“I celebrate the human condition”
– Louis Stettner’s people of Penn Station
It began in 1957, when Louis Stettner saw a girl in party dress skipping across balls of light playing on the stone floor at Pennsylvania Station.
Stettner returned a year later to capture the people moving through this public space. They contrasted with an earlier series of portraits he’d taken on the New York subway. There, subjects had looked his camera squarely in the eye. Here, his people are mostly in worlds of their own; he liked scenes from “the smoke, fumes, the bustle” of the city, in which there were “still moments or stray corners that have sometimes touched eternity”.
He attributed his work as a combat photographer during World War 2, as fostering within him a deep connection with “my fellow countrymen – fishermen, industrial workers, storekeepers – whom I had previously only brushed up against in Times Square”.
After the war, he traveled around Paris for several years. There he made friends with fellow photographers Brassai, Henri Cartier-Bresson, Robert Doisneau, Man Ray and Paul Strand.
“I always felt the difference between New York and Paris nourishes you by the fact that it’s very beautiful,” he said. “You see living history all around you. The whole flavour of the place is one of harmony and beauty. It raises the human spirit. New York does same thing, but it’s more through struggle. Everyone has to be a little bit of a hero. Your spirit is raised through struggle and conflict. It still brings out the best in people, but in a totally different way.”
“When things work out, it’s like a miracle. I had the light, the camera was very good, a wonderful lens. Film back then was better. Today, it would be quite impossible to get permission to photograph in the railway station. A lot of forces came together which made it very favourable.”
– Louis Stettner
With the remodelling of Penn Station in 1963, Stettner couldn’t have known how his work would become such a record of the original station’s Beaux-Arts aesthetic. (The station is modelled on the Beaux-Arts Gare d’Orsay in Paris.) It was, he say, “like living in an art museum; it gave grace and charm to an ordinary function of going from A to B.”
The replacement design is universally unloved.
“The whole thing is continually anxiety-ridden,” he say of traveling through the “new” Penn Station. “People rush here and there. They never post where the train is going to go, or which track it is. People bump into each other. There is no space.”
“Time is the best proof of how valuable a photograph is, or how profound the content is. The fact these photographs get more exciting with time is a good sign.”
– Louis Stettner
“People really got in touch with themselves whilst they were waiting. It’s a complex thing, a very profound experience when people travel.”
– Louis Stettner
“I work on intuition. If something strikes me as significant, I don’t censor what’s around me. I don’t come with any ideas to impose on reality; I let reality speak to me.”
– Louis Stettner
Via: Louis Stettner Penn Station, New York by Thames and Hudson.
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