| Louis Faurer (1916–2001) was one of the most talented and incisive photographers working in America between 1937 and 1955. His impact may be seen clearly in the work of Robert Frank, Diane Arbus, Lee Friedlander, and a host of other contemporary photographers. Nevertheless, he has been overlooked in most histories of photography. This dissertation seeks to restore his importance through a detailed investigation of his most significant photographs and also of how and why his work came to be omitted from the historical record. In the process, it uncovers a complex network of cultural idiosyncrasies at the heart of postwar American society that not only shaped Louis Faurer's photographs but formed the foundation of American cultural history after World War II.; The first chapter describes Faurer's background and early photographic experiences in Philadelphia and Atlantic City. Particularly important to his work at this time were the documentary photographs published by the Farm Security Administration in the 1930s and images by Walker Evans, Lisette Model, and Helen Levitt. Faurer's fashion photography is the subject of Chapter 2, which observes a close relationship between his independent street photographs and his images produced on assignment for commercial fashion periodicals between 1947 and 1951. Chapter 3 identifies a strong stylistic and conceptual affiliation between Faurer's photography and contemporaneous film noir, and Chapter 4 focuses on the relationship between Faurer's photography and Abstract Expressionism. All three—Faurer's photographs, film noir, and Abstract Expressionism—shared an emphatic insistence on subjective experience, personal identity, and the limits of representation, as these chapters make clear. Chapter 4 also investigates the context in which the Museum of Modern Art (the most important exhibitor of photographs in America at the time) displayed Faurer's work and Abstract Expressionism, reflecting upon the consequences for Faurer in the history of photography. A final section is devoted to the relationship between Faurer and his close friend and younger colleague, Robert Frank—a discussion which reveals not only the contrast between two different generations of photographers but between two different stages in the institutionalization of the photographic medium. |
