Edward Steichen and his contributions to modern photography

Steichen

Edward Steichen -- His Life, Times, and Art

In one of Edward Steichen's most famous photographs, the ghostly, lovely face of a woman looks out through a gauzy whisper of a lace veil. Her gaze is directed at the viewer with a disturbing directness, only broken by the filtering lens of the veil. The effect is strikingly modern, but the actress is the young Gloria Swanson and the year the photograph was taken was 1924.

Long before Herb Ritts and other famous celebrity photographers made the art of the publicity still into a revelatory act of a celebrity's soul as well as a mere glamour shot, Edward Steichen engaged in such acts of photographic psychological exploration. Steichen was constantly stretching what was once construed as a purely reproductive or at best journalistic form of media to where it had never been stretched before. Vanity photography was now, in the hands of a master artist, a work of fine art. Over the course of a long career that spanned nearly a century, Steichen's portraits encompassed a diverse and illustrious cast of characters, ranging from Richard Strauss to J.P. Morgan, Maurice Maeterlinck to George Bernard Shaw. (Smith, 1999)

The hazy, opaque quality of the Swanson reproduction is characteristic of much of Steichen's photography, as well as the photo's merging of the popular art of cinema and photography with techniques often found in European high art. Steichen was born in Europe, to European parents, but his family emigrated from Luxembourg, to the United States in 1882. Steichen became interested in photography when he was sixteen, just at the turn of the new century. ("Edward Steichen," Getty Museum, 2004) Steichen's most formative years as a developing artist came during his service in World War I, where he organized an aerial photography unit for the United States Army.

This experience convinced Steichen of the ability of photography to convey emotion as well as merely encapsulate images of reality. (Hagen, 2005) the camera is more than "a witness of objects, places, and events," the photographer is quoted as saying, adding "the technical process" of photography "simply serves as a vehicle of transcription and not as the art," itself, much as the use of a particular brush should not to be equated with the entirety of the art of painting. (Getty Museum, 2004) Photography was more than a craft for Steichen, more than the use of an implement.

In one of Steichen's early landscape photographs, for example, Steichen depicts the "Flatiron NYC on a Rainy Night," in 1931. This work is noteworthy not simply for its use of chiaroscuro, and lonely, imperfectly seen anonymous central figure that is reminiscent of a Rembrandt painting. The work's title stresses its location, like an impressionist work, in a specific 'mood' and time as well as place -- rain and a district of the city. The point of the work is not simply to show an interesting piece of New York City life or architecture, but the character of a district at a particular time, during a specific kind of weather, just like Monet's flowers or building facades had different characters based upon the light, at different times of day, the paintings were 'set' in.

But while the 19th century impressionists approached their works as a way of justifying the art of painting against the perfect reproduction of photography, the Steichen's grounding in fine art, allowed Steichen to bring impressionist techniques to the developing photographic genre to show the truth of a person or a landscape through photography, and take photos beyond their capacity to show mere a literal reproductions. It is important to note the influence of painting upon the photographer's works, particularly, he admitted, in his earlier works that often use "the atmosphere of moonlight," causing works such as the Flatiron to be characterized as his 'pictorial' period.'

During this early post World War I period, the photographer also frequently painted, "to paint or to photograph, that is the question," observed one critic of this period, marveling at the daring of such works as 'Scarlet Poppy," 1928 ("Steichen as Painter," National Gallery of Art, 2005) "Steichen is painting flowers near Paris and says if he keeps on some day he may do something worth looking at," wryly noted Carl Sandburg, Steichen's brother in law. (Steichen and Sandburg, 2002) Although the paintings from this period are less well remembered by posterity than his photographs they are still striking in their design and were formative in his conceptualization of himself as an artist and his later arrangement of his photographic subjects. ("Steichen as Painter," National Gallery of Art, 2005)

For instance, like the revelation of a painting, 'true' Swanson emerges in her photograph more vividly through the haze of lace than would a perfect shot of the young actress' beauty, just as the true "George Washington Bridge, 1931's" expanse of loneliness and cold, steely beauty illuminated in the darkness of that photograph speaks deeply about what the surface represents about modern city life, as well as what it looks like to an outsider's eyes. This iconic quality of his photographic work has also caused Steichen to be called an early albeit unintentional pioneer of what was to become graphic art. (Smith, 1999)

After the war, from 1923 to 1938, Steichen became the chief photographer for two fashion magazines, Vanity Fair and Vogue, another example of his early bridging between the then-chiasmic gulf between popular and high art. Steichen became a member of the Photo-Secession, a group first formed in 1902 by Alfred Stieglitz, another American photographer. The group actively promoted photography as a fine art, rather than a merely popular or personal reproductive art. (Hagen, 2005)