I'm in a period right now where not much is getting done with my own shooting. My father is fighting cancer. He is 88 years old now, and a little weaker every day. When I'm not at my job, which has nothing to do with photography, I'm staying close to my parents. One of my aunts passed recently, leaving behind an extensive personal library and had many great books on painting and photography. This gives me the opportunity to stay active by studying great photographers and blogging. I'm attempting a systematic approach to studying these books. I began with Stieglitz, now on to Edward Steichen. This fantastic book written by Steichen, full of quality reproductions of his work, traces his career from 1895 up to 1963. The story of Steichen's career is the story of how how the art of photography changed and developed over the course of the early and mid 20th century.
Steichen was born in 1879 in Luxembourg and Settled in Michigan with his parents in 1881. He had one sister, Lillian, a writer, who would marry the Poet Carl Sandburg in 1908. Steichen first picked up a camera in 1895. He was bitten by the photo bug and began to teach himself printing. His first work was very atmospheric. He used his camera to capture the emotion of moments instead of attempting to make an accurate recording. He liked to shoot by moonlight and to intentionally throw his camera out of focus.
He quit a decent paying job at a lithographic company in 1900, and with a friend, he went to travel in Europe and go to art school. Stopping in New York City, he introduced himself to Alfred Stieglitz, and became involved with the Photo-Secession movement. While in France, he came up with the idea of traveling the continent and making photographic portraits of the great artists of the day. Steichen was not afraid to go dark. His photos were studies of darkness and shadow permeated by bright clusters of interest. His photos invite the views in to study the subtle detail in his shadows.
Portrait of Auguste Rodin with Le Penseur by Steichen
When Steichen returned to America, he looked up Stieglitz in New York and eventually opened up a small portrait studio at 291 5th Avenue. 291 Would become the home of Stieglitz's "The Little Galleries of the Photo-Secession". Steichen quickly became the go-to portrait photographer of anyone-who-was-anyone in America. When the U.S. entered the first world war, he received an army commission and joined the fledgling air reconnaissance unit. He hated the war, and the fact that the photographs he was responsible for told the Army where to drop bombs on people depressed him, but the challenges of figuring out how to take sharp photographs from a bucking aircraft 10,000 feet off the ground impacted his later work.
After the war, he settled in France and entered a period of experimentation, a period he referred to as an "apprenticeship". He worked on methods of suggesting a feeling of physical weight to the objects that he photographed. Photographing natural objects, he looked at spirals and brought the idea of the "Golden Section" into photography.
1923 began a commercial, fashion, and advertising period in which Steichen photographed for Vogue and Vanity Fair. This lasted until 1938 when the work had become routine and stifling. He spent World War Two working for the Navy Department and was placed in command of all Navy combat photography. He was on board the U.S.S. Lexington when it was damaged by a torpedo. The post-war period found Steichen as director of the photography department in the Museum of Modern Art. During this tenure, he created one of the defining exhibitions in the history of photography known as "The Family of Man". I will be exploring the accompanying book to "The Family of Man" in a later post.
From the 1880s to the 1960s, from pictoral photography to social documentary photography, Edward Stiechen was a guiding hand that led photography into the modern art form that it is today. This monograph, if you can find it a great work that anyone interested in photography should own.
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