Louis Faurer

Times Square

Faurer was born in Philadelphia in 1916. After studying commercial art, he began working professionally in photography in the late 1930s. The Philadelphia Museum of Art retrospective spans 1937–83 and places particular emphasis on his New York work of 1947–51.^*1 In a 1979 text, Faurer recalled photographing almost every day, following the twilight light to Times Square, then developing and printing at night in Robert Frank’s darkroom until the routine became a “way of life.”^*18 New York at night grew from this repeated daily rhythm; the visual language followed the routine. He also wrote that commercial assignments for magazines such as Harper’s Bazaar supported him and made his private photography possible.^*18 Magazine work and nighttime street photography were parallel circuits within the same New York life. Getty’s authority record gives the basic biography: an American photographer born in Philadelphia in 1916 and deceased in 2001.^*3

Times Square and Fourteenth Street

Faurer repeatedly photographed Times Square, Fourteenth Street, movie theaters, buses, and ferries—places dense with people, advertising text, and artificial light. The Philadelphia Museum of Art catalogue describes theater lines, ushers, B-movie signs, and passersby as part of a melancholic, psychologically charged image of the city.^*4 The National Gallery of Art’s The Streets of New York places Faurer with Roy DeCarava, Ted Croner, and others in the history of New York photography between Walker Evans’s American Photographs and Robert Frank’s The Americans.^*5 Neon in Faurer’s work carries more than the visual excitement of the metropolis. Lettering overlaps bodies, glass reflects another space, and faces emerge from shadow, bringing the prosperity promised by advertising into the same field as individual isolation. He keeps the street’s information overload intact and turns density itself into psychological pressure. In Staten Island Ferry (1946), reflections in the ferry window overlap with the distant city and fragments of seated figures; the Jewish Museum describes the image in terms of people separated from one another within the metropolis.^*2 Reflection and doubling structure the division between person and city and become part of the photograph’s psychological organization.^*2

Figures at the Margins

Faurer’s repeated attention to beggars, street vendors, people with disabilities, and visibly isolated figures was rooted in a form of self-projection; he was not collecting social “types.” The Fondation Henri Cartier-Bresson retrospective notes that he avoided excessively violent situations that might humiliate his subjects, consciously projected himself into the people he photographed, and often found himself in them.^*19 The Met likewise emphasizes his recurring attention to people at the social margins during the apparent prosperity of postwar America.^*6 His proximity seeks continuity with the anxiety and solitude of anonymous others instead of organizing poverty or disability as representative social cases. In some photographs the photographer’s own reflection enters the picture, disturbing a clean division between observer and observed.^*19 Smithsonian Magazine has similarly described his recurring interest in Times Square light and marginalized figures as a way of setting the psychology of a still person against the movement of the surrounding city.^*7

Reflections, Double Exposures, and Darkroom Intervention

Faurer described his motivation as an urgent desire to record life as he “sees” and “feels” it.^*20 Low light, reflections, blur, double exposure, and darkroom intervention recur as ways of keeping visible facts and the sensations produced in the moment within the same image, instead of classifying the street with documentary clarity. In New York, N.Y. (1946), The Met identifies the white form at lower left as a darkroom addition that heightens psychological tension.^*8 The Fondation Henri Cartier-Bresson also notes Faurer’s active use of blur, superimposed negatives, and grain produced by nighttime illumination.^*19 These procedures leave interruptions, overlaps, and delays of seeing on the photographic surface. His subjectivity lies less in dramatizing the people he photographs than in allowing unstable perception to remain visible.

Frank, Klein, and Arbus

Faurer and Robert Frank were close in late-1940s New York and shared a darkroom. Faurer’s 1947 portrait Robert Frank is held by the National Portrait Gallery.^*10 Their work nevertheless develops different forms of subjective street photography. Faurer repeatedly returned to Times Square and Fourteenth Street, layering people with advertising, glass, and nighttime light to probe the psychology of a single city. Frank edited his 1955–57 travels across the United States into The Americans, connecting race, class, political ritual, and consumer culture at a national scale.^*24 From 1954 onward, William Klein used wide-angle lenses, close range, grain, tilted framing, and page layout to turn New York’s collisions into an aggressive visual field.^*23 Diane Arbus later isolated figures from the city and concentrated on frontal encounter and bodily specificity. Faurer’s people remain embedded in neon, advertising, reflections, and darkness; the urban environment itself becomes part of their psychological situation. The Met’s reference to his influence on Frank, Friedlander, and Arbus is tied to this simultaneous subjectivization of city and person.^*8 San Gennaro Festival, New York City (1950), now at MFAH, came from Robert Frank’s collection, leaving a material trace of their exchange in the photograph’s provenance.^*11

From the Photo League to Psychological Street Photography

In the 1930s and 1940s, the Photo League linked labor, housing, and poverty to collective study and social reform, using street photography to make social problems visible.^*21 Faurer was not a member. Although he also photographed people at the margins of the city, he did not organize them as examples of class or poverty. Advertising text, window reflections, shadow, and blur overlap the figure, while his own loneliness and unease enter the construction of the image. The Milwaukee Art Museum exhibition Street Seen: The Psychological Gesture in American Photography, 1940–1959 brought Lisette Model, Faurer, Ted Croner, Saul Leiter, Klein, and Frank together as part of a shift from social record toward psychological and subjective street photography.^*22 Within that transition, Faurer was treating the street as a site of unstable perception before the major photobook culture of the 1950s was fully established.

Fashion Magazines and Private Photography

Faurer worked in fashion for Harper’s Bazaar, Vogue, Flair, Seventeen, and other magazines over many years. MFAH describes a career in which the precision applied to a model’s line and expression in magazine work coexisted with psychologically unstable figures in his private street photographs.^*12 Postwar American magazines, under art directors such as Alexey Brodovitch, modernized the relation among photography, typography, and page layout and provided a livelihood for photographers including Faurer and Frank.^*13 In Faurer’s case, the clear presentation of the figure demanded by commercial photography contrasts with the reflection, darkness, and cropping of the private work. Both depend on his ability to organize artificial urban light and bodily posture quickly; according to use, that skill divides between the body presented as a commodity and the body isolated within the city.

The 1981 Exhibition and 2002 Retrospective

Faurer was not as widely known early in his career as he is today. The exhibition history for NGA’s Champion shows the 1981 University of Maryland exhibition Photographs from Philadelphia and New York, 1937–1973 as an important moment of reassessment.^*14 A major retrospective organized by the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston in 2002 traveled to the Addison Gallery, the Art Institute of Chicago, and other venues before reaching the Philadelphia Museum of Art in 2003.^*1 ICP’s library holds the accompanying 2002 monograph; research by Anne Wilkes Tucker and others became a standard source for later study.^*15 Faurer’s reputation was thus built in stages through solo exhibitions, retrospectives, catalogue scholarship, and entry into public collections from the 1980s onward. MoMA currently makes thirteen works available online, sustaining his place within a museum history of postwar American photography.^*9 The Smithsonian American Art Museum’s Fifth Avenue, New York, New York is another example of his New York street work entering major public collections.^*17

A Junction in Postwar New York Photography

Faurer occupies a junction among several histories of postwar New York photography. The Photo League’s reformist documentary, the sophistication of magazine culture, the subjective turn associated with Klein and Frank in the 1950s, and the experiments of Friedlander and Arbus in the 1960s each reorganized the relation between city and person in different ways. From the late 1940s, Faurer repeatedly photographed the nighttime territory of Times Square within that transition, placing socially marginal figures and the artificial environment of advertising and neon in the same image. The Jewish Museum’s New York: Capital of Photography brought Hine, DeCarava, Model, Faurer, Klein, and Arbus together to describe New York photography as multiple lineages in which social criticism, immigrant culture, magazines, and authorial subjectivity intersected.^*16 Faurer’s early position within this history connects the reform-oriented documentary of the 1930s with the increasingly psychological and personal urban photography of the 1950s and 1960s.