Stettner  born in 1922, died in 2016, is a celebrated American photographer whose  work includes iconic images of Paris and New York. He was born and  raised in Brooklyn, New York but moved to Paris in the 1950s, where he  now lives permanently with his family.  

Louis has photographed Paris and New York for over 60 years,  capturing the changes in the people, culture, and architecture of both  cities. Using both black-and-white and color images, his work documents  fleeting moments in the life of the cities, moments that often cannot be  recaptured. Stettner has documented the architectural and cultural  evolution of Paris and New York, making his archive of thousands of  images an important resource. Few photographers have such an extensive  archive of both cities, one that includes historic images of each city's  most celebrated landmarks and the daily lives of its citizens. His work has an unforced naturalistic quality to it, as he sought to  capture the ordinary, every day lives of his subjects. He was  particularly interested in documenting the lives of the working class in  each city and he demonstrates much sensitivity in this endeavor,  photographing them with great dignity. A limited amount of his work is  devoted to still life and landscape images. Additionally, his paintings  and sculptures tend to be abstract and in sharp contrast to his clear,  vivid photographic images. As a teenager and young man, Stettner was a regular visitor to the  Metropolitan Museum of Art to explore its photographic prints  collection. His first camera was a wooden view camera and today he still  shoots with film rather than moving to digital images. Stettner studied  and taught at the Photo League until he went to Paris after the Second  World War. He received his Bachelor of Arts, Photography & Cinema  I.D.H.E.C. at Paris University. Throughout his life, he has gotten to  know and work with many great photographers.