Louis Faurer American, 1916-2001

Louis Faurer (1916–2001) photographed New York at night for two decades yet remained known chiefly among fellow photographers. A quiet, independent artist, he never received the recognition accorded to many of his contemporaries during his lifetime. Those who understood his work best, among them Robert Frank, William Eggleston, and Edward Steichen, recognized its singularity. Time later described him as the missing link between the documentary photography of the Depression and the more personal, psychologically complex work that emerged in the 1960s.

Born in Philadelphia in 1916 to Polish immigrant parents, Faurer studied at the School of Commercial Art and Lettering and spent summers drawing caricatures on the Atlantic City boardwalk. He bought his first camera in 1937 from the photographer Ben Somoroff, worked as a photographic technician in portrait studios, and served in the Signal Corps during the Second World War. During this period, he commuted to New York to attend Alexey Brodovitch’s Design Laboratory.

At the Laboratory, Faurer met Robert Frank. The two shared a darkroom and studio on Madison Avenue, became lifelong friends, and Faurer eventually moved into Frank’s loft. Walker Evans, whose work Faurer had long admired, introduced him to Alexander Liberman at Vogue. For more than twenty years, Faurer worked as a fashion photographer for Vogue, Junior Bazaar, where he served as art director in 1947, Harper’s Bazaar, Mademoiselle, Glamour, Elle, Flair, Charm, Seventeen, Life, and Look. From 1968 to 1974, he also photographed for European magazines in Paris and London.

Throughout these years, Faurer continued to pursue the personal work on which his reputation ultimately rests. Working close to his subjects and often in difficult light, he photographed the people who inhabited Times Square and midtown Manhattan after dark, along with shopfront reflections, box-office queues, moviegoers, and theater ushers. His images convey an undercurrent of unease absent from his commercial work, transforming the everyday street into a psychologically charged, sometimes disorienting world. Associated with the New York School of photography, Faurer occupies a distinctive position between Walker Evans’s documentary precision, and the introspective, subjective vision Robert Frank would develop further in The Americans.

Edward Steichen included Faurer in In and Out of Focus at The Museum of Modern Art in 1948 and in The Family of Man in 1955. His first solo exhibition followed in 1959, but his work subsequently fell largely out of view. A rediscovery began in 1976, when a mutual friend introduced him to the curator Walter Hopps. Faurer died in New York in 2001, aged eighty-four. The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, presented a retrospective of his work the following year.