Edward Steichen Luxembourgish, American, 1879-1973

Edward Steichen (1879–1973) occupied a remarkable succession of positions within the history of modern photography: Pictorialist painter-photographer, co-founder with Alfred Stieglitz of the Photo-Secession and the gallery at 291, the most highly paid fashion and advertising photographer of his generation, and, ultimately, the curator who conceived The Family of Man, the most widely seen photographic exhibition ever mounted. Few photographers moved so decisively between art, commerce, technology and the museum, or exerted such influence across all four.

Born in Luxembourg and raised in Michigan and Wisconsin, Steichen apprenticed in lithography, painted, and began photographing in 1895. In Paris from 1900, he developed the soft-focus, tonal and extensively hand-worked prints that became synonymous with American Pictorialism. The Pond—Moonlight, exposed in Mamaroneck in September 1904 and printed in layered gum bichromate over platinum, exemplifies the medium’s ambition to transform photography into a form of painterly expression. Each impression was hand-coloured and therefore unique; only three are known. One, deaccessioned by The Metropolitan Museum of Art from the Gilman Paper Company collection, was sold at Sotheby’s in 2006.

Steichen’s partnership with Stieglitz was central to the institutional formation of American modernism. Together they founded the Photo-Secession in 1902; Steichen designed and substantially shaped Camera Work, and in 1905 opened the Little Galleries of the Photo-Secession at 291 Fifth Avenue. There, photography existed alongside the work of the European avant-garde: Steichen organized the first American exhibitions of Auguste Rodin, Henri Matisse, Paul Cézanne and Constantin Brâncuși, establishing 291 as a crucial point of exchange between American photography and European modernism.

His experience during the First World War marked a decisive break with Pictorialism. Steichen commanded aerial photography for the American Expeditionary Forces and later directed the Naval Aviation Photographic Unit during the Second World War. Friends, Romans and Countrymen, of about 1920, belongs to this period of transition. A densely packed field of flowers is transformed into an almost abstract field of tonal repetition, the descriptive subject giving way to pattern, rhythm and light.

After the war, Steichen abandoned the Pictorialist aesthetic almost entirely. In 1923 he became chief photographer for Condé Nast, where he brought a new precision and graphic force to fashion and portrait photography. His portraits of Greta Garbo, Charlie Chaplin and Gloria Swanson, together with his work for Vogue and Vanity Fair, helped define the visual vocabulary of modern fashion photography. At the same time, his advertising campaigns for J. Walter Thompson demonstrated that commercial photography could absorb the formal intelligence of modern art without relinquishing its communicative power. Steichen thus became a pivotal figure in the convergence of photography, mass media and modern visual culture.

In 1947, Steichen became director of the Department of Photography at The Museum of Modern Art, a position he held until 1962. Over the course of his tenure, he organized approximately fifty exhibitions and profoundly expanded the institutional possibilities of photography. His curatorial vision culminated in The Family of Man, which opened at MoMA in 1955. The exhibition brought together 503 photographs by 273 photographers from 68 countries, selected from more than two million submissions, and presented a humanist vision of shared experience across national and cultural boundaries. It subsequently travelled internationally for eight years and was seen by an estimated nine million people. In 2003, the collection was inscribed on UNESCO’s Memory of the World Register and is now permanently installed at Clervaux Castle in Luxembourg.

Steichen died at West Redding, Connecticut, in 1973. His photographs are held in the collections of The Museum of Modern Art, to which he gave his own collection, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Art Institute of Chicago, the National Gallery of Art and the Musée national d’histoire et d’art in Luxembourg, among many others.

Bruce Silverstein Gallery has presented Steichen’s work in Photographer as Sculptor, Sculptor as Photographer (2025), Summer Glow (2024).