“A photographer’s style, the way he or she gives shape or form to whatever they photograph, is inevitably influenced by the photographer’s past. Only by honestly building on what we have inherited can we genuinely make a new contribution. Every creative photographer is in a sense the biographer of every photographer that has gone before them”
~ Louis Stettner
(1922-2016)
Louis took advantage of the GI bill which allowed him to discover the joys and small miracles that Paris had to offer after the war. It became his lifelong second home. He embraced the city and the city embraced him and he connected with some of the greatest photographers who were working there primarily Brassai and the great Edouard Boubat. They became his great friends and consciously or unconsciously he was swept up in this wonderful era and produced work on a par with the great French humanists of the era. This tender image of a mother and child is pure brilliant "humanist photography". Something Henri Cartier Bresson, Robert Doisneau , Sabine Weiss, Willy Ronis and many others could have been very proud of. There certainly was something special in the air and the water and the wine in that magical era that we all get lost in.
