Edward Steichen

Edward Steichen , 1879-1973, American photographer, b. Luxembourg, reared in Hancock, Mich. Steichen is credited with the transformation of photography into an art form. At 16, while apprenticed as a lithographer, he taught himself photography and painted in his spare time. Studying art in Paris, he sought painterly effects in his photography, becoming an enormously successful portrait photographer. In New York City he was associated with Alfred Stieglitz in the founding of the "291" and Photo-Secession galleries. At "291" he brought works by Cézanne, Rodin, Picasso, and Matisse to American attention. Back in Paris, Steichen made botanical experiments, a lifelong passion; he was later to win added renown as a crossbreeder of flowers.

During World War I Steichen was instrumental in the development of aerial photography. Fascinated by the technical potential of the medium, he produced pictures remarkable for their clarity, detail, and expressive use of light. From 1923 to 1938 he worked as a portrait and fashion photographer for Condé Nast publications and opened a commercial studio. At this time he made superb photomurals, including those of the George Washington Bridge. During World War II, he was placed in command of naval combat photography.

Steichen was later director of the department of photography of the Museum of Modern Art (1947-62). In this capacity he organized the Family of Man exhibition (1955) to "mirror the essential oneness of mankind" ; it is considered the greatest photographic exposition ever mounted. During his time at the museum, Steichen had virtually abandoned his own work; but in his last years he filmed the effect of the passing seasons on a flowering shadblow tree. Steichen's creative imagination and his extraordinarily powerful imagery forged for him and for his medium an honored place among the fine arts.

Bibliography: See his Life in Photography (1963, repr. 1985); Edward Steichen: The Portraits, with text by C. Peterson (1989); C. Sandburg (his brother-in-law) et al., Steichen the Photographer (1961); J. Steichen (his third wife), Steichen's Legacy: Photographs, 1895-1973 (2000); biography by P. Nivens (1997); J. Smith, Edward Steichen: The Early Years (1999).

Steichen, Edward Jean (1879–1973), photographer.Part of the avant‐garde modernist circle around Alfred Stieglitz; a prominent advertising, fashion, and wartime photographer; and director of the Museum of Modern Art's Photography Department (1947–1962), Steichen championed a photography that could move fluidly between elite museum work and popular, even frankly commercial imagery.

Born in Luxembourg, Steichen came to America with his working‐class parents in 1881 and grew up in Michigan and Wisconsin. Apprenticed to a Milwaukee commercial lithographer, he soon turned to photography. His work, exhibited in Philadelphia in 1899, garnered the attention of major national figures in the arts, including Stieglitz. During two years in Paris (1900–1902), he served as Stieglitz's representative and soaked up the dominant trends in painting and photography. Opening a portrait studio in New York City in 1902, he photographed many well‐known figures of the day while working with Stieglitz to promote photography as an art form. In 1917–1918, he headed the photographic office of the U.S. Army Air Service. By the 1920s, while continuing as a portrait photographer, Steichen was also firmly entrenched in the worlds of commercial photography, practically inventing the genre in the United States with his advertising and fashion work in such glossy journals as Vanity Fair and Vogue. Like many others, he was converted in the 1930s to the cause of social documentation and the power of the camera as a persuader of national truths, whether Great Depression Era realities or the World War II naval conflict in the Pacific—dogma that served him well as curator of nationalistic blockbuster photograph exhibitions at the Museum of Modern Art during and after the war. His most famous endeavor, The Family of Man (1955), which toured worldwide and became a best‐selling book, brought the layout and rhetorical styles of photojournalism and advertising to the elite museum. As both photographer and curator, Steichen's greatest talent lay in adapting techniques from other media—painting and journalism—to the realms of high‐art photography.
See also Depressions, Economic; Modernist Culture; Museums: Museums of Art.

Bibliography

Eric Sandeen , Picturing an Exhibition: The Family of Man and 1950s America, 1995.
Penelope Niven , Steichen: A Biography, 1997.
Joel Smith , Edward Steichen: The Early Years, 1999.

Peter Bacon Hales