Louis Stettner: Penn Station, New York - Hardcover

Louis Stettner

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0500544506 ISBN 13: 9780500544501

Publisher: Thames and Hudson Ltd, 2015

Synopsis

Louis Stettner is one of the last living members of the avant-garde New York School of Photography. His Penn Station series of the late 1950s represents some of his most important work, gathered here in a single form for the first time. The series is less a portrait of now-vanished building, though the station makes itself felt by its shadowy spaces and glowing surfaces, than a study of people at once in transit and in suspension. For Stettner, ‘it was a spacious and dramatic arena where people in the act of travelling went through a mixture of excitement, a silent patience for waiting, and an honest fatigue’, and he found the project exhilarating. However, when completed, the photographs weren’t deemed ‘newsworthy’ enough for publication. But with time and distance their significance has deepened, and this body of work has become recognized as a major work of art.

Table of Contents

Louis Stettner’s Delicate Moment, Adam Gopnik • Penn Station, New York • The Poet of the Magnificent Ordinary, Raphaėl Picon • Afterword, Louis Stettner • Biography, Books, Selected Collections

About this title

About the Author

Louis Stettner is one of the last living members of the avant-garde New York School of Photography. His Penn Station series of the late 1950s represents some of his most important work, gathered here in a single form for the first time.

From the Back Cover

Louis Stettner took a photograph in Penn Station in 1957 of a girl in a party dress stepping from one circular patch of sunlight to another across the vast floor of the station, moving away from the photographer toward the farther reaches of the station interior. The image inspired the photographer to return a year later and create the series of Penn Station photographs. For Stettner, the station 'was a spacious and dramatic arena where people in the act of travelling went through a mixture of excitement, a silent patience for waiting, and an honest fatigue'.
The Penn Station series is a richly evocative and poetic statement about a lost time and place in New York of the 1950s. Though the station makes itself felt by its shadowy spaces and glowing surfaces, the work is not a portrait of the building, but rather a study of the people within it, at once in transit and in suspension. Deemed unpublishable at the time he took the series - Life magazine rejected the photographs for not being newsworthy or unusual enough - the Penn Station series has since come to be recognized as a profound and compelling work of art which is published here in volume form for the first time.

Edition details

• Publisher: Thames and Hudson Ltd
• Publication date: 2015
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0500544506
• ISBN 13: 9780500544501
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 112