"Young Girl playing in Circles"

Penn Station, New York City

gelatin silver print on cardboard

signed and numbered on recto

The first photograph taken in the series Penn Station from 1953, this image of a young girl playing in circles of sunlight on the waiting room floor inspired Louis Stettner to return to photograph people in Penn Station in 1958, just five years before the historic station was demolished.
(Christoph Fuchs)

Preservation

While it is now commonly accepted that the preservation movement in New York City evolved from more than one single demolition, the mystique of Penn Station as the impetus for New York City’s Landmarks Law lives on. The latest in the string of works immortalizing the iconic train station is Penn Station, New York, a book of photographs by Louis Stettner. One of the last living members of the avant-garde New York School of photography, which challenged many of the long-accepted fundamentals of the art form, Stettner’s Penn Station series of the late 1950s represents some of his most significant work. These photographs are gathered together for the first time in this book, creating an intimate portrait of the building and a study of the people who travelled through it.
As reported in The New York Times, it was New York City’s dynamism that led Stettner to practice his photography in Penn Station; amid the City’s hustle, Stettner found the train station a place where he could catch his breath. “Penn Station was a pause,” he said, “where people could get in touch with themselves, and a way that I could get in touch with them.” Stettner, who now lives in Paris, told the Times that he is saddened that such a dignified public space was demolished, especially since its replacement is so off-putting. “The whole thing is continually anxiety-ridden,” he said of traveling through today’s Penn Station. He likened the original 1910 structure by McKim, Mead & White to “living in an art museum; it gave grace and charm to an ordinary function of going from A to B.” Stettner says today that in 1958 the thought of losing Penn Station seemed unimaginable.
“What attracted me most was that this was a place that gave dignity to people. A place where you felt you were living in a better world. It was marble and iron and very graceful, a place with high ceilings that enforced the dignity of the human race—a place where you felt more worthy than on the street. You felt good there.”
Although Stettner and the publications to which he originally submitted this series of photographs deemed them as un-newsworthy and “just people in Penn Station,” with time, distance, and the loss of the inspiring structure, their significance has been recognized, and the series is now considered a major work of art.  […]
(New York Preservation Archive Project, May 19, 2016)