Born in Brooklyn in 1922, he started taking pictures of people and things surrounding him as early as the 1930s. As a teenager, he would go to the Metropolitan Museaum’s reading room to learn about the history of American and European photography. He went on to study photography at the Photo League, while being a regular visitor of Alfred Stieglitz’ gallery, An American Place. After fighting in the Pacific during the Second World War, he came to Paris in 1946, itinially for a few weeks. He would end up spending there a big part of his life, dividing his time between the two continents.

In 2015, Louis Stettner was still photographing in the Alpilles mountains, with a weighty 20x25cm view camera. He passed away on October 13, 2016.

His work has been exhibited throughout the world, at the Moderna Museet in Stockholm (1959), the Photographer’s Gallery in London (1982), the Centre de la Photographie in Geneva (1992) and the submarine Base in Bordeaux (2009). His photographs are part of many public collections, among which those of the Centre Pompidou, the Maison Européenne de la Photographie in Paris, the Art Institute of Chicago, the MoMA, the Metropolitan Museum of New York and the Victoria and Albert Museum in London.