Louis Stettner (New York, 1922 - Paris, 2016), was 13 years old the first time he received a camera as a gift. Soon after, he began to visit the Metropolitan Museum of Art assiduously, where he had the opportunity to get to know the various issues of Camera Work magazine. Through its pages he became familiar with the work of photographers such as Alfred Stieglitz, Clarence H. White and Paul Strand, who made a deep impression on him. Shortly afterwards he joined Stieglitz's circle and through the Photo League he became acquainted with the work of Weegee, Sid Grossman, Edward Weston and Lewis Hine.

At the age of eighteen he enlisted in the army as a war photographer in the Pacific, and upon his return to New York he continued to work for the Photo League. In 1947 he traveled to Paris, where he would reside for the next five years and where he would be in charge of the first retrospective of French photography in New York at the Photo League gallery in 1948.During this process he met Brassai, whom he would consider his teacher and with whom he would establish a relationship that would last throughout the years.

In 1950 Stettner returned to New York where he began to work for various magazines such as Life, Time, Fortune and Paris-Match, and during this period he also began to write about photography, something he would do periodically from then on.At the end of the 1960s Stettner began to teach at Brooklyn College, part of Long Island University.His political commitment, which he remained active throughout his life, led him to demonstrate against the Vietnam War and, at a time when few others did, he spent five weeks photographing in the Soviet Union.

In the early 1980's he stops teaching and writing and devotes himself to researching his own work, in 1990 he returns to France and begins to paint and sculpt.In 2001 he was named Chevalier des Arts et des Lettres by the French government and during this period he began one of his color series, Manhattan Pastoral, which he made during his summers in New York City, as well as a project with a large format camera in the Alpilles massif in Provence, France.The artist died in Paris on October 13, 2016 after the closing of his exhibition Ici Ailleurs, at the Centre George Pompidou.