Edward Jean Steichen (; March 27, 1879 – March 25, 1973) was a Luxembourgish American photographer, painter and curator and a pioneer of fashion photography. His gown images for the magazine Art et Décoration in 1911 were the first modern fashion photographs to be published. From 1923 to 1938, Steichen served as chief photographer for the Condé Nast magazines Vogue and Vanity Fair, designating him the "greatest living portrait photographer" even as he turned to painting. Steichen worked for many advertising agencies, including J. Walter Thompson. During these years, Steichen was regarded as the most popular and highest-paid photographer in the world.
After the United States' entry into World War II, Steichen was invited by the United States Navy to serve as Director of the Naval Aviation Photographic Unit. In 1944, he directed the war documentary The Fighting Lady, which won the Academy Award for Best Documentary Feature at the 17th Academy Awards.
From 1947 to 1961, Steichen served as Director of the Department of Photography at New York's Museum of Modern Art. While there, he curated and assembled exhibits including the touring exhibition The Family of Man, which was seen by nine million people. In 2003, the Family of Man photographic collection was added to UNESCO's Memory of the World Register in recognition of its historical value.
In February 2006, a print of Steichen's early pictorialist photograph, The Pond–Moonlight (1904), sold for US$2.9 million—at the time, the highest price ever paid for a photograph at auction.Tooth, Roger (15 February 2006), "At $2.9m, Pond–Moonlight becomes world's most expensive photograph", The Guardian. A print of another photograph of the same style, The Flatiron (1904), became the second most expensive photograph ever on November 8, 2022, when it was sold for $12,000,000, at Christie's New York – well above the original estimate of $2,000,000-$3,000,000.
Early life Steichen was born Éduard Jean Steichen on March 27, 1879, in a small house in the village of Bivange, Luxembourg, the son of Jean-Pierre and Marie Kemp Steichen.Niven, Penelope (1997), Steichen: A Biography. New York: Clarkson Potter. , p. 4. His parents facing increasingly straitened circumstances and financial difficulties, decided to make a new start and emigrated to the United States when Steichen was eighteen months old. Jean-Pierre Steichen immigrated in 1880, with Marie Steichen bringing the infant Éduard along after Jean-Pierre had settled in Hancock in Michigan's Upper Peninsula copper country. According to noted Steichen biographer, Penelope Niven, the Steichens were "part of a large exodus of Luxembourgers displaced in the late nineteenth century by worsening economic conditions."
Éduard's sister and only sibling, Lilian Steichen, was born in Hancock on May 1, 1883. She would later marry poet Carl Sandburg, whom she met at the Milwaukee Social Democratic Party office in 1907. Her marriage to Sandburg the following year helped forge a life-long friendship and partnership between her brother and Sandburg.Niven, Penelope (1997), Steichen: A Biography. New York: Clarkson Potter. , p. 6.
By 1889, when Éduard was 10, his parents had saved up enough money to move the family to Milwaukee (Wisconsin).Niven, Penelope (1997), Steichen: A Biography. New York: Clarkson Potter. , p. 16. There he learned German and English at school, while continuing to speak Luxembourgish at home.
In 1894, at fifteen, Steichen began attending Pio Nono College, a Catholic boys' high school, where his artistic talents were noticed. His drawings in particular were said to show promise.Faram, Mark D. (2009), Faces of War: The Untold Story of Edward Steichen's WWII Photographers Penguin. p. 15–16. He quit high school to begin a four-year lithography apprenticeship with the American Fine Art Company of Milwaukee.Gedrim, Ronald J. (1996), Edward Steichen: Selected Texts and Bibliography. Oxford, UK: Clio Press. , p. xiii. After hours, he would sketch and draw, and he began to teach himself painting.Niven (1997), p. 28. Having discovered a camera shop near his work, he visited frequently until he persuaded himself to buy his first camera, a secondhand Kodak box "detective" camera, in 1895.Niven (1997), p. 29. Steichen and his friends who were also interested in drawing and photography pooled their funds, rented a small room in a Milwaukee office building, and began calling themselves the Milwaukee Art Students League.Niven (1997), p. 42. The group hired Richard Lorenz and Robert Schade for occasional lectures. In 1899, Steichen's photographs were exhibited in the second Philadelphia Photographic Salon.
Steichen became a U.S. citizen in 1900 and signed the naturalization papers as Edward J. Steichen, but he continued to use his birth name of Éduard until after the First World War.Niven (1997), p. 66.
Career Paris, New York, and Partnerships with Stieglitz and Rodin
In April 1900, Steichen left Milwaukee for Paris to study art. Clarence H. White thought Steichen and Alfred Stieglitz should meet, and thus produced an introduction letter for Steichen, and Steichen—then en route to Paris from his home in Milwaukee—met Stieglitz in New York City in early 1900.Niven, Penelope (1997), Steichen: A Biography. New York: Clarkson Potter. , p. 74. In that first meeting, Stieglitz expressed praise for Steichen's background in painting and bought three of Steichen's photographic prints.Niven (1997), p. 75.
In 1902, when Stieglitz was formulating what would become Camera Work, he asked Steichen to design the logo for the magazine with a custom typeface.Roberts, Pam (1997). "Alfred Stieglitz, 291 Gallery and Camera Work," in: Alfred Stieglitz (ed.), Camera Work, The Complete Illustrations 1903–1917. Köln: Taschen. , p. 17. Steichen was the most frequently shown photographer in the journal. In Camera Work, Steichen pushed for a democratic approach where he responded to those who criticized him for manipulating photographs claiming that all photographers were frackers and "upended the myth of an "objective" photography faithful to nature." Claiming, "There is never anything natural in photography […] every shot, every print, is already a manipulation that introduces a gap between the photograph and its supposed truth". His approach effectively blurring the lines between the two arts.
Steichen began experimenting with color photography in 1904 and was one of the earliest in the United States to use the Autochrome Lumière process.. In 1905, Stieglitz and Steichen created the Little Galleries of the Photo-Secession, in what had been Steichen's portrait studio; it eventually became known as the 291 Gallery after its address. It presented some of the first American exhibitions of Auguste Rodin, Henri Matisse, Paul Cézanne, Pablo Picasso, and Constantin Brâncuși.
According to author and art historian William A. Ewing, Steichen became one of the earliest "jet setters", constantly moving back and forth between Europe and the U.S. by steamship, in the process cross-pollinating art from Europe to the United States, helping to define photography as an art form, and at the same time widening America's understanding of European art and art in general.
Pioneering fashion photography Fashion photography began with engravings reproduced from photographs of modishly-dressed actresses by Leopold-Emile Reutlinger, Nadar and others in the 1890s. After high-quality half-tone reproduction of photographs became possible, most credit as pioneers of the genre goes to the French Baron Adolph de Meyer and to Steichen who, borrowing his friend's hand-camera in 1907, candidly photographed dazzlingly-dressed ladies at the Longchamp Racecourse.. Fashion then was being photographed for newspaper supplements and fashion magazines, particularly by the Frères Séeberger, as it was worn at Paris horse-race meetings by aristocracy and hired models.
In 1911, Lucien Vogel, the publisher of Jardin des Modes and La Gazette du Bon Ton, challenged Steichen to promote fashion as a fine art through photography.Niven (1997), p. 352. Steichen took photos of gowns designed by couturier Paul Poiret, which were published in the April 1911 issue of the magazine Art et Décoration.Steichen's prints appeared in an article by Paul Cornu, "L'art de la robe", in Art et Décoration, April 1911, p. 101–118. Two were in colour,Edward Steichen, Experiment in Three-Color Photography in "Our lllustrations", in Camera Work. No. 15 (July 1906), p. 44. and appeared next to flat, stylised, yellow-and-black Georges Lepape drawings of accessories, fabrics, and girls.
Steichen himself, in his 1963 autobiography, asserted that his 1911 Art et Décoration photographs "were probably the first serious fashion photographs ever made," a generalised claim since repeated by many commentators. What he (and de Meyer) did bring was an artistic approach; a soft-focus, aesthetically retouched Pictorialist style that was distinct from the mechanically sharp images made by his commercial colleagues for half-tone reproduction, and that he and the publishers and fashion designers for whom he worked appreciated as a marketable idealisation of the garment, beyond the exact description of fabrics and buttonholes.
After World War I, during which he commanded the photographic division of the American Expeditionary Forces, he gradually reverted to straight photography. In the early 1920s, Steichen famously took over 1000 photographs of a single cup and saucer, on "a graduated scale of tones from pure white through light and dark greys to black velvet," which he compared to a musician's finger exercises. He was hired by Condé Nast in 1923 for the extraordinary salary of $35,000 (equivalent to over $500,000 in 2019 value).
World War II
At the commencement of World War II, Steichen, then in his sixties, had retired as a full-time photographer. He was developing new varieties of delphinium, which in 1936 had been the subject of his first exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art, and the only flower exhibition ever held there.An exhibition in Orlando in 2019/20 focused on Steichen's dedication to flowers. Examples especially of his rarely seen paintings are displayed in a review of Edward Steichen: In Exaltation of Flowers by Suzanne Cohen on Art Districts Magazine, n. d. [Sept 2019], and on the museum's website. Accessed 30 August 2024.
When the United States joined the global conflict, Steichen, who had come out of the first World War an Army Colonel, was refused for active service because of his age. Later, invited by the Navy to serve as Director of the Naval Aviation Photographic Unit,Budiansky, Stephen, "The Photographer who Took the Navy's Portrait", World War II, Volume 26, No. 2, July/August 2011, p. 25 he was commissioned a Lieutenant-Commander in January 1942. Steichen selected for his unit six officer-photographers from the industry (sometimes irreverently called "Steichen's chickens"), including photographers Wayne Miller and Charles Fenno Jacobs. A collection of 172 silver gelatin photographs taken by the Unit under his leadership is held at the Harry Ransom Center at the University of Texas at Austin. Their war documentary The Fighting Lady, directed by Steichen, won the Academy Award for Best Documentary Feature at the 17th Academy Awards.