Louis Faurer

Louis Faurer (1916-2001) was one of the most poetic American photographers of the mid-twentieth century, whose haunting images of New York City street life have secured his place among the great figures of the New York School of photography. Born in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, he began photographing as a young man and moved to New York in the 1940s, where he quickly became part of the community of postwar photographers who were transforming the medium into a serious personal and artistic pursuit.

In New York, Faurer formed a close and lasting friendship with Robert Frank, and the two photographers influenced each other deeply during the years surrounding Frank's landmark project The Americans. Faurer's own photographs of Times Square, transient hotels, subway cars, and the anonymous urban figures who populated the city's streets carry a distinctive melancholy and lyrical mystery, capturing New York at its most restless and unguarded moments. Working with a small-format camera and available light, he produced images that blur the line between documentary and dream, marked by their tender attention to solitary figures and their sensitivity to the surreal geometry of city life at night.

Alongside his personal photographic work, Faurer built a substantial parallel career as a fashion photographer, contributing to Harper's Bazaar, Vogue, Junior Bazaar, and Flair, and he spent significant years working in Europe. For much of the mid-twentieth century his personal work remained relatively unknown outside the community of photographers, but he was rediscovered late in life as scholars and curators began to reassess the New York School and its poetic wing. His photographs are held in the Museum of Modern Art, the Metropolitan Museum, and other major American collections, and he received an important posthumous retrospective at MoMA that confirmed his standing as one of the essential photographers of his generation.