People Of Penn Station, NYC In 1958

“I celebrate the human condition”
–Louis Stettner’s individuals of Penn Station

It started in 1957, when Louis Stettner noticed a lady in get together costume skipping throughout balls of gentle taking part in on the stone flooring at Pennsylvania Station.

Stettner returned a 12 months later to seize the individuals transferring by this public area. They contrasted with an earlier sequence of portraits he’d taken on the New York subway. There, topics had appeared his digicam squarely in the attention. Here, his persons are largely in worlds of their very own; he appreciated scenes from “the smoke, fumes, the bustle” of town, in which there have been “still moments or stray corners that have sometimes touched eternity”.

Penn Station 1958

He attributed his work as a fight photographer throughout world war 2as fostering inside him a deep reference to “my fellow countrymen – fishermen, industrial workers, storekeepers – whom I had previously only brushed up against in Times Square”.

After the warfare, I traveled round Paris for a number of years. There he made associates with fellow photographers Brassai, Henri Cartier-Bresson, Robert Doisneau, Man Ray and Paul Strand.

“I always felt the difference between New York and Paris nourishes you by the fact that it’s very beautiful,” he said. “You see living history all around you. The whole flavor of the place is one of harmony and beauty. It raises the human spirit. New York does the same thing, but it’s more through struggle. Everyone has to be a little bit of a hero. Your spirit is raised through struggle and conflict. “It still brings out the best in people, but in a totally different way.”

“When things work out, it’s like a miracle. I had the light, the camera was very good, a wonderful lens. Film back then was better. Today, it would be quite impossible to get permission to photograph in the railway station. A lot of forces came together which made it very favorable.”
–Louis Stettner

With the transforming of Penn Station in 1963, Stettner could not have identified how his work would grow to be such a report of the unique station’s Beaux-Arts aesthetic. (The station is modeled on the Beaux-Arts Gare d’Orsay in Paris.) It was, he say, “like living in an art museum; it gave grace and charm to an ordinary function of going from A to B.”

The substitute design is universally unloved.

“The whole thing is continually anxiety-ridden,” he say of touring by the “new” Penn Station. “People rush here and there. They never post where the train is going to go, or which track it is. People bump into each other. There is no space.”

Penn Station 1958

“Time is the best proof of how valuable a photograph is, or how profound the content is. The fact these photographs get more exciting with time is a good sign.”
–Louis Stettner

Penn Station 1958

“People really got in touch with themselves while they were waiting. It’s a complex thing, a very profound experience when people travel.”
–Louis Stettner

“I work on intuition. If something strikes me as significant, I don’t censor what’s around me. I don’t come with any ideas to impose on reality; I let reality speak to me.”
–Louis Stettner