted, often it seemed unreal. I showed my photographs to Walker Evans. A handsome brass tea kettle in his tiny room in the offices at FORTUNE projected his stability and eloquence. “You wouldn’t photograph fat women, would you?” he asked me. Later he warned me, “don’t become contaminated.” My need to continue photographing was solved by photography for commerce. I worked for periodicals which included Harper’s Bazaar.

1946 to 1951 were important years. I photographed almost daily and the hypnotic dusk light led me to Times Square. Several nights of photographing in that area and developing and printing in Robert Frank’s dark room became a way of life. He would say, “whatta town”, “whatta town”. I was represented in Edward Steichen’s IN AND OUT OF FOCUS exhibit. Then, work, work, and more work. “Boy,” he boomed, “go out and photograph and put the prints on my desk.” This command was synchronised with a pound of his fist on the glass top desk. I thought it miraculous, that the glass did not shatter.

I tasted and accepted the offerings of the 50s and 60s. LIFE, COWLES PUBLICATIONS, HEARST and CONDE NAST, enabled me to continue with my personal photography efforts. Often I would carry a 16mm motion picture camera as I would a Leica and photograph in the New York streets. The results were never shown commercially. The negative has been stored.

In 1968, I needed new places, new faces and change. I tried Europe. I returned in the mid-seventies and was overwhelmed by the change that had occurred here. I took to photographing the new New York with an enthusiasm almost equal to the beginning. After the Lunn purchase, the gallery world. I was brought again to the drawing I first experienced, and as an unexpected bonus, the photographer had become an artist! 1978 found me the recipient of the National Endowment for the Arts Grant and the Creative Public Service Grant for photography. The latter is known as (CAPS). My eyes search for people who are grateful for life, people who forgive and whose doubts have been removed, who understand the truth, whose enduring spirit is bathed by such piercing white light as to provide their present and future hope.*

Louis Faurer

* Reproduced, with editorial revisions, from the artist’s original text. Text published at the occasion of the exhibition Louis Faurer – Photographs from Philadelphia and New York 1937-1973 presented from March 10 to April 23, 1981 at the Art Gallery of University of Maryland. Extracts from the book Louis Faurer published by Steidl, September 2016

Louis Faurer (American, 1916-2001)
Somewhere in West Village, New York
1948
Gelatin silver print
© Louis Faurer estate

Louis Faurer (American, 1916-2001)
Untitled, Philadelphia
Date unknown
Gelatin silver print
© Louis Faurer estate

Louis Faurer
Steidl Verlag

Foreword: Agnès Sire. Essay: Susan Kismaric
Original texts: Louis Faurer and Walter Hopps

208 pages
24 x 17.6cm
100 illustrations
ISBN: 978-3-95829-241-3
September 2016

Extracts from the book

New York City has been the major center of the Faurer’s work, and that city’s life at mid-century, his great subject. The city is totally Faurer’s natural habitat. He can be at home, at one, with people on its streets, in its rooms. However serene or edgy his encounters, one senses Faurer (if at all) as being the same as the people in his photographs. And since these people are extremely varied, it is a transcendent vision that allows the photographer to be so many “others.” Faurer’s at-oneness with his subjects contrasts with both the mode of working and the results of Evans and Frank. They have proved to be great and wide-ranging explorers and finders of their images. Faurer made only one important trip: from Philadelphia (where he made his first, early brilliant photographs) to New York, where he stayed, and where in the course of things his vision consumed, whether ordinary or odd, the all of it.

Walter Hopps

Louis Faurer was a “photographer’s photographer”, one whose work was not known to a broad audience, or appreciated by the art world, but was loved by photographers. They saw in his pictures a purity of seeing, akin to what Faurer saw in the work of Walker Evans, the “poetic use of facts”. Faurer distinguished himself within this way of working through his instinct and his uncanny eye for people who radiate a rare and convincing sense of privacy, an inner life. They are people who would be true in any time and place,who are emblematic of human struggle.

For whatever reasons, Faurer did not have the wherewithal to edit his photographs into a book, the most visible and long-lasting expression of a photographer’s work. Yet his pictures are indelible. Their content presages a major shift in subject matter within the rubric of “documentary” American photography that was to come to fruition almost two decades later. In 1967 John Szarkowski identified this radical change when he wrote in his wall text for New Documents, an exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art, about the work of Diane Arbus, Lee Friedlander, and Garry Winogrand: “… In the past decade, a new generation of photographers has directed the documentary approach toward more personal ends. Their aim has been not to reform life, but to know it”.

Susan Kismaric

Louis Faurer (American, 1916-2001)
Viva, New York
1962
Gelatin silver print
© Louis Faurer Estate, Courtesy Christophe Lunn

Fondation Henri Cartier-Bresson
79 rue des Archives
75003 Paris

Opening hours:
Tuesday – Sunday
11am – 7pm
Closed on Mondays

Fondation Henri Cartier-Bresson website

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Photographs: Andy Warhol unplugged 2

May 2015

Andy Warhol (American, 1928-1987)
Air France
Jun 21 1982
Unique gelatin silver print
8 x 10 in. (20.3 x 25.4cm)

Andy Warhol being, well … Andy Warhol.

Artist, tourist, celebrity, poofter, man about town and spontaneous, thoughtful snapper. The photograph of the Prado at night is superb as are the multiple, stitched together photographs. Warhol certainly loved his high key, 35mm images.

Marcus

.
Please click on the photographs for a larger version of the image.

Andy Warhol (American, 1928-1987)
Cessna Plane
c. 1977
Four stitched gelatin silver prints
Each: 11 x 14 in. (27.9 x 35.6cm)
Overall: 2 1 1/4 x 27 3/8 in. (54 x 69.5cm)

Andy Warhol (American, 1928-1987)
City View 
May 07 1984
Unique gelatin silver print
8 x 10 in. (20.3 x 25.4cm)

Andy Warhol (American, 1928-1987)
Houston Skyline
c. 1979
Unique gelatin silver print
8 x 10 in. (20.3 x 25.4cm)

Andy Warhol (American, 1928-1987)
German Trolley 
Jun 23 1980
Unique gelatin silver print
8 x 10 in. (20.3 x 25.4cm)

Andy Warhol (American, 1928-1987)
Limousine Interior
c. 1980
Unique gelatin silver print
8 x 10 in. (20.3 x 25.4cm)

Andy Warhol (American, 1928-1987)
Luxor Temple
c. 1977
Two unique gelatin silver prints
Each: 8 x 5 in. (20.3 x 12.7cm)

Andy Warhol (American, 1928-1987)
Luxor Temple (detail)
c. 1977
Two unique gelatin silver prints
Each: 8 x 5 in. (20.3 x 12.7cm)

Andy Warhol (American, 1928-1987)
Ocean Landscape
1986
Four stitched gelatin silver prints
Each: 11 x 14 in. (27.9 x 35.6cm.)
Overall: 2 1/4 x 27 1/2 in. (54 x 69.9cm)

Andy Warhol (American, 1928-1987)
Statues Outside Musée D’Orsay
c. 1980
Unique gelatin silver print
8 x 10 in. (20.3 x 25.4cm)

Andy Warhol (American, 1928-1987)
Monastery of Saint John of the Kings, Toledo
Jan 24 1983
Unique gelatin silver print
8 x 10 in. (20.3 x 25.4 cm)

Andy Warhol (American, 1928-1987)
Museo del Prado Exterior, Madrid, Spain
Jan 24 1983
Unique gelatin silver print
8 x 10 in. (20.3 x 25.4cm)

Andy Warhol (American, 1928-1987)
Spanish Portico
Jan 24 1983
Unique gelatin silver print
8 x 10 in. (20.3 x 25.4cm)

Andy Warhol (American, 1928-1987)
Richard Coeur de Lion at Westminster
c. 1980
Unique gelatin silver print
8 x 10 in. (20.3 x 25.4cm)

Andy Warhol (American, 1928-1987)
Pyramid
c. 1977
Unique gelatin silver print
5 x 8 in. (12.7 x 20.3cm)

Andy Warhol (American, 1928-1987)
Street Scene
c. 1982
Unique gelatin silver print
8 x 10 in. (20.3 x 25.4cm)

Andy Warhol (American, 1928-1987)
Riders from the Car
c. 1979
Two unique polaroid prints mounted on board
Each: 4 1/4 x 3 3/8 in. (10.8 x 8.6cm)

Andy Warhol (American, 1928-1987)
Unidentified Men
c. 1980
Unique gelatin silver print
8 x 10 in. (20.3 x 25.4cm)

Andy Warhol (American, 1928-1987)
Venetian Canal
1977
Unique gelatin silver print
8 x 10 in. (20.3 x 25.4cm)

Andy Warhol (American, 1928-1987)
Table Setting
c. 1980
Unique gelatin silver print
8 x 10 in. (20.3 x 25.4cm)

Andy Warhol (American, 1928-1987)
Beach Scene
c. 1975
Unique polaroid print
4¼ x 3½ in. (10.8 x 8.8cm)

Andy Warhol (American, 1928-1987)
Place de la Concorde
c. 1980
Unique gelatin silver print
10 x 8 in. (25.4 x 20.3cm)

Andy Warhol (American, 1928-1987)
Rockefeller Center
c. 1984
Unique gelatin silver print
10 x 8 in. (25.4 x 20.3cm)

Andy Warhol (American, 1928-1987)
Sears Tower
c. 1980
Unique gelatin silver print
10 x 8 in. (25.4 x 20.3cm)

Andy Warhol (American, 1928-1987)
Max Delys at the Saloon
c. 1980
Unique polaroid print mounted on board
4 1/4 x 3/ 3/8 in. (10.8 x 8.5cm)

Andy Warhol (American, 1928-1987)
Union Square
c. 1975
Unique polaroid print
4 1/4 x 3 3/8 in. (10.8 x 8.5cm)

Andy Warhol (American, 1928-1987)
Tunnel
c. 1980
Unique gelatin silver print
8 x 10 in. (20.3 x 25.4cm)

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