Tickets

Wikipedia entry
Introduction
Louis Clyde Stoumen (July 15, 1917 – September 20, 1991), known as Lou Stoumen, was an American photographer, film director and producer. He won two Academy Awards; the first in 1957 for Best Documentary Short Subject (The True Story of the Civil War), and the second in 1963 for Best Documentary Feature (Black Fox: The Rise and Fall of Adolf Hitler). Stoumen was born in Springtown, Bucks County, Pennsylvania, and died in Sebastopol, California. After graduating from Lehigh University in 1939, he worked as a freelance journalist and photographer in New York. Many of the photographs of Times Square he made were published in the 1985 book Times Square: 45 Years of Photographs. Stoumen taught at UCLA Film School. He spoke of his innovation in The True Story of the Civil War. He invented a track for the camera to move back and forth over historic photos and paintings. It also tracked up and down (in and out). The technique is often referred to today as the "Ken Burns effect". Stoumen received Colin Higgins' master's thesis, a screenplay called Harold and Maude. Stoumen spoke of his enjoyment of the writing, but doubted it would ever be produced. He wasn't unhappy when proven wrong by the film's success. Stoumen married Lini De Vries in 1943; the couple divorced in 1949. He subsequently married and was divorced from Joyce Wessel. After his death in 1991, the Stoumen Estate gifted the entire archive of Stoumen's work, including copyright, to the Museum of Photographic Arts. MOPA created a special exhibition and catalog entitled Seduced by Life: The Art of Lou Stoumen in celebration of acquiring the Stoumen Archive. Copyright for Stoumen's work is currently administered by the Museum of Photographic Arts. The Academy Film Archive preserved The True Story of the Civil War and T Is for Tumbleweed by Stoumen.
Wikidata
Q6686914
View or edit the full Wikipedia entry
Information from Wikipedia, made available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike License
Getty record
Nationality
American
Gender
Male
Roles
Artist, Photographer
Names
Lou Stoumen, Louis Clyde Stoumen
Ulan
500129351
View the full Getty record
Information from Getty’s Union List of Artist Names ® (ULAN), made available under the ODC Attribution License

Exhibitions

Licensing

If you would like to reproduce an image of a work of art in MoMA’s collection, or an image of a MoMA publication or archival material (including installation views, checklists, and press releases), please contact Art Resource (publication in North America) or Scala Archives (publication in all other geographic locations).

MoMA licenses archival audio and select out of copyright film clips from our film collection. At this time, MoMA produced video cannot be licensed by MoMA/Scala. All requests to license archival audio or out of copyright film clips should be addressed to Scala Archives at [email protected]. Motion picture film stills cannot be licensed by MoMA/Scala. For access to motion picture film stills for research purposes, please contact the Film Study Center at [email protected]. For more information about film loans and our Circulating Film and Video Library, please visit https://www.moma.org/research/circulating-film.

If you would like to reproduce text from a MoMA publication, please email [email protected]. If you would like to publish text from MoMA’s archival materials, please fill out this permission form and send to [email protected].

Feedback

This record is a work in progress. If you have additional information or spotted an error, please send feedback to [email protected].