Louis Faurer was born and raised in Philadelphia, where he made his first photographs in 1937 with a camera sold to him by his childhood friend Ben Somoroff. That year he won first prize for "Photo of the Week" for his photograph "Happy" on Cantrell St., South Philadelphia, Pa. in the Philadelphia Evening Public Ledger, accompanied by a full-page reproduction and a cash prize of $3.

In the mid-1940s Faurer commuted regularly between Philadelphia and New York. Seeking editorial assignments with the best magazines of the period, he met in 1947 with Lillian Bassman, the art director at Junior Bazaar magazine, who asked Faurer to return with test pictures of a model. Bassman also recommended Faurer to Alexey Brodovitch, the art director of Harper's Bazaar. That year, Faurer met Robert Frank at the Harper's Bazaar studios in New York. They later shared a darkroom and studio at 86th Street and Madison Avenue owned by Fernand Fonssagrives, and became lifelong friends. In 1948, Faurer's first fashion photograph was published in Junior Bazaar, and his work was included in Edward Steichen's In and Out of Focus exhibition at The Museum of Modern Art in New York. Steichen later included Faurer in his 1955 landmark exhibition, The Family of Man. In 1959, Helen Gee held a one-person exhibition of Faurer's work at her legendary Limelight Gallery. Through 1967 Faurer photographed on assignment for a number of magazines including Charm, Flair, Harper's Bazaar, Glamour, Mademoiselle, Vogue, Seventeen, and Look; he continued working for European fashion magazines in 1968-1974 in Paris and London, and again in New York in the 1980s, all the while continuing his personal work.

Faurer's photographs were re-discovered in 1976 when was introduced to the curator Walter Hopps by their mutual friend, Sue Hoffman (known by then as the actress Viva, who starred in many of Andy Warhol's films). Hopps remembered Faurer's work from its regular appearance in the short-lived, extraordinary magazine Flair, and recommended Faurer's remaining cache of vintage prints from the late 1930s-1950s, and the work he made while in Montreal, London and Paris from 1969-1974, to the art dealer Harry Lunn, who began to offer Faurer's photographs in his Washington, DC gallery. In 1977, Marlborough Gallery showed Faurer's prints in a group show and a one-person exhibition. LIGHT Gallery in New York also exhibited Faurer's work and represented him well into the 1980s.

In his introduction to the catalogue for Faurer's 1980 exhibition at The University of Maryland Art Gallery at College Park, Maryland, organized by Hopps and the photographer John Gossage, Hopps explains his reactions upon seeing Faurer's photographs again:

At my first viewing (somewhat chaotic early hours in New York's Chelsea Hotel—Faurer not present), I was surprised to recognize images (but not Faurer's name) which I had seen in an issue of Flair (a short-lived, opulent magazine from Cowles Publications). The photographs in that issue, which I acquired in 1950, immediately affected my thought about photography. There have been times over the years when I have tried to find that issue of Flair, to recall the photographer who took those pictures that were stuck in my mind…to no avail. …

New York City has been the major center of Faurer's work, and that city's life at mid-century, his great subject. The city is totally Faurer's natural habitat. He can be at home, at one, with people on it streets, in its rooms. However serene or edgy his encounters, one senses Faurer (if at all) as being the same as the people in his photographs. And since these people are extremely varied, it is a transcendent vision that allows the photographer to be so many "others." Faurer's at-oneness with his subjects contrasts with both the mode of working and the results of Evans and Frank. They have proved to be great and wide-ranging explorers and finders of their images. Faurer made only one important trip: from Philadelphia (where he made his first, early brilliant photographs) to New York, where he stayed, and where in the course of things his vision consumed, whether ordinary or odd, the all of it. …

I am in awe of the high point he can reach in a photograph such as Family, Times Square, at the center of New York in the center of our century. Perhaps no other American image stands comparison with Picasso's Family of Saltimbanques, on their imagined European plane in 1905. However little known or historically acknowledged, Faurer stands as a master of his medium.

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