[The Guardian] The big picture: Louis Stettner on commuters in 1950s New York

The big picture: Louis Stettner on commuters in 1950s New York

The American photographer’s connection with his countrymen shines through in portraits of people going about their daily lives

The ability to manipulate a broadsheet newspaper on a crowded commuter train is one of those skills, like full attention and mental arithmetic, mostly lost to our digital world. Louis Stettner’s photographs from the 1950s are fascinated by these images of a New York newsprint world, the ways in which ordinary Americans demanded information morning and night, as if they had a feeling that might soon be going out of style.

Many of Stettner’s pictures of that period were taken at Penn station. They contrasted with an earlier series of portraits taken on the New York subway. There, subjects had looked his camera squarely in the eye. Here, his people are mostly in worlds of their own; he liked scenes from “the smoke, fumes, the bustle” of the city, in which there were “still moments or stray corners that have sometimes touched eternity”.

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