Léon Herschtritt, The end of an era

"Photography has never been as “devious” as to take us down a series of wrong paths and we would be mistaken to understand this way of diverting the issue as a “humanist” artifice.
Léon Herschtritt gets away from the tragic, from excess and eye-catching contrasts so as to impose his lucid, clever, non-acrimonious photography. He finds the right level of expression for his works in a slightly nostalgic if somewhat sharp approach, structured around the way things and men work.
The photographer’s main aim is to contain each image within a narrative that owes nothing to the great photographic works he knows and appreciates. He exercises the profession of photographer-reporter without shame, confident in the rough quality of the tool. The resources of the machine itself are enough for him to express that which lies beneath. So it goes, the work of Léon Herschtritt, lives without fits and starts, almost underground. In describing it one often is often misled. One could be led to think it was declining. Then, it is exhumed. It arouses more than curiosity. And, it is quite possible that one day it will awaken the uneasiness that brought it into being."
 François Cheval