Photographer Edward SteichenBy Ms. Brooks

Digital PhotographyEdited:

Spring 2015

His Start● Born in Luxenbourg, Germany and

immigrated to the United States with his family at the age of 3

● began a lithography apprenticeship with the American Fine Art Company in Milwaukee at age 15

● Became good friends with Alfred Stieglitz after Stieglitz bought one of his prints

http://www.spartacus.schoolnet.co.uk/USAPsteichen.htm

At Age 21, Alfred Stieglitz became an instrumental part of Steichen’s career as a photographer

As he headed to Paris to study painting and to see the Rodin Pavilion just outside the 1900 Exposition Universelle, twenty-one-year-old Edward Steichen stopped in New York. An aspiring painter and an accomplished photographer in the soft-focus, self-consciously artistic style that distinguished serious amateurs from casual snapshooters and commercial studios alike, Steichen made a pilgrimage to the Camera Club of New York to show his work to Alfred Stieglitz, the leading tastemaker in American photography. Stieglitz, vice-president of the Camera Club and editor of its journal Camera Notes, was impressed by the young artist from Milwaukee and bought three of his photographs—a self-portrait and two moody, atmospheric woodland scenes printed in platinum—for the impressive sum of five dollars each. Elated, Steichen (who told Stieglitz that he'd never before sold a photograph for more than fifty cents) left additional photographs from his portfolio for Stieglitz to publish or send to exhibitions, as he saw fit, and then boarded the ship for Europe.

http://www.metmuseum.org/toah/hd/stei/hd_stei.htm

Paris: gum bichromate process

The process1. http://www.alternativephotography.

com/wp/processes/gum-bichromates/an-introduction-to-the-gum-bichromate-process

2. Gum Bichromate is a 19th century photographic process, initially patented in 1855 by the French photographer and inventor, Alphonse Poitevin.

Edward Steichen fled Paris for New York in the autumn of 1914 at the onset of World War I.

The Little Galleries of Succession

http://www.metmuseum.org/toah/works-of-art/1987.1100.109World War ISteichen made aerial photographs for the U.S. Army's air reconnaissance division; his pictures were used to survey enemy territory, record enemy movements, and locate gun encampments.

Special Steichen Supplement, Photography by Edward Steichen in the published journal Camera Work

The Big White Cloud from Camera Work, Edward Steichen

Notwithstanding his prominence in the pages of Camera Work and on the walls of the Little Galleries and his success as a portrait photographer, in the autumn of 1906 Steichen determined "to get away from the lucrative but stultifying professional portrait business" and return to France with his family in hopes of resuscitating his idled painting career. It was a move with numerous consequences. http://www.metmuseum.org/toah/hd/stei/hd_stei.htm

● Embraced Autochrome

● Friendship with Rodin

● Hand camera● "first attempt at

serious documentary reportage"

After World War ISteichen's large and painterly early prints, perhaps because of their rarity, are now far less known by the general public than his portraits of Greta Garbo, Marlene Dietrich, Gloria Swanson, and other celebrities that appeared in Condé Nast's Vogue and Vanity Fair in the 1920s and 1930s, or his fashion and advertising photographs that shared those same pages

http://www.metmuseum.org/toah/hd/stei/hd_stei.htm

curator of photographs at the Museum of Modern Art (1947–62), the 1955 exhibition The Family of Man

The Family of Man, Revisited

Edward Steichen’s Legacy lives on in this exhibitHere photography is celebrated as the lives of those who were lost in World War I are commemorated.

http://www.europeanceo.com/culture/2013/10/the-modern-family-of-man/