From September 9 to December 18, 2016, The Fondation Henri Cartier-Bresson dedicates an exhibition to the American photographer, Louis Faurer. This show is the occasion to discover this artist who has not been the subject of an exhibition in France since 1992.
A native of Philadelphia, Louis Faurer moved to New York after the War, as if irresistibly pulled into the life of Times Square, where he homed in, objectively and pitilessly, on loneliness in the crowd. Reporting held little interest for him, and journalism even less; he was drawn – as the captions to his photographs sometimes indicate – to the poetic side: the fragility of things and the unconscious revelation.
Louis Faurer, «Win, Place, and Show,» 3rd Avenue El at 53rd Street, New York, c.1946-1948 © Estate Louis Faurer
He carried out much-admired commissions for leading magazines including Flair, Junior Bazaar, Glamour and Mademoiselle. This gave rise to an unfeigned self-contempt and a paradoxical inner division only humor could counter.
Accident, New York, 1952 © Louis Faurer Estate, Courtesy Deborah Bell
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These assignments earned a living and helped him pursue a more personal work in New York streets. Profoundly honest, he refused the excessiveness (or obscenity) of violent scenes that might humiliate his subjects, and deliberately projected himself into the people he photographed; and if he often recognized himself in them, this was the whole point.
Louis Faurer, 42nd Street, New York, c. 1948 © Estate Louis Faurer
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Sometimes he encountered his double, or even appeared in shot as a reflection. Each of his images was “a challenge to silence and indifference” – theirs and his own.
The exhibition is curated by Agnès Sire, The Fondation Henri Cartier-Bresson director in collaboration with The Louis Faurer Estate in New York, Howard Greenberg Gallery in New York and Deborah Bell Photographs. The show includes a hundred prints and documents has been The exhibition is co-produced with the Centro José Guerrero in Grenada.
The book Louis Faurer is published by Steidl and is available in French and English. It proposes two original texts by Louis Faurer and Walter Hopps as well as an essay written by Susan Kismaric.
FONDATION HENRI CARTIER-BRESSON
2, impasse Lebouis – 75014 Paris
