LouisFaurer

Louis Faurer (1916, Philadelphia – 2001, New York) was an American candid and street photographer whose work, though admired by insiders such as Robert Frank, William Eggleston, and Edward Steichen, never achieved the broad public recognition granted to his best-known contemporaries. He bought his first camera in 1937 from the photographer Ben Somoroff and soon made his way to Manhattan and into fashion photography, sharing a darkroom and studio with Robert Frank and befriending Walker Evans, who introduced him to Alexander Liberman at Vogue.

Faurer worked professionally for Vogue, Harper's Bazaar, Junior Bazaar, Mademoiselle, Elle, Glamour, Life, and Look for more than two decades, but it is his personal photography of the 1940s through 1960s — made on the streets of New York and his native Philadelphia — for which he is best remembered. Robert Frank described him in 1994 as an artist whose “eye is on the pulse” of the city, with “deep sympathy” for its lonely Times Square people. Faurer experimented restlessly with blur, grain, double exposures, sandwiched negatives, and reflections; his 1950 photographs of Robert and Mary Frank at the San Gennaro Festival, exploiting shallow depth of field and halation, were included by Edward Steichen in the world-touring Museum of Modern Art exhibition The Family of Man (1955), following his earlier inclusion in Steichen's In and Out of Focus (1948).

Faurer lived and worked in Paris between 1969 and 1974, and from the mid-1970s to mid-1980s taught at Parsons School of Design, Yale University, the University of Virginia, and Stockton State College. In 1984, struck by a car while running for a New York City bus, he was seriously injured and never photographed again.

A major retrospective organized by the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston traveled to the Addison Gallery of American Art, the Museum of Photographic Arts, the Art Institute of Chicago, and the Philadelphia Museum of Art in 2002–2003, and in 2016 the Henri Cartier-Bresson Foundation in Paris presented a comprehensive exhibition of his work, accompanied by a Steidl monograph.