Edward Steichen

Photographer

• Born: March 27, 1879
• Birthplace: Bivange, Luxembourg
• Died: March 25, 1973
• Place of death: West Redding, Connecticut

American photographer

Steichen was a gifted and remarkably versatile photographer and a visionary editor, who did more than any single individual in developing the range of photography’s possibilities as an expressive medium.

Areas of achievement Photography, literature

Early Life

Edward Steichen (STI-kehn) was the only son of Jean-Pierre and Marie Kemp Steichen. In 1881, the Steichens emigrated to Hancock, Michigan, from Luxembourg; two years later, their daughter Lillian was born. (She would later marry poet Carl Sandburg, with whom Steichen would become close friends.) A hardworking and precociously inquisitive boy, Steichen once took apart his Western Union delivery bicycle and put it together again; he did the same with a watch and got it to run with two pieces left over. When a teacher at his college preparatory school praised one of his drawings, his mother who owned a hat shop and was the family’s chief breadwinner after her husband’s health declined from work in the copper mines determined that her son would become a great artist.

Steichen got his first camera at the age of sixteen. Eagerly, he took a roll of fifty pictures, but when the film came back, only one of them had been clear enough to print. His mother said that the one picture was so beautiful it was worth the forty-nine failures, and, bolstered by her encouragement, Steichen taught himself photography (at the time, there were no classes and few books on the subject). His formal education having ended at the age of fifteen, he was then working as an apprentice at a Milwaukee lithography firm that supplied posters and display cards for packers and flour mills. Always interested in finding a new and better way of doing things, Steichen persuaded his superiors to let him photograph their subjects so the drawings made of them would be more accurate (they had been using outdated woodcuts as models). Also a talented designer, he won a prize for his design of an envelope, and one of his illustrations was reproduced on posters across the country.

Painting and sketching in his spare time, he organized the Milwaukee Art Students League in 1897 and became its first president. Tall, with a prominent nose, striking blue eyes, and unruly hair, he had, as a local newspaper would later declare, the looks of an artist. Fascinated with the romantic subjects of twilight and moonlit scenes in his paintings, Steichen wrestled with the problem of communicating mood and emotion in his photographs. Through persistence and an ability to convert failure into success (an accidental kick to the tripod blurred the image but succeeded in conveying the mood), Steichen created new, experimental photographs. He achieved his first recognition as a photographer when two prints he submitted were selected to appear in the Second Philadelphia Salon in 1899.

His entries in the Chicago Salon in 1900 brought a letter of encouragement from prominent photographer Clarence White, who also wrote about him to Alfred Stieglitz, another leading photographer. On his way to Europe at the age of twenty-one, Steichen stopped in New York and met with Stieglitz, who bought three of his prints. Steichen had quit his job as a commercial artist (against his father’s wishes but with his mother’s support) to devote himself to fine art. While in Europe, he continued to paint, and, as he had hoped, met with and photographed many prominent writers and artists, among them the sculptor Auguste Rodin. Steichen had his first major showing in the New School of American Photography in London in 1901 and his first one-man showing of paintings and photographs in Paris in 1902.

Life’s Work

Steichen returned to New York in 1902 and supported himself through commercial portrait photography one of his most famous photographs was of J. P. Morgan, the powerful financier. Steichen was taking it for a portrait painter who found Morgan too restless to sit still. Carefully preparing the shot and lighting beforehand with a janitor as stand-in, Steichen accomplished the job using only three minutes of Morgan’s time; the pleased Morgan rewarded Steichen with a roll of hundred-dollar bills yet more valuable was the lesson the experience had taught him. He had asked Morgan to strike a particular pose, which Morgan complained was uncomfortable, but when Steichen told him to pose the way he wished, Morgan returned to that same “uncomfortable” position, only this time with an air of defiance and irritation that brought out his true personality. Steichen realized that when some live moment was brought to a sitting, it could change a picture from simply an image into a portrait that revealed character. He would use that insight to great advantage in a later phase of his career.

In 1905, along with Stieglitz, Steichen established the Little Galleries of the Photo-Secession, also called 291, in his former studio at 291 Fifth Avenue. The Photo-Secessionists were committed to promoting modern art and, in particular, to winning respect for photography as an art form (when photographs had been shown at an art museum for the first time seven years earlier, the exhibition had stirred quite a controversy). The group published the influential Camera Work from 1903 to 1917; its cover was designed by Steichen, and his photographs, which Stieglitz considered proof that photography was an art, appeared in numerous issues. Steichen, feeling stifled by the routine of commercial photography, returned to Paris in 1906. From there, he sent back America’s first glimpses of European modernism, arranging for exhibitions at “291” of Rodin, Henri Matisse, Paul Cézanne, and Pablo Picasso. He returned to the United States when World War I broke out in 1914; soon afterward, his friendship with Stieglitz ended over differing views about the war in particular, about how artists should respond to the world crisis.

In 1917, then thirty-eight years old, Steichen volunteered for the U.S. Army and was put in charge of the Photographic Division of Aerial Photography for the American Expeditionary Forces; it was the first time that aerial photography was used for reconnaissance and intelligence purposes. Steichen proved to be a remarkably able commander, skilled at solving the large-scale organizational problems of wartime as well as the technical difficulties of shooting clear pictures from a moving airplane. After the war, he made a decisive change in the direction of his career. Steichen gave up painting dramatically burning all of his paintings in a bonfire in his garden and devoted himself exclusively to photography, through which, he reasoned, he could reach a wider audience and make an affirmative contribution to the world. His experience in aerial photography had given him a renewed appreciation for the medium; he entered into a second apprenticeship in photography, determined to master its range of technical possibilities. He worked with patient dedication in one experiment, taking more than one thousand shots of a white cup and saucer to study various arrangements of light; he also worked with abstract symbolism and design, bringing a new sense of shape and form into his work.

Steichen returned to New York in 1923 and was hired by publisher Conde Nast to do fashion and portrait photography for Vogue and Vanity Fair magazines (his lucrative contract made him the most highly paid photographer in the world). His fashion photographs were distinguished by a strong sense of design and dramatic lighting; his portraits of celebrities (among them actors Greta Garbo, Marlene Dietrich, and Charles Chaplin) were often considered the best ever taken of the stars because of Steichen’s gift for putting his subjects at ease and then finding the moment when their faces were lit with character. He also did advertising work photographing silks, creams, and vacuum cleaners for the J. Walter Thompson agency. He devoted his spare hours to his longtime hobby of breeding delphiniums (the Museum of Modern Art displayed his hybrids in 1936). When Steichen found that his work was becoming too repetitious, he closed his New York studio in 1938.

At the outbreak of World War II in 1941, the then sixty-two-year-old Steichen volunteered for service, and was initially refused because of his age, but eventually succeeded in receiving a commission as lieutenant commander, in charge of all Navy combat photography. He assembled a unit of top photographers and instructed them to focus on the human aspects of war. He supervised a Navy film, The Fighting Lady, and directed two photographic exhibitions for the Museum of Modern Art: Road to Victory (1942) and Power in the Pacific (1945). Coordinating the work of many photographers around a single theme, these exhibitions introduced a new concept of photographic presentation that was both visually and emotionally compelling.

In 1947, he was appointed director of the department of photography of the Museum of Modern Art; he temporarily gave up his own work to gain more objectivity in judging the work of others. He organized numerous exhibitions; the most notable was The Family of Man, a collection of more than five hundred photographs from around the world, selected to convey the essential unity of humankind. In honor of his eighty-second birthday the museum gave him a large retrospective exhibition in 1961. He became director emeritus of the department in 1962, and in 1963, he wrote his autobiography, A Life in Photography. In his advanced years, he continued to take pictures, experimenting with a movie camera and color photography. He was married three times and had two daughters. He died at his home in 1973, two days before his ninety-fourth birthday.

Significance

Steichen’s list of achievements is so extensive that it could easily have been the work of several persons rather than one. His tremendous vitality, his ambitious pursuit of change, and his drive to find new expressions mirrored the spirit of America at the beginning of the twentieth century and consistently placed him at the leading edge of photography’s evolution. The young painter-photographer who in 1898 thrilled at the news that photographs were being shown in an art museum might never have dreamed that he would be named a director of photography at a major museum in his later years. However, not only did Steichen play a significant role in winning this respect for photography as an art form, but also he pioneered the movement of photography back out of the museum and into the public eye for more popular and widespread consumption. He was often criticized as having sold out his artistic instincts for his commercial work, to which he responded,

If my technique, imagination and vision are any good I ought to be able to put the best values of my noncommercial and experimental photographs into a pair of shoes, a tube of tooth paste, a jar of face cream, a mattress or any object that I want to light up and make humanly interesting in an advertising photograph.

For more than half a century, Steichen’s creativity and technical mastery set a new standard of excellence that revolutionized each of the fields he entered portraiture, the military, fashion, and advertising literally changing the way Americans saw themselves.

It took a visionary spirit to bring, as Steichen did, the first examples of modernist art to the American continent; in a real sense, he ushered the culture into the twentieth century. Later, responding to the shattering side effects of two world wars on the American psyche, he was, as an editor and director of exhibitions, essentially a humanist, bringing to the public a view of humanity that was both compassionate and ennobling. His Family of Man exhibition was viewed by more than nine million people in more than sixty-nine countries. He had indeed realized his goal of making, through photography, an affirmative contribution to the world.

Bibliography

Green, Jonathon, ed. Camera Work: A Critical Anthology. Millerton, N.Y.: Aperture, 1973. A valuable resource for studying the Photo-Secessionists, with commentary, excerpts from issues, photographs, an extensive bibliography, and biographies of contributors.

Hoffman, Katherine. “The Family of Man: An Introduction.” History of Photography 29, no. 4 (Winter, 2005): 317-319. A history of the exhibition, which opened in New York City in 1955. Describes Steichen’s preparations for the show, how he selected photographs for inclusion, and how scholars have interpreted the show’s success.

Longwell, Dennis. Steichen: The Master Prints, 1895-1914 The Symbolist Period. New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1978. Focuses on Steichen’s early career as an art photographer. Though Longwell’s thesis linking Steichen to the Symbolist movement is of limited value, the seventy-two prints and accompanying commentary and selections from letters are worth viewing.

Newhall, Beaumont. The History of Photography from 1839 to the Present Day. New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1964. A comprehensive look at the development of photography, its technology and major figures. Scattered references to Steichen.

Phillips, Christopher, comp. Steichen at War. New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1981. The focus is on Steichen’s years as commander of Navy photography during World War II. Text and photographs are excellent.

Sandburg, Carl. Steichen the Photographer. New York: Harcourt Brace, 1929. An affectionate and anecdotal look at Steichen’s life by his brother-in-law. Survives its early publication date quite well. Though this edition is difficult to find, a large portion of it is reprinted in The Sandburg Range, published in 1957.

Steichen, Edward. A Life in Photography. Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1963. The best account of Steichen’s life is his own. Steichen wrote the text and selected the 249 photographs that accompany it. Also included is a valuable biographical outline.

‗‗‗‗‗‗‗, ed. The Family of Man. New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1955. Contains the photographs from Steichen’s popular exhibition, with a brief prologue by Sandburg and an introduction by Steichen.

Steichen, Joanna. Steichen’s Legacy: Photographs, 1895-1973. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2000. Steichen’s wife selected the photographs in this collection and supplied a text in which she describes their relationship, his views on photography, his experiments with modernism and abstraction, and other aspects of his life and career.

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