Louis Faurer – Photographer
Louis Faurer (1916-2001) is an influential but relatively unknown street photographer who documented the gritty vitality and alienating immediacy of urban life in Post War America. His quick snapshots of ordinary people engaged in unremarkable and often overlooked activities left a lasting impression on a generation of artists including Robert Frank, Lee Friedlander, Garry Winogrand and Diane Arbus. His reputation was such that Edward Steichen, the famous photographer and curator at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, included Faurer’s images in his two seminal exhibitions In and Out of Focus: A Survey of Today’s Photography (1948) and Family of Man (1955). Despite earning the admiration his peers and critics alike, Faurer never attracted the attention of the general public.
Born in Philadelphia in 1916, Faurer attended the School of Commercial Art and Lettering from 1937 to 1940. After purchasing a camera in 1937, he began to take pictures of Philadelphia and the boardwalk of Atlantic City, New Jersey. Faurer earned a living by painting advertising signs and serving as a photographic technician in portrait studios before embarking on a career as a fashion and editorial photographer. His work in fashion continued for thirty more years, appearing in magazines such as Harper’s Bazaar, Vogue and Glamour. Few of his fashion prints and negatives remain; most were thrown out in the late 1960s and 70s. Indeed, Faurer’s body of work is relatively small. Known to hold exacting standards, Faurer labored extensively over every image in the darkroom. He took extraordinary pains in producing specific effects, often applying hot developer to film negatives with a brush and cropping his prints to bring out certain details and erase others. A great perfectionist intent on creating only the most perfect print, Faurer produced stacks of editions only to destroy them. His fastidious approach to his own work, coupled with his focus on commercial photography, may account for his relative anonymity.
Like Robert Frank and other street photographers, Faurer sought inspiration in metropolitan spaces and the motley cast of characters that inhabited them. However, while Frank emphasized the harsh realities of urban life and treated his subjects with cynicism, Faurer celebrated the beauty found in marginal and unremarkable subjects. Equipped with a small 35 mm Leica camera, Faurer documented passing moments be they the bored glance of a doorman, children lolling in boredom on the steps of a hotel or tender gesture of a woman smoothing down the hair over the bald pate of her husband.
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