Bright lights, full skirts and deep shadow shape New York City in the 1950s. In New York City Never Sleeps, Peter Fetterman Gallery shows us the post-war city glistening with life and grotesque figures”, with pictures from Bruce Davidson, Louis Stettner, Sabine Weiss and Louis Faurer, among others.
These pictures were taken at a time when older photographers working then wanted to create pictures that looked like paintings but reality was coming up fast. NYC was a place bathed in F. Scott Fitzgerald’s ‘revolutions of light”, a city of “light dividing like pearls – forming and reforming in glittering bars and circles and monstrous grotesque figures cut amazingly on the sky.”
New York City Never Sleeps is at NYC’s Peter Fetterman Gallery.
Martin Elkort, Grabbing The Brass Ring, 1950
Louis Faurer (United States, 1916-2001) Union Square from Ohrbach’s Window, New York, N.Y., 1948-50
Louis Stettner 1922-2016 Times Square at Night, New York, 1952
What made it worse, it was so quiet and lonesome out, even though it was Saturday night. I didn’t see hardly anybody on the street. Now and then you just saw a man and a girl crossing a street, with their arms around each other’s waists and all, or a bunch of hoodlumy-looking guys and their dates, all of them laughing like hyenas at something you could bet wasn’t funny. New York’s terrible when somebody laughs on the street very late at night. You can hear it for miles. It makes you feel so lonesome and depressed.
– JD Salinger, The Catcher in the Rye
Louis Faurer (United States, 1916-2001) Union Square from Ohrbach’s Window, New York, N.Y., 1948-50
Sabine Weiss, New York
Ted Croner 1922-2005 Central Park South, 1948
Louis Stettner 1922-2016 Elbowing Out of Town, News Stand, New York, 1954
Bruce Davidson 1933 Brooklyn Gang (couple kissing in the back seat of a car), 1959
Louis Stettner 1922-2016 Six Lights, Penn Station, 1958
Louis Faurer (United States, 1916-2001) New York, NY (Tulip Cab Corp), 1950
Lead Image: Sabine Weiss 1924-2021 Times Square, 1955.
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