Edward Steichen (1879 to 1973) was born in Luxembourg, grew up in the American Midwest and worked in Paris and New York for seven decades. He made soft, hand-worked art prints around 1900, then sharp fashion pictures and portraits for Vogue and Vanity Fair, then led photography for the United States Navy in the Second World War. He is best known for The Family of Man, the 1955 exhibition he organised at the Museum of Modern Art.
Steichen trained as a lithographer and painted in his spare time, and he came to photography with a painter’s habits. Clarence H. White introduced him to Alfred Stieglitz, who bought three of his prints in 1900 and became a close ally. Together they founded the Photo-Secession in 1902 and opened the gallery known as 291. After the First World War Steichen turned against the painterly look he had helped to make famous and took up straight, sharp photography instead.
From a Milwaukee print shop to gallery 291
Steichen was born Éduard Jean Steichen in Bivange, Luxembourg, on March 27, 1879. His family emigrated when he was an infant, first to Hancock, Michigan, and by 1889 to Milwaukee, Wisconsin. He left high school for a four-year lithography apprenticeship at the American Fine Art Company of Milwaukee, painted after hours and bought a secondhand Kodak box camera in 1895. With friends he founded the Milwaukee Art Students League. His photographs were shown at the Philadelphia Photographic Salon in 1899, and he became an American citizen in 1900.
That year he left for Paris to study art, stopping in New York to meet Stieglitz. His early prints belong to Pictorialism, the movement that argued for photography as art by making prints that looked worked by hand. In 1902 he designed the logo and typeface of Stieglitz’s journal Camera Work, and he became the photographer shown most often in its pages. In Camera Work he argued that nothing in photography is natural, because every exposure and every print is already a manipulation.
In 1905 he and Stieglitz opened the Little Galleries of the Photo-Secession in Steichen’s former portrait studio. The address gave it the name 291. Through Steichen’s contacts in Paris the gallery gave some of the first American exhibitions of Auguste Rodin, Henri Matisse, Paul Cézanne, Pablo Picasso and Constantin Brâncuși. He began experimenting with colour in 1904 and was among the first photographers in the United States to use the Autochrome process.
How does a print end up looking like a painting? Alternative photography processes covers the hand-coated printing methods that sit behind this period.
Fashion, Condé Nast and a change of style
Steichen is counted, with Baron Adolph de Meyer, among the first fashion photographers. In 1907 he borrowed a friend’s hand camera and photographed well-dressed women candidly at the Longchamp racecourse. In 1911 the publisher Lucien Vogel challenged him to promote fashion as a fine art through photography. Steichen photographed gowns by the designer Paul Poiret, and the pictures ran in the April 1911 issue of Art et Décoration, two of them in colour. In his 1963 autobiography, A Life in Photography, he claimed they were probably the first serious fashion photographs ever made.
During the First World War he commanded the photographic division of the American Expeditionary Forces. Afterwards he gave up painting and Pictorialism and moved step by step to straight photography. In the early 1920s he photographed a single cup and saucer more than a thousand times against a graduated scale of tones running from pure white through greys to black velvet. He compared the exercise to a musician’s finger exercises.
In 1923 Condé Nast hired him at a salary of 35,000 dollars. He was chief photographer for Vogue and Vanity Fair from 1923 to 1938 and also worked for advertising agencies, including J. Walter Thompson. In those years he was regarded as the most popular and highest paid photographer in the world. The route from his work to fashion photography as a profession is direct.
The Navy and the Museum of Modern Art
When the Second World War began Steichen was in his sixties, had retired from full-time photography and was breeding new varieties of delphinium. His first exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art, in 1936, was of those flowers. Turned down at first because of his age, he was commissioned a lieutenant commander in the Navy in January 1942 and directed the Naval Aviation Photographic Unit, choosing six officer photographers, among them Wayne Miller. He directed the documentary The Fighting Lady (1944), which won the Academy Award for Best Documentary Feature, and organised two war exhibitions for the museum, Road to Victory (1942) and Power in the Pacific (1945).
From 1947 to 1962 he was director of photography at the Museum of Modern Art. The appointment was contested. Beaumont Newhall resigned, and Ansel Adams wrote a letter of protest saying the change favoured the spectacular and the popular over creative photography. Steichen organised dozens of exhibitions there. He showed early work by Harry Callahan and Aaron Siskind, worked with Robert Frank before The Americans was published, and ended with The Bitter Years (1962), 200 pictures chosen from the Farm Security Administration files. He received the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 1963 and died at West Redding, Connecticut, on March 25, 1973, two days before his 94th birthday.
Wondering how pictures by many hands become one show? The photography exhibition guide covers selecting, printing and hanging work for a wall.
How Steichen’s pictures and exhibitions are built
Four working methods run through the career, and each can be practised.
- The print is made, not taken. In the early work colour and mood were added at the printing stage. Steichen applied layers of light-sensitive gum to a print by hand, so no two prints of the same negative match. The lesson survives the process: decide what the finished picture should feel like, then use every stage to get there.
- Tone is practised like scales. The cup and saucer series was a drill in how a white object separates from a white ground and a dark one from black. It is training in contrast and tonal separation, done with one subject so that only the light and exposure change.
- Commercial work is treated as art. The 1911 Poiret pictures applied a soft-focus, retouched, artistic approach to clothes at a time when commercial pictures were plain records. The later magazine work applied sharp, straight photography to the same job.
- An exhibition is edited like a film. The Family of Man used 503 photographs by 273 photographers from 68 countries. The architect Paul Rudolph designed temporary walls that led visitors through ten rooms. Prints ranged from about 24 by 36 centimetres to 3 by 4 metres. Meaning came from the sequence and the order of the pictures as much as from any single frame.
Want to try the same idea with your own pictures? How to create a photo essay explains choosing and ordering images around one theme.
Photographs and projects to look for
- Rodin, The Thinker (1902). Made in Steichen’s first Paris years and titled for the sculptor Auguste Rodin and his sculpture The Thinker. Rodin called Steichen the leading photographer of the time.
- The Pond, Moonlight (1904). Made at Mamaroneck, New York, near the home of the critic Charles Caffin. It shows a pond with woods beyond it and the moon appearing in a gap in the trees. The print has more than one colour, which came from light-sensitive gums applied by hand in layers. Three prints are known, each different. One sold for 2.9 million dollars in 2006, then the highest price paid for a photograph at auction.
- The Flatiron (1904). The Flatiron Building in New York, which had opened in 1902, photographed a year after Stieglitz photographed it. Steichen printed it in different colours over several years, including a brown version of 1905 and a blue-green version of 1909. A branch reaching in from the upper left recalls Japanese woodblock prints, and the colour has been compared with Whistler’s Nocturnes.
- Fashion photographs for Art et Décoration (1911). Gowns by Paul Poiret, two of them in colour, printed beside drawings by Georges Lepape. Look at how softly they are rendered compared with his magazine work of the 1920s.
- The Fighting Lady (1944). A war documentary directed by Steichen during his Navy service. It won the Academy Award for Best Documentary Feature.
- The Family of Man (1955). The exhibition and its book, with a prologue by Steichen’s brother-in-law, the poet Carl Sandburg. Notice the grouping by shared human experience and the absence of any one photographer’s voice.
Try this: Steichen’s cup and saucer
Take 15 minutes. Put a plain white cup and saucer near a window. Photograph them on a white surface, then a mid grey one, then a black cloth. On each background make three frames: one at the camera’s suggested exposure, one a stop brighter and one a stop darker. Do not move the cup or the camera. Lay the nine frames side by side and find the one in each set where the white of the cup is clearly separate from its background and still shows its curve. Steichen did this more than a thousand times. Nine frames is enough to see what he was looking for.
Not sure how to make a frame a stop brighter or darker? Exposure compensation explains the control and when to use it.
Questions people ask about Edward Steichen
What was The Family of Man?
It was an exhibition Steichen organised at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, shown from January to May 1955. It held 503 photographs from 68 countries and then toured 37 countries over eight years. Sources put its total audience at nine to ten million people. The collection is on permanent display at Clervaux Castle in Luxembourg and was added to UNESCO’s Memory of the World Register in 2003.
Why was The Family of Man criticised?
Writers including Roland Barthes and Susan Sontag argued that its picture of one human family was sentimental and hid real historical injustice. Some photographers also disliked seeing individual work absorbed into a curator’s story.
Was Edward Steichen the first fashion photographer?
He is credited, with Baron Adolph de Meyer, as one of the first. His 1911 photographs of Paul Poiret gowns for Art et Décoration are the pictures he himself described as probably the first serious fashion photographs.
How was The Pond, Moonlight made?
Steichen applied light-sensitive gums to the paper by hand in layers, which gave the print more than one colour. Because the layers were hand-applied, each of the three known prints is unique.
Edward Steichen is one of the photographers in the A to Z of photographers, and he is quoted on the photography quotes page.