Sensitive, singular, there is no shortage of adjectives to describe what makes the specificity of Louis Faurer’s gaze. Born in 1916 in Philadelphia, he remains less known in France than Helen Levitt, Roberto Franco or William Klein who also worked on the streets. The twenty prints presented at the Les Douches gallery allow us to take the measure of this talent who also contributed to giving his noble letters to the street photographywhich over the decades has established itself as a genre in its own right.
Louis Faurer’s encounter with New York – where he settled in 1947 – was instrumental, both emotionally and photographically. ” The years from 1946 to 1951 were important. I photographed most days and the hypnotic sunset light guided me through Times Square. My way of life was to shoot at night in the neighborhood and develop and print my photos in Robert Frank’s darkroom. He exclaimed: ‘What a city, what a city! ‘ *, he says.
It is in fact in New York that Louis Faurer makes friends with the Swiss, who has also just arrived in the city. The latter is not yet the recognized photographer that we show today as an example: he will not travel until 1955 and his founding book, Americans, will not see the light until 1958. The two men become friends and must surely discuss their practice, then marginal, far from reporting, and leave a lot of room for subjectivity, playing on the blurs, often flirting with abstraction.
It was in New York that Louis Faurer produced his major works, a body of work that he himself considered a personal work, having freed himself from the bond of commission. He chooses to preserve his freedom of creation by earning a living in fashion. Recruited by Lilian Bassman, then artistic director of Junior Bazaar, he will then work for the prestigious Style, Harper’s Bazaar, Charm or Miss. “I tasted and accepted the proposals of the fifties and sixties. LifeCowles Publications, Hearst and Conde Nast have allowed me to continue my personal work “.
Fascinated by New York, Louis Faurer offers a phantasmagoric vision of the city, playing with shadows and reflections, weaving architectures in complex compositions where it is often difficult to distinguish reality from illusion. A bold style whose goal is not to faithfully transcribe reality but to capture sensations and atmospheres. A point of view also distant from that of the humanists who in those same years marked the photographic production across the Atlantic.
Because if like his European contemporaries his favorite place is the street, unlike them, Louis Faurer is not looking for anecdotes or colorful images. And if, like them, the human being is at the center of his work, he captures the crowd walking on the asphalt, the smiles of a group of friends gathered in a convertible on Broadway, the silhouettes in Chinese shadow of maneuvers that write the letters d ‘a cinema … Freezes frames of the course of existence, moments of life that escape our attention in the present. Louis Faurer, in his own way, reminds us of the value of photography, its ability to stop time and stop life.
His images show an America that no longer exists today, giving it an undeniable documentary value. However, they are not imbued with nostalgia because they capture universal and timeless moments of life. And also at times moments of grace, like this exchange of looks full of emotion between a man and a woman. Her work is rather melancholy to use the title of the exhibition. The magic of Faurer’s images owes much to his smoky black and white and his mastery of composition. But also about the fact that he shoots at nightfall.
“Louis Faurer: The Melancholy Guardian”until 29 October 2022. At the same time, Les Douches la Galerie presents an exhibition of Frank Horvathtitled “The Unexpected”.
* Text taken from the catalog published on the occasion of the exhibition at the Henri Cartier-Bresson Foundation, “Louis Faurer”, Steidl editions, 2016.
