Louis Stettner Frames Penn Station Nyc Photos in 1958
Louis Stettner returned to penn station nyc in 1958 to photograph people moving through the station after first noticing a girl in a party dress skipping across balls of light on the stone floor a year earlier. His pictures now stand as a visual record of the original station before the 1963 remodeling replaced it.
Stettner's 1958 return
Stettner said, “When things work out, it’s like a miracle. I had the light, the camera was very good, a wonderful lens. Film back then was better.” He was working from an earlier eye for strangers in motion, after making a series of portraits on the New York subway.
He also linked the work to his wartime experience, saying combat photography during World War 2 fostered a deep connection with “my fellow countrymen – fishermen, industrial workers, storekeepers – whom I had previously only brushed up against in Times Square.” That experience shaped the way he looked at ordinary movement through public space.
Penn Station before 1963
Stettner described the original Penn Station as “like living in an art museum; it gave grace and charm to an ordinary function of going from A to B.” He said the replacement design is “universally unloved,” and he later contrasted the old station with the new one by saying, “The whole thing is continually anxiety-ridden.”
His subjects were mostly in worlds of their own, a detail that gives the photographs a quieter register than the crowd scenes around them. Stettner said, “People really got in touch with themselves whilst they were waiting,” and added, “It’s a complex thing, a very profound experience when people travel.”
What the photographs preserve
The station was modeled on the Beaux-Arts Gare d’Orsay in Paris, and Stettner said that today, “it would be quite impossible to get permission to photograph in the railway station.” That makes the 1958 work a fixed record of a place that no longer exists in the same form.
Stettner also said, “Time is the best proof of how valuable a photograph is, or how profound the content is.” For readers looking at Penn Station now, the photographs show what was lost before the 1963 remodeling and why the 1958 series still carries its own weight.
