A native of Philadelphia, Louis Faurer (1916–2001) was drawn to the energy of Times Square and settled in New York in 1947, where he would relentlessly stalk solitude in the crowd, always from a distance. He was not interested in reporting or journalism; instead, he explored the fragility of things and manifestations of the unconscious. He built a remarkable body of work commissioned by prestigious journals such as Flair, Harper’s Bazaar, Glamour, and Mademoiselle, which he treated with undisguised contempt—a paradoxical inner conflict that could only be resolved by his sense of humor. This work allowed him to earn a living and to develop a more personal oeuvre in the streets of New York.
Trained as an artist, Faurer launched his career by creating advertising posters and drawing caricatures on Atlantic City boardwalks. Aged 21, he bought his first camera and won a prize offered by the Philadelphia daily Evening Public Ledger. Market Street, Philadelphia’s major commercial thoroughfare, became the setting of his first photographs. In 1947, he was recruited by Lilian Bassman, the then artistic director of Junior Bazaar, and moved to New York. There, he met Robert Frank who would become his close friend and with whom he regularly shared a darkroom. Sensitive to what he saw, Faurer did not hide his ambivalence as he selected the anonymous faces encountered in the banality of the street: he plucked them from the reigning melancholy, from the film noir atmosphere, and from the pervading despair which was his own lot. Profoundly honest, rejecting the excess or the obscenity of an overly violent scene, Louis Faurer willfully empathized with his subjects; he often saw himself in them: this identification was the essence of his approach. He would thus meet his own double, and even thrust himself into the frame as a reflection. Each of his images was a gauntlet thrown down in the face of silence and indifference, theirs and his own.
Louis Faurer attracted the attention of Edward Steichen, the photography curator at MoMA at the time, who included his work in the 1948 exhibition In and Out of Focus. “Louis Faurer, a newcomer to the field of documentary reporting, is a lyrical poet of photography who seeks magic and finds it in all walks of life,” commented Steichen. Subsequently, Steichen featured Faurer’s photographs in several other exhibitions, including The Family of Man in 1955.
Agnès Sire
The exhibition was curated by Agnès Sire, director of the Fondation Henri Cartier-Bresson, in collaboration with the Estate Louis Faurer, the Howard Greenberg Gallery, and Deborah Bell Photographs. The exhibition is jointly produced with Centro José Guerrero in Grenada.
Louis Faurer
September 9 to December 18 2016
Fondation Cartier-Bresson
2 Impasse Lebouis
75014 Paris, France
