TALK & BOOK SIGNING: Peter Stein on The Iconic Photographs of Fred Stein

Event date: 
Sunday, August 3, 2014 - 4:00pm
Event address: 
6422 Montgomery St., Suite 6
12572-0482 Rhinebeck
us

This event will be held at Oblong Books & Music, 6422 Montgomery St., Rhinebeck, NY.

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At this event Peter Stein will talk about his father, celebrated photographer Fred Stein, show a short film and share insights and stories of his father's life and work. Followed by a book signing of FRED STEIN: PARIS-NEW YORK - the companion publication for the recent exhibition of Stein's work, curated by Theresia Ziehe, at the Jewish Museum in Berlin.

PETER STEIN, ASC is Professor of Cinematography & Head of Production at the Tisch Graduate Film Program of New York University, having shot over fifty award-winning films & documentaries for major studios and TV networks. He manages the archive of his father, the noted photographer Fred Stein, and is currently producing a documentary film about him. He lives in Dutchess County with his wife Dawn Freer, a film editor.

Fred Stein was born on July 3, 1909 in Dresden, Germany. As a teenager he was deeply interested in politics and became an early anti-Nazi activist. He went to Leipzig University to study law, and obtained a law degree in an impressively short time, but was denied admission to the German bar by the Nazi government for “racial and political reasons.” The threat of Fascism grew more and more dangerous and after the SS began making inquiries about him, Stein fled to Paris in 1933 with his new wife, Liselotte Salzburg, under the pretext of taking a honeymoon.

In Paris they were in the center of a circle of expatriates, intellectuals and artists. In the midst of upheaval, gathering war, and personal penury, Stein began taking photographs. He was a pioneer of the small, hand-held camera, and with the Leica which he and his wife had purchased as a joint wedding present, he went into the streets to photograph scenes of life in Paris. He saw hope and beauty where most people would only see despair. He also became acquainted with and photographed some of the leading personalities of Europe. 

When Germany declared war on France in 1939, Stein was put in an internment camp for enemy aliens near Paris. He managed to escape, and after a hazardous clandestine journey through the countryside, met his wife and baby girl in Marseilles, where they obtained visas through the efforts of the International Rescue Committee. On May 7, 1941, the three boarded the S.S. Winnipeg, one of the last boats to leave France under the protective wing of Varian Fry, an American journalist working to get jewish refugees out of France. They carried only the Leica and some negatives.
 

“I first met Fred when we were both refugees fighting the totalitarian Nazi regime through the rather poor means we had. In his time he was very much in the avant garde, a brilliant photographer inspired by his quest for justice and his concern for for truth so clearly reflected in his photographs. He truly was a man of vision, and his choice of people and subjects is an obvious proof of it.”---Willy Brandt, Chancellor of Germany (Image at Right by Fred Stein 1957)

 “He has recorded the central years of our century with a flood of pictorial impressions, and a multitude of faces famous and anonymous, which will illuminate the period for ever. In my own historical writings, I have found such photographic material of crucial value in recreating the sense of a bygone time. Pictures and words are very different, and on the whole incommensurable things. But words often grope where pictures indelibly suggest or declare, especially when the gifted hand and eye of an artist are at work with the camera. Fred Stein was preeminently such an artist."---Herman Wouk, author (Image at Left by Fred Stein 1955)

 

Images LtoR Copyright Fred Stein: Hannah Arendt 1944, Albert Einstein 1946, Le Corbusier 1937, Fidel Castro 1961, Dobbs New York 1946