Out of Exile: The Photography of Fred Stein
9/1/2023 | 55m 58sVideo has Closed Captions
Forced into exile by the Nazis in 1933, Fred Stein became a photographer.
A vivid, filmic depiction of the dramatic life of pioneering street photographer, Fred Stein. The Nazi menace in 1933 forced him to flee to Paris, where he learned photography. The camera inspired him, and he walked the streets, capturing images of timeless beauty. But when the war came, he had to flee across the embattled countryside, in a narrow escape.
Out of Exile: The Photography of Fred Stein
9/1/2023 | 55m 58sVideo has Closed Captions
A vivid, filmic depiction of the dramatic life of pioneering street photographer, Fred Stein. The Nazi menace in 1933 forced him to flee to Paris, where he learned photography. The camera inspired him, and he walked the streets, capturing images of timeless beauty. But when the war came, he had to flee across the embattled countryside, in a narrow escape.
How to Watch Out of Exile: The Photography of Fred Stein
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Learn Moreabout PBS online sponsorship[Negative sliding into place] [Hitler shouting in German in distance] ♪ [Negative sliding into place] [Click of enlarger] ♪ [Crowds chanting "Sieg Heil!"]
♪ Man: What makes a picture great is always difficult to define.
Woman: It's something that just excites you.
There's something about it.
Woman: In his pictures are so many small things to discover.
♪ Man: An ambiance, a kind of piece of poetry.
♪ Man: Nobody knows the Fred Stein story.
♪ Woman: What makes an artist's work belong in art history?
Who decides?
[Paper rustling] Man: When you look over the photographer, you are working for a kind of consistent work, a bunch of pictures which are consistent, I mean, all together they work, and you try to select maybe 200 or 300 pictures, which are very similar and which give a view on the style of the photographer, what importance he had, why he was working in this way and what was the difference between him and other photographers.
♪ Sometimes in the history of photography, you miss somebody because you don't know the work.
♪ [Bells ringing] Fred Stein: The Dresden of my youth was beautiful... with palaces and noble houses... full of art and culture.
[People singing] And since the recent inflation had eased up, people were busy bustling about, turning the wheels of progress.
♪ But in the midst of all this wealth and opulence, I became a socialist.
The poor were everywhere, I could not ignore it.
I was nearly finished with my law degree.
I was now an apprentice in the courts, and my dissertation was almost completed.
I was very eager to work as a public defender.
[Voices in courtroom] ♪ [Horses cantering] Lilo: We lived in a big house in the nice part of town.
You rang the doorbell, and a servant let you in.
I was the youngest of 3 girls.
My whole family was very old-fashioned and proper.
I always made fun of it to my sisters.
My father was the doctor for the King and the nobles of the court and the opera singers.
We had a famous opera house in Dresden, the Semperopera, so we had singers from all over the world.
My sisters and I were in love with the singers.
[Woman singing "Rinaldo, Act II: Lascia ch'io pianga"] ♪ [Bell of tram] ♪ Lilo: I was very impressed with Fred's political opinions because I didn't have any.
I met him at a party at my cousin's house.
[People speaking indistinctly] Someone introduced us, and I didn't pay attention to his name, but we hit it off right away.
We talked about art and music.
He was really very interesting.
He won my mother over right away.
He was so well-educated and so well-spoken.
We went canoeing the next week.
It was so much fun.
We became good, good friends.
[People shouting] ♪ Fred: And then in January, Hitler became chancellor of Germany.
We were dismayed.
I had seen him speak and knew that he was very dangerous.
Lilo: Suddenly, the Nazis were everywhere.
[Shouting] They were like an army in the streets.
[People shouting "Sieg Heil!"]
They took over everything.
[People chanting in German] Lilo: Faster than you get used to one thing, something else happened.
♪ When we went to get married and we went into the office, there were two Nazis, one on either side, saying, "Heil Hitler."
So, we had to be married saying, "Heil Hitler."
Fred really frightened me.
He kept going out on his bicycle, distributing anti-Nazi papers and talking to people on the street.
He could have been arrested at any time.
I was so angry at him for putting his life in jeopardy.
Fred: Then, in June, I was thrown out of the court for the crime of being Jewish.
The Nazi commissar called me before him and dismissed me from my court service and barred me from entering the research library for "racial and political" reasons.
We had a letter from our friend Herbert Zucker in Paris.
He urged us that we should disappear as fast as possible, but we were reluctant to leave our families alone.
Then came a threat we could not ignore.
One night, my employer's son knocked on my door.
He told me that the Gestapo were asking questions about me.
A co-worker had already been imprisoned.
We had to leave and in a hurry.
Lilo: We packed, went to the station, and said we were going on a honeymoon trip with only small suitcases.
[Whistle blows] [Steam hissing] As night approached, the train left.
[Bell clanging] [Train whistle blows] It was a very painful departure.
[Engine puffing] [Slow jazz playing] Fred: We found an apartment in Montmartre where the rents were low.
We were now members of that unpopular class: the refugee.
Our dignity was a bit injured, especially Lilo, who had been such an aristocrat.
But we found ourselves in good company.
There were so many refugees in Paris.
Lilo: We shared the apartment with our friend Herbert and sublet rooms to help pay the rent.
It was exciting to be in Paris, and people were always coming to visit us.
Fred said in Dresden, we had been proper, and now we were bohemians.
I cooked for everyone, but it was a joke, because I'd never learned to cook.
I always had servants growing up.
But we were all so miserably poor, no one ever complained.
[Bell clangs] In spite of the problems, Paris was really beautiful.
♪ Like all the other refugees, we went to the cafés.
You could stay all day with one coffee.
Fred loved all the interesting people who came and the conversation.
They talked about everything.
Fred: There was one urgent problem: how to earn a living.
You had to prove that you had sufficient money to support yourself, and yet refugees were not allowed to get work permits.
Huh!
French logic.
I couldn't practice law.
You had to live in France 10 years before you could get a license.
I certainly had no head for business.
We had no special skills.
The gendarmes had no mercy.
They constantly came by, checking on everyone, always checking your papers.
The situation was getting bad.
Our little money from the wedding was running out.
Lilo: And then we had the idea that Fred should try to be a photographer.
We had a camera, which we had given each other as a wedding present, a Leica, and Fred had taken very good pictures with it...of me.
Fred: The Leica taught me photography.
[Shutter clicks] [Clicking] I walked around Paris with all my senses alert.
♪ [Camera shutter clicks] ♪ [Shutter clicks] And, thus, photography taught me new ways of looking.
[Shutter clicks] Lilo: It was such fun to go with him.
We would go somewhere, a very old neighborhood, dirty and decrepit.
And I would say, "Why are you going here?"
He would say, "I have a feeling."
And then there would be something fantastic.
[Shutter clicks] ♪ He met strangers so easily.
He knew how to quickly get an understanding with them.
So that they were comfortable with him.
It was like that with everyone.
I once stood for I don't know how long in the middle of the Place de la Concorde right in all the traffic with my hand shading the lens until the light was just right for his picture.
[Shutter clicks] Fred: I became a photographer by chance, but it seems it was designed for me.
There is an excitement to it and the close contact with another person.
With a camera in front of me, I feel a current between me and the other person.
I become something more.
♪ Cynthia: Photography in the 1930s was really a moment of explosion.
There was incredible creativity in different areas.
The technology allowed photographers to make photographs more quickly and more cheaply and easily than--than before.
Fred Stein had a darkroom in his apartment and quickly became a professional.
Mary: The minute he picked up the camera, he understood what would be possible for him to do with a Leica that had never been possible before.
The Leica had two things that were very unusual.
One was the size and shape of the camera being very light.
But the other thing was that the film was on a roll, and you could take a lot of pictures very quickly.
[Shutter clicks] [Upbeat Leica commercial playing] ♪ [Man singing in German] ♪ Fred: We opened up Studio Stein to start our venture.
In the showcase outside the building, we put up a portrait and a picture of Montmartre, which was the first photo I took in Paris.
It took real chutzpah since I had not yet learned photography well at all.
We went on in spite of pitiful material success, because we enjoyed the taking of photographs so much.
We went to festive events and put up a stand in the corner, announcing that we would take portraits, returning home in the morning dead tired, but with a little money in our pockets.
Lilo: And we took portraits of people in the apartment.
The concierge turned off the electricity very early in the morning, so the only place Fred could take the portraits was in the hallway where there was a window, but that was right in front of the door to the bathroom, so the sitter had to keep jumping up all the time.
Our boarders got along with our photography very happily.
One of the boarders was Gerda Taro.
She was a very pretty girl, slim and very charming.
She was then working as a typist.
Fred: Gerda met a young photographer.
He was out of money, so she asked if he could use our darkroom.
And so we met Robert Capa, who later became the famous war photographer.
He was a charming boy back then with long hair.
Once he said to me, "Why do you waste your time "on these pictures that bring in nothing?
You should wait for the big things that you can sell."
He lived for excitement, but he was always a good comrade, never showing off his success in later years.
We found a source of income when the weekly magazines became very popular.
I personally went to the offices and offered them street reportages and portraits.
This way, I made contacts with editors, which led to orders and sometimes a series, such as the one about the festival in Garches.
[Music playing] ♪ Michael: Something very funny happened.
The Fête de l'Humanité was in Garche, which is in the suburbs of Paris.
I was making some research, and I discovered a short movie made at that time, and I say to myself, "Oh, it would be interesting to--to see Fred Stein working."
And then it happened.
I saw him making pictures just behind the person who was making a speech.
[Man speaking indistinctly] Michael: And what's very strange and beautiful to see him working slowly to prepare the picture he was going to take and just take this picture slowly.
[Camera shutter clicks] It was an amazing surprise to--to see that.
♪ Very good.
He was organizing these albums by topics, series after series-- workers, children... new design, view of the city, social concern-- themes after themes.
It's a very large span of themes of activities he took pictures of.
He was aware of it-- of what he was doing, and that's--it's very clear when you look over the archives.
He was aware of doing something in a very precise and definite way.
For that reason, it's very interesting.
[Music playing] ♪ Lilo: Fred started early on taking portraits of personalities.
One of the first was of André Malraux, the great writer.
They became friends.
When Malraux saw his picture, he thought it was so good that he told Fred that he had to immediately cultivate the making of portraits.
But Fred was already doing that.
Fred: I love the taking of portraits.
I am a headhunter.
But better not to admit that one enjoys it, for that is seen as not serious.
[Camera shutter clicking] ♪ Lilo: He liked talking to the person as much as taking their picture.
When he took portraits, he would know the person's work so well that the two of them could discuss it together.
Then he could get a picture of them thinking in their deep way.
He soon had many of the famous people of Paris, including our friend Willy Brandt, who came to Paris often to work secretly against the Nazis.
Willy later became Chancellor of Germany.
He came with us on our hikes, then he also came to our political meetings.
We met every week in a little dark street.
Fred: We discussed everything.
We hoped one day to return to Germany, but Hitler was rearming, which concerned us greatly.
Then there was a moment of hope when the Popular Front movement, headed by Prime Minister Léon Blum, won the elections of 1936.
[Men talking indistinctly] [Man speaking French] ...Monsieur Léon Blum... [Shouting, music playing] [Dramatic musical sting] [Explosions, gunfire] Fred: The war in Spain affected us deeply.
It was our struggle against fascism on a different front.
People from around the world volunteered to fight for the Republican forces.
Our closest friend Herbert went in the fall.
Lilo was pregnant with our first child, so we thought it better that I did not go.
Gerda Taro and Robert Capa went to Spain as photographers of the war.
They went right into the fighting.
Robert's pictures shocked the world.
No one had ever seen photography like that.
He moved close into the battles.
He also showed what happened to the civilians.
♪ Gerda's pictures were remarkable, also.
She had such a short time to learn, but she was talented.
Then the terrible day came when we learned that our best friend Herbert Zucker was killed at the Huesca Front.
We were devastated.
Our closest friend, a beautiful soul killed by these barbarians.
We saw it not only as an individual fate, but symbolic for that of many.
And then Gerda Taro was killed in Spain.
Her body was brought to Paris by the newspaper "Ce Soir" and was accompanied by an immense procession through the streets to Père Lachaise Cemetery.
Lilo: First Herbert, then Gerda.
It was terrible, so terrible.
But then Fred had his first exhibition at the Galerie de la Pleiade, a very good gallery.
Börn: The New Vision was a movement in photography in the 1920s and in the 1930.
The photographers of the New Vision used new perspectives.
They took photographs from above, from below.
They focused on details.
They really emphasized all the possibilities in photography.
The New Vision is something that Fred Stein picked up and really developed into a very individual artistic language.
♪ Fred: Then a happy occasion.
Our first child, Mimi, was born.
♪ Hitler sent troops into Austria and declared it a part of Germany.
It was very ominous.
Then Hitler overtook the Sudetenland, part of Czechoslovakia.
The European powers called for an emergency meeting in Munich... but ended up signing an agreement with Hitler... appeasement with Hitler.
It could never end well.
[Movietone Newsreel music playing] A year later, Hitler invaded Poland.
Lowell Thomas: At the Chamber of Deputies in Paris, scenes are tense, gendarmes on guard.
A sense of fateful decision among the people as France declares war on Germany.
[Movietone News music continues] [Bombs exploding] Fred: I was immediately swept up by the conflict.
I was requested to report as an enemy alien, as I was a German refugee.
Lilo didn't have to go to a camp, as she had a child who was born in France, and she was thereby the mother of a French citizen.
We all being good Germans reported promptly.
We were divided into companies and driven through Paris in a long chain of sightseeing buses.
Passers-by waved to us, thinking we were recruits.
We were brought to an internment camp in Saint-Nazaire on the northwest coast of France.
We thought we would work for the military, but to our surprise, they threw us behind barbed wire like prisoners.
The conditions were primitive, but we tried to get by.
I managed a library with donated books and what we called a Sorbonne, where we taught each other interesting courses.
For a long time, all was quiet.
The war seemed to be on hold.
It went on thus through the winter because of the bad weather.
People called it the phony war.
[Loud gunfire, explosion] In May, the Nazis suddenly attacked Holland and broke through Belgium.
♪ Then they moved into France with crushing speed.
No one had foreseen such a lightning bolt.
♪ We were trapped in the camp.
♪ Lilo: The Nazis marched right down the Champs-Elysees.
♪ The French people were horrified.
[Walking hoof beats] ♪ People were crying.
I was crying.
♪ Nothing seemed right anymore.
Nazi Paris was terrible.
♪ The soldiers frightened everyone.
There was no food or supplies.
They took everything.
People left the city, but I didn't know where to go or what to do.
I didn't know what had happened to Fred, and I had the child.
I had to stay.
I was always afraid of being arrested.
Fred: We waited like animals in a cage.
News came that the French army collapsed.
Day by day, the Germans came closer.
Nazi planes flew over the camp.
We were desperate to get out.
Then, suddenly, a gendarme from the town came running into the camp, shouting, "Gentlemen, gentlemen!
The Germans are here!
Quickly, free yourselves!"
He opened the gates, and we were free.
I headed southward with some of the men.
A ferry boat brought us over the Loire River.
We went quickly into the woods, and after a while, came to a small, remote village.
We hid nearby.
[Distant dogs barking] I was sent by my compatriots into the village to listen to the radio for news, as I spoke good French.
I had to hope to avoid soldiers.
The report was crushing.
[Man on radio speaking French] Fred: France had surrendered.
The country was divided into two zones-- occupied France and the so-called Free France, or Vichy France-- with the French government agreeing to hand over refugees to the Nazis.
We were betrayed.
I had a friend in Toulouse in the free zone.
It was a long way, perhaps 500 kilometers, but if I could get there, I could get word to Lilo to meet me.
I separated from the others, as they wanted to go back to Paris.
German tanks were on all the roads.
Refugees making their way south moved along, traumatized.
Soldiers occupied the villages.
It was like a nightmare.
I kept to the woods and the field paths.
In the evenings, I often came to isolated farmhouses, and they always gave me food and drink.
The French have their flaws, but they can be magnificent.
[Rooster crows] It took a long time to get to Toulouse.
♪ Lilo: I didn't know what had happened to Fred or even if he was still alive.
♪ I was glad to have the baby.
I had to pretend to be happy for her.
And then it was like a miracle.
A postcard from Fred.
It was unbelievable.
He wrote on an assumed name, but I knew his handwriting, of course.
He said that Mr. and Mrs. So-and-so want you to visit them, and he gave an address in Toulouse.
I was going right away.
I packed and, of course, I brought Fred's pictures with me.
♪ The Germans had put themselves up in the Rothschild Palace, a beautiful palace near the Bois de Boulogne.
There was a long line of people.
It went on for blocks.
I went up to a French policeman who was there supposedly keeping order.
And with my child in my arms, I didn't look too bad.
I smiled at him.
He said, "Can I help you, Madame?"
And I said, "Yes, I have to go see my husband, who was just demobilized," as if he had been a French soldier.
And he brought me right inside to the German officers, and the German officer thought, if this woman comes with a policeman who says, "Please give this lady a permit," he should give it to her.
So he wrote out the permit, saying, "What is your name?"
and I spelled it in a French way.
Then, before he was able to even read the name, I smiled and took it very fast, saying, "Merci, monsieur," and was gone.
[Chuckling] Fred was very amused when I told him how I did that.
♪ [Train whistle blows] ♪ ♪ Fred: My friend was now the mayor of Toulouse.
He put me up in a barn behind his house to hide me.
When Lilo came, she was appalled by how bad I looked.
[Steam hissing] Lilo: It was so amazing that we found each other in all this terrible war.
[Truck horn honks] Fred: Now we had to think of getting to the United States.
I took the train to Marseilles, which was near to Toulouse, hiding most of the time from the police in the bathroom.
Of course, I had to go out from time to time so that other people could use it.
[Sea birds screeching] I found Marseille full of refugees wanting to leave the country.
♪ But no country was giving out visas.
There was no room for sympathy.
There were too many people.
♪ But then I heard about Varian Fry.
Justus: Varian Fry had come to Marseilles from the United States to help refugees get out of France.
He had $3,000 with him and a list of people whom he was supposed to help: intellectuals, writers, painters, musicians; out of France.
I was 17 years old.
I became the courier to take messages to various refugees who were hiding.
Fred: I went to see him at his office in the Hotel Splendide.
There were refugees out to the street and up the stairs, and the hotel was not happy about it.
Justus: I used to be the one that opened the door and let people only in one or two or three at a time.
Fred: He told me the situation was dire, with countries not accepting refugees.
There were only a few exceptions.
In those few exceptions, it took many, many documents, each one of them difficult or impossible to obtain.
Without a visa, we couldn't leave, and staying in France was too dangerous.
♪ Lilo: We had just to wait.
It was not so nice hiding there.
We had no money, and there was no food because of the war.
We had to avoid the police.
I was worried all the time.
Fred: I then heard from Varian Fry.
That which had placed me most in danger-- my political activity-- now came to my aid.
I was on a list to be arrested.
He could apply for a danger visa for me.
Getting the papers required dedication and money and a genius for circumventing rules.
Luckily, Varian Fry was just that kind of genius.
He got us our visas.
On May the 6th, 1941, we boarded the SS Winnipeg, heading for New York.
What a storm of emotions we felt.
♪ On the ship, a co-traveler wanted to know my profession.
I answered, "A sort of an artist, a photographer," whereupon he emphatically replied, "In our country, Mister, in America, you are not an artist.
You are only a photographer."
Well, so it goes.
♪ Lilo: New York was not like we had imagined it.
[Car horn honks] At first, it was a strange world.
Everything was different.
♪ But we liked how it was modern.
♪ Fred: We took an apartment in Washington Heights, near the river.
It had been a doctor's office.
It was on the ground floor.
We called it the Fourth Reich because there were so many German refugees there.
♪ Lilo: It was such a problem to choose what to eat.
Poor Fred had lost 40 pounds in France.
He had given most of his food to me and the child.
But now, the war was far away.
Fred could not immediately take pictures because we didn't have a camera.
My mother sent us money for Fred to buy a Leica.
He also applied for a loan to buy a Rolleiflex to expand his professional work, as he put it.
He went out every day.
He was carried away by how much there was in New York for him.
There were all the famous people who came because of the UN, and then, on the streets, there was so much that he found.
Mary: By the time he gets to New York, he really knows a lot about making pictures with the camera, what kind of lines and curves and shapes are going to be interesting, how they're going to work together on a page.
It seems to take on some kind of meaning.
♪ Fred: My path has taken many twists and turns.
It was the catastrophes of war that led me to this strange occupation, where one can capture a moment from life.
♪ It brings all my senses alert.
I scan the scene in front of me, out of the exterior world with its variety of forms.
I focus in on a field of view.
♪ In one frame, a photograph fixes what our eye sees, but cannot hold.
♪ Daniel: With Stein, we're not caught up in people as poor, but in people, as human.
There's a kind of classlessness to his-- to what he's doing, even as he, at the same time, is kind of trying to enrich the lives of the average person or show how the lives of the average person makes them not average, but, in fact, as grand as anyone else.
Fred: Street reportage became difficult for me when I developed a hip problem.
It led me to more taking of portraits.
♪ Theresia: The portraits are a Who's Who... it's really amazing.
They are such big names, and it's-- you can't believe that he met all these famous people.
♪ Fred: With a camera in front of me, I am eye-to-eye with the important person.
The atmosphere acts upon you both.
When I laugh, they laugh.
When I become serious, they become serious.
I watch it with my other eye.
♪ When they become funny enough or serious enough, I shoot.
♪ Or sometimes I'm just a spectator of a performance that goes on without even noticing me.
[Camera shutter clicks] ♪ Albert Einstein felt that being photographed was like being tortured.
I told the professor that it was better to submit to torture than to have the newspapers print caricatures of him.
He laughed.
This opened the door, and we began to talk.
When the secretary came to the door to remind him that my time was up, he sent her away.
She came again and again, and every time, he sent her away.
This went on for two hours, and our "torture" session produced one of my best portraits.
[Camera shutter clicks] Lilo: And then, it was terrible.
All of a sudden, Fred got sick, and after only a short time, he died.
It was like I fell into a darkness.
It was horrible.
He was so young, only 58.
How could he die?
♪ He was so many-sided, so educated, so interested, so warm-hearted and direct that he found contact with the most different and difficult people.
A joyous, gracious human being in spite of the hardest destinies.
♪ Peter: My father's photographs and his negatives were really just sitting in my mother's apartment, gathering dust.
His work was really pretty much forgotten.
My mother was cataloging them, so she never forgot about doing work with his photographs.
But she didn't know how to promote his work or what to do, and she was always hoping that somehow, magically, it would be discovered and, and I told her, you know, "I'm going to do it."
♪ It was too good a body of work not to get out to the world.
Peter: I inherited the whole archive, but it took quite a while for me to get my career as a cinematographer established.
♪ But then I had time and I was ready to get started.
The first thing I thought was, "I'm going to find a museum curator who's going to take this under his wing, and Fred will become famous and galleries will call me and, you know, it's not that-- it's not that hard."
Well, it was not that easy.
[Musical pratfall] When my father died in 1967, photography wasn't really considered an art form.
Today it is.
Almost every museum has a photography department.
But I quickly found out that the museums were not dying to find an unknown photographer.
♪ They were polite, but they really weren't interested.
♪ So what I decided was I was going to take it to the people, to local art galleries in upscale towns.
And when people would come in, they would see great photographs.
♪ It was really gratifying when I saw how well people responded to the photographs.
♪ They loved them, they talked about them, and they-- they bought them.
[Overlapping chatter] ♪ Woman: I think it's beautiful.
I really love it.
Woman: So modern, you know.
It's hard to imagine that it was taken in the forties.
Man: The way it creates stories, it just captures a picture, but inside the picture, there are a lot of interesting elements.
Peter: I ended up signing up probably 60 galleries.
♪ I worked on it for years.
Peter, voice-over: We're in Dresden, Germany.
It's a beautiful, old, Baroque... Peter: Eventually, I signed on with fine art photography galleries.
Woman, voice-over: This, that, and this, that.
♪ [Indistinct chatter] Man, voice-over: These are all vintage prints.
They're vintage prints, and they-- there are very few copies... ♪ Peter: There were surprises.
Man, voice-over: It was Cornell Capa's lifelong dream to recover these lost negatives of the Spanish Civil War, Robert Capa and of Gerda Taro.
Cynthia: Fred Stein was part of the Suitcase.
He was represented with only 3 rolls of film, but they were so important to the Suitcase.
This was Fred Stein's famous photograph, one of the only portraits that we have of the two of them together, sitting in a Paris café, which is really a portrait of, you know, young love.
Peter: There was a book published.
♪ We have... Peter: I met a lot of people.
[Overlapping, indistinct chatter] Peter: I had some successes and I definitely had some failures, but it was my passion.
♪ Quentin: Fred Stein builds a bridge between that Modern and modernist New Vision Photography and that kind of Humanist Photography that you see as a rising current in the early thirties.
And I think that Fred Stein is really an interesting mix.
He was fully aware of that modernist syntax that was happening in photography at the time, but I can feel that kind of humanist sensibility.
♪ He has that knowledge of that modernist vocabulary, but sometimes he refuses to use because he's more interested in trying to translate a kind of empathy that he has for his subject.
♪ Peter: I decided to go to Europe.
I didn't feel that American museums were really going to do a show soon.
And it really takes a major museum show to convince the art establishment, and without that, Fred really won't be there.
In the US, museums need a big name to bring in audience numbers.
In Europe, museums are supported by the government, so they can take a chance on an unknown artist.
Fred was from Germany and he'd lived in France, so I figured they would be more receptive to the work.
[Indistinct chatter] ♪ Peter: I went to Dresden... to go on a tour of my great-grandmother's house.
It's one of the few places still standing after the firebombing, and a friend put me in contact with the Director of Dresden's Stadtmuseum.
Peter: It would be spiritually really wonderful to have an exhibition here.
Woman: Mm-hmm.
Peter: It would-- it would make so much sense and-- Woman: Ah, yes.
OK. OK. OK.
It would be interesting for us.
[Woman speaking German] Man: Next spring.
-That's good -You'll come back?
Peter: Oh, I'll come back.
Woman: Yes.
[Man speaks German] ♪ Peter: They were going to do a show.
♪ I want to thank everybody very much.
I hope you enjoy the exhibition.
I hope you enjoy the book.
Thank you.
[Applause] ♪ You know, I think about my father.
He had to flee for his life, he lived in exile, and he struggled to survive... but his photographs will be remembered.
♪ ♪