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IN THE NEWS
April 4, 2018
Das Kupferstich-Kabinett der Staatlichen Kunstsammlungen Dresden hatte schon länger Ankauf genommen. Nun kann es rund 30 Original-Abzügen aus dem fotografischen Werk Fred Stein (1909 - 1967) zeigen.
March 27, 2018
DRESDEN - Sozialist war er und Jude, was ihm die Nazis doppelt zum Feind machte. Recht bald nach der “ Machtergreifung” 1933 floh der 1909 in Dresden geborene angehende Jurist Alfred Stein mit Ehefrau Liselotte nach Paris. Als er 1941 in die USA weiterfloh, war er ein prominenter Fotograf. Den Dresden jetzt mit zwei Ausstellungen wiederentdeckt.
March 27, 2018
In Sachsen kam er zur Welt, in Amerika zu Bekanntheit. Nun entdeckt Dresden den Fotografen Fred Stein wieder.
June 17, 2017
“Mehr Licht” — more light — were Goethe’s famous last words. That deathbed declaration was also the title of Fred Stein’s book, featuring images taken along the streets of Paris and New York, which was published posthumously. What could be more fitting?
March 3, 2017
Fred Stein was born on July 3rd 1909 in Dresden, Germany. The son of a rabbi, he studied law at the University of Leipzig, but was refused admission to the German bar because of his Jewish origins and political ideas (in Dresden at the age of sixteen, he had joined the socialist movement).
February 2, 2014
He was a virtuoso of street photography, capturing the ‘decisive moment’ with perfectly composed images. But Fred Stein was about more than the street, he was also appreciated for his portraits – a fact that photographic history has only lately rediscovered.
December 8, 2013
La Germania dedica la prima retrospettiva, nel Paese d’origine, al fotografo che scattò uno dei ritratti più celebri di Einstein e fermò magnifici istanti di vita a Parigi e a New York
November 30, 2013
Einstein hatte ihm zunächst nur zehn Minuten eingeräumt, sein Porträt aufzunehmen, am Ende bleibt er zwei Stunden in Princeton, die beiden erzählen sich einen Witz nach dem nächsten. Als er Arendt trifft, diskutiert er mit ihr den halben Nachmittag, sie blickt wie aus einem Gedankengang hinaus, der Blick geschärft, eindringlich, lauernd, die Zigarette in der Hand kurz abgesetzt, um gleich weiterzusprechen. Die bierglasbodendicke Brille von Arnold Zweig habe ihn terrorisiert, notiert er, ewig spiegelt sie das Licht, irgendwann beim Sprechen über sein letztes Manuskript neigt der Schriftsteller zufällig den Kopf und sieht nicht mehr aus wie ein geblendeter Otter.
November 19, 2013
You might not know the man behind them, but you surely know his images. Fred Stein fled Germany and became a talented photographer of both street scenes and the famous. His first major German retrospective opens Friday at the Jewish Museum in Berlin.
We were staying at the Warwick Hotel at the corner of Sixth Avenue and 54th, a charming old hotel built in 1926 by William Randolph Hearst for his Hollywood friends whose photos now cover the stairwells and hallways. It was mid-December, on the lip of Christmas, and the city was in a festive mood. I had arranged to meet Peter Stein and his wife Dawn Freer for lunch. Stein is a cinematographer. He has shot over 50 films, T.V. movies, and documentaries and teaches at the Graduate Film School of NYU. His wife is an editor and scriptwriter. But we weren’t getting together to talk about film. We were meeting to talk about Peter’s father.
Stein foi unha das máis sobranceiras figuras da fotografía urbana, deixando unha visión de enorme riqueza do ambiente das cidades de París e Nova York, que serían foco da súa cámara, a primeira nos anos trinta e a segunda nas seguintes décadas.
June 7, 2012
Somehow the legacy of this photographer is only now on its way to gaining the true recognition it deserves. We need not look at many works to realize their quality, their belonging to the time and place of the artist and his contemporaries. Perhaps it was the era and Stein's need to keep on the move, to reinvent and rebuild himself that worked against his earlier establishment. Born in Dresden, Stein studied law but the Nazi Government denied him admission to the bar. Stein and his wife left Germany in 1933 claiming to be on honeymoon. They traveled to Paris where Stein began taking photographs with the Leica they bought as a joint wedding present.
June 1, 2012
The career of Fred Stein (1909-1967) illustrates how easily a talented photographer can be written out of history. Born in Dresden, Germany, Mr. Stein belonged to the generation that documented trouble in Europe with hand-held cameras (in his case, a Leica) during the 1930s. Fleeing Leipzig for Paris in 1933 and France for the U.S. in 1941, he found a home with the Photo League in New York and established a successful studio practice here, specializing in portraiture.
April 8, 2012
The lawyer-turned-photographer—who fled Germany in the nineteen-thirties, moving first to Paris and then to New York—was easily overshadowed by such contemporaries as André Kertész, Lisette Model, and Helen Levitt. But this selection of vintage black-and-white prints makes a strong case for reëvaluating the work, much of which could be mistaken for that of his more famous peers.
November 18, 2011
The years 35/37 : avant-garde photographers are reunited for an exhibition at the legendary Pléiade gallery: Brassaï, Man Ray, André Kertesz, Henri Cartier- Bresson and… Fred Stein. An unknown. Yet this is a photographer who, as early as 1933, fled Germany and befriended Capa and Gerda Taro, and was never without his Leica. He lived, worked, and shared the intimacy of those who were, and remain the greatest intellectuals, thinkers, artists, poets, musicians and writers of the 20th century. They also represented moral consciousness, demonstrating their refusal of a world where dark clouds of intolerance and fascism were forming over Europe.
January 18, 2004
Fred Stein’s black-and-white photographs deal with remembrance. Mr. Stein fled Nazi Germany – first to Paris in 1933 and then, in 1941, to New York. He viewed both cities with an outsider’s fascination and curiosity, as well as a deeply humanistic interest in urban life. Like all great street photographers, he interpreted as he observed.
October, 2003
Broader artistic recognition eluded Fred Stein during his accomplished but relatively short career as a freelance documentary photographer and photojournalist. But a series of recent photography exhibitions in New York, Spain and France, and the release of a limited edition portfolio of Stein’s work, has brought a new appreciation for his substantial achievement as an artist and chronicler of his times. A pioneer in the use of 35mm reportage, Stein transformed his life experiences and political idealism into a compelling and comprehensive visual record of European and American society from the rise of Fascism and Nazi Germany to the aftermath of World War II.
August, 2003
Fred Stein was born on July 3, 1909 in Dresden, Germany. His father (who died when Stein was only six years old) was a rabbi, and his mother was a religion teacher. An independent thinker, Stein became active in socialist and anti-Nazi movements as a teenager. He joined the Socialist Workers’ Party, a non-Communist splinter group of the Social Democrats. He lectured and rode around on his bike distributing anti-Nazi literature. Stein was a brilliant student full of humanist ideals, attending Leipzig University to study law. He obtained his law degree in an impressively short time, but was denied admission to the German bar by the Nazi government for “racial and political reasons.”
June, 2003
Fred Stein knew the demands of the photojournalist’s art. “One moment is all you have,” he wrote. And as this exhibition of vintage and modern prints of 1930s Paris and 1940s New York vividly demonstrated, Stein had a rare ability to capture that moment.
2003
Fred Stein used a camera to show the humanity in the everyday world. Born in Germany in 1909, he became a brilliant law student and a committed anti-Nazi activist. After being denied admission to the German bar by the Nazi government for “racial and political reasons,” and seeing the implications of the Fascist threat beginning to materialize in earnest, Stein fled to Paris in 1933 under the pretext of taking a honeymoon.
December 19, 1999
Like all good photojournalists, Fred Stein (1909-1967) had an eye for intriguing detail and a knack for capturing the revealing moment. But more important, he combined a documentarian’s acumen with an artist’s visual sensibility. This selection of his vintage prints concentrates on the 1930’s, when he began using a hand-held Leica to record the street life of Paris, and the 1940’s in New York, where he settled during World War II.
November 29, 1998
When the Dresden-born photographer Fred Stein (1909-1967) bought his Leica in 1933, he saw the potential for the new, hand-held equipment to facilitate the recording of momentary effects. The purchase coincided with his move to Paris, where, until his departure for New York in 1941, he concentrated on the serendipitous discoveries of the street that seem so memorable.
1998
In 1946, photographer Fred Stein had an opportunity to meet with Albert Einstein, and was allotted 10 minutes to capture the notable physicist on film. However, the minutes turned into two hours as the men discussed art, politics, religion and other issues of the day. Because he was engaged in conversation – and not posed - Einstein’s thoughtfulness is revealed in the resulting images, giving us a glimpse of the great mind at work.
April, 1998
“He died too young, too early. If he had lived another 20 years, he would now be more recognized.” Peter Stein is talking about his father, Fred, whose documentary photographs captured poignant moments in the street life of two of the world’s great cities, and whose portraits sought to reveal the personalities of a number of the artists, writers and politicians of his time.
April, 1997
Among the images that will live forever in the collective consciousness of the Western world are the insightful portraits by Fred Stein. Dedicated as much to humanity as he was to the camera, Stein's mission as a photographer was to capture the souls of those he photographed. His subjects were the educated elite: scientists, artists, writers, architects, and politicians. They were also the man on the street: children, lovers, workers, hobos, and peddlers. He got to know his eminent subjects backward and forward. He read their bodies of work, and knew where they stood in the world, as well as the positions they held in their respective disciplines. When he wasn't photographing his more famous subjects, he was walking the city streets, recording life as it unfolded before him.
September 26, 1954
The report of a likeness and the revelation of character are the two principal goals of the portrait photographer, in the opinion of Fred Stein, whose one-man show of 126 portraits of outstanding personalities, “Creative Minds,” is currently on view at the Hudson Park Branch of the New York Public Library, 10 Seventh Avenue South, where it will hang through October. The gallery is open from 9 a.m. to 9 p.m. Mondays through Thursdays and 9 a.m. to 6 p.m. Fridays.
July, 1944
The camera makes no distinction between famous people and a nobody, between a good friend and a complete stranger, when the shutter opens. But the man behind the camera is influenced by the great moment when he is eye to eye to the important person. Then, the atmosphere acts upon his behavior, forms the kind of conversation, and, consequently, determines the expressions of his subject, too. Sometimes, with celebrities, you are just a spectator of a performance that goes on without even noticing you. All the better!
June, 1936
Should portraitists attempt to educate the public? Should we give them the photographs they want or the photographs we want them to have? I have noticed that many people nowadays prefer enlargements of heads snapped by amateurs in a seaside or garden group. The general belief is that portraits taken under these conditions are thoroughly natural. They are but that is all.
A contest in which photographs of still life become the subjects for stories is one of the interesting ideas which Stein, the Paris photographer, has been trying.
“As one walks along,” he explains, “one frequently sees old and discarded objects abandoned in the street. Frequently these can be used as subjects for interesting photographs in which the subject itself becomes unimportant and in which the composition, the play of light and shade become primeval.”
February, 1952
Fred Stein has recorded the public face of the men of the Thirties and the cities where they once gathered to talk through the night. That age is over. Our decade is not a time of gatherings, conventions, congregations of all parties. As a very young man, Stein roamed all those camping grounds of the European intelligentsia. Rollei or Leica in hands, he shot swiftly and efficiently under the lights of the dais and the stage, and in the street itself.