Louis Stettner

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.