CHOO-CHOO BABY

Louis Stettner is the master of a 1950s-era Penn Station

DAVID KAMP

It's been drummed into our heads that commuting is a dreary business, the province of logy working stiffs and sad, bibulous sack-suiters out of Cheever. But the images collected in "Louis Stettner: Train of Thought," an exhibition ft running from April 18 through June 1 at Manhattan's BonI ni Benrubi Gallery, suggest otherwise. The photographs, I taken by Stettner as he prowled the glorious original Penn Station with his Leica in the late 1950s, capture moments of contentment and pensiveness: a smoky game of bridge glanced sidelong through a train window; two sets of stockinged feet getting a well-deserved airing against a railcar wall; a jumble of fedora'd newspaper readers, all seemingly identical, but each lost in his own world. "It's people getting back into themselves, getting their balance back at the end of the day," says the Brooklyn-born, Paris-based photographer, who now, at age 73, is finally getting the recognition he deserves in his native land. This fall, Rizzoli will publish Stettner's New York, featuring 100 photographs taken over the course of 50 years. Among them will be some of the Penn Station shots, but "Train of Thought" is no exercise in When Rail Was King nostalgia. Its charms are subtler, and timeless—conveying, in its author's words, that "there's a certain amount of poetry in taking a train."

Arts