THE ARTS | Reshaping ideas, expressing identity
14 May 2008
Steichen: A Legend Who Reimagined Portrait Photography
New exhibition explores photographer’s artistry and lasting influence
Washington -- Of all the innovators who helped propel photography to its hard-won status as a fine-arts medium in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, probably none has been as widely praised, as harshly criticized or as influential as photographer Edward Steichen (1879-1973).
A new exhibition, Edward Steichen: Portraits, at the National Portrait Gallery in Washington reveals how Steichen’s aesthetic evolved from the romanticized vision of his early years into an urbane and stylized -- yet intimate -- perspective. Although he began his photographic career by experimenting with a soft-focus “pictorialist” technique that yielded impressionistic, gauzy images, he soon adopted the linear, modernist approach that became his signature.
Portraits curator Ann M. Shumard, in a recent interview with America.gov, explained that Steichen turned away from pictorialism (a painterly effect of artfully blurred or manually enhanced photographic prints) during World War I since the genre’s dream-like quality no longer fit the spirit of the times. Steichen’s own war experience as commander of the photographic division of the American Expeditionary Forces was instrumental in his decision to renounce impressionistic photography in favor of realism.
By the 1920s, Steichen was working as a high-end fashion and portrait photographer. Within a decade, he had become one of the most successful photographers in the world, producing iconic portraits of actors, dancers, playwrights, novelists, architects, statesmen and other celebrated figures.
IN THE BEGINNING: AN ARTIST’S JOURNEY
A naturalized American, Steichen emigrated from Luxembourg at age 2 in 1881 with his family, settling in Hancock, Michigan. At age 15, he became apprenticed to a lithographer in Milwaukee and also studied painting. According to Shumard, Steichen’s youthful training in lithography “nurtured a graphic design sense that helped shape his career.”
Steichen took up photography in 1895 but “continued to paint even when he was well established as a photographer, finally ending that phase of his life in 1923, when he burned most of his paintings,” said Shumard.
As a leader of the pictorialist movement, Steichen attracted the notice of pioneering photographer Alfred Steiglitz, who shared Steichen’s ambition of elevating photography to the status of fine art. Steiglitz aggressively promoted the dark, moody (and often heavily retouched) images produced by pictorialists, and while pictorialism largely was forgotten after World War I, it played an important role in securing photography’s reputation as a creative medium worthy of respect.
After the war, Steichen began photographing fashion models for magazines, his camera work showcasing the streamlined elegance of Jazz Age couture. Steichen’s ability to seize on and amplify emerging design trends lent his work a cutting-edge aura that appealed to many contemporaries, including New York publisher Condé Montrose Nast. With a business empire built around periodicals that catered to a moneyed leisure class, Nast was seeking a photographer to create stylish visuals for Vogue, the United States’ premier monthly fashion journal, and Vanity Fair, a sophisticated general-interest magazine.
In 1923, Nast hired Steichen as the chief photographer for Condé Nast Publications, giving him a mandate to change the editorial direction of Vogue and Vanity Fair. Steichen soon would rewrite the rules of portrait photography and become, in the process, the originator of modern celebrity portraiture.
BIRTH OF A NEW ERA
When the Art Deco movement (initially called Style Moderne) swept through the fields of architecture, interior design and industrial design in 1925, Steichen quickly appreciated its potential and was among the first photographers to incorporate an Art Deco sensibility in his work. With its sleek, sinuous lines and geometric precision, the style conveyed an opulence and glamour that perfectly suited the appetites of Vogue and Vanity Fair readers.
Steichen wanted to create images “that had the kick and the verve to leap off the page,” Shumard said. A 1927 portrait of dancer Fred Astaire shows the Broadway star (who was not yet a Hollywood fixture) in immaculate evening attire, his silhouette dramatically lengthened by his own shadow, with a profusion of silk top hats carelessly strewn at his feet. Published in Vanity Fair, the portrait reinforced the public perception of Astaire as a cosmopolitan bon vivant: a perfect match for the film roles that soon would come his way.
Other Steichen portraits -- of actor Charlie Chaplin (1925), relaxed and smiling; actress Anna May Wong (1930), enigmatic and self-contained; actress Joan Crawford (1932), austerely chic in a floor-length black gown; novelist Willa Cather (1927), unpretentious and engagingly direct; actor/singer Paul Robeson (circa 1933), an imposing presence radiating command and authority -- further stoked the public’s growing fascination with celebrity figures.
Under Steichen’s lens, his famous subjects projected a sense of worldly ease and self-confidence that viewers longed to emulate, and Steichen became an arbiter of taste. “There’s no question that people were mimicking what they saw in Vanity Fair,” said Shumard. “Steichen’s images strongly influenced Old Hollywood glamour photography.”
If there were any doubts about the artistic merits of magazine work, Steichen did not share them. He saw no contradiction between working commercially and maintaining high artistic standards, Shumard observed. “He had a rational approach to commercial photography, and didn’t feel that he was lowering his artistic standards” by working for magazines, she said. “He didn’t feel that commercial work in any way diminished his luster.”
Also, “he was very receptive to new technological developments,” she added. During his pictorialist phase, he had relied exclusively on natural light, “but when a lighting technician showed up one day with equipment that Steichen wasn’t familiar with, he quickly adapted” and began using artificial lighting to great effect, heightening the drama of his images.
ASSESSING A LEGEND
Although Steichen was hailed by some colleagues as “the Rembrandt” or “the Leonardo” of photography and dubbed “the greatest photographer that ever lived,” not everyone was persuaded. To skeptics, he was a crass purveyor of “parvenu elegance and slick technique,” with “a tendency toward the showy and inflated.” His former mentor Stieglitz regarded Steichen’s commercial success as a form of treason, and he never entirely forgave his one-time protegé for conquering the (presumably vulgar) publishing industry.
Still, even his rivals -- such as photographer Paul Strand -- grudgingly acknowledged Steichen’s achievements. Throughout a career that spanned more than 70 years, Steichen garnered many honors that confirmed his stature as “a king of the photographic world,” as journalists often described him.
Because he undertook so many different projects (including the creation of a vast exhibition in 1955, The Family of Man, which depicted life, love and death in 68 countries), it would be virtually impossible for any single photography show to encompass the full scope of Steichen’s accomplishments. The Portraits exhibition concentrates exclusively on the works for which Steichen probably is best known: images of famous faces that transformed U.S. popular culture.
By casting aside conventional ideas about portrait photography -- and producing sharply focused, dramatically lit, boldly linear compositions that made his subjects seem just a bit larger than life -- Steichen set the stage for those who followed. For example, the celebrity portraits of photographer Annie Leibovitz almost certainly owe a debt to Steichen’s innovations.
If Steichen was not the first photographer to specialize in photographing the famous, “he was well positioned to feed the public interest” in celebrities, “and he propelled that trend,” said Shumard. The Portraits exhibition, which offers an expansive view of Steichen’s extraordinarily productive years at Vanity Fair, aims to “give viewers an appreciation for his skill -- and his ability to capture and distill images” that illuminate the modern world.
The Portaits exhibition is on display at the Smithsonian Institution’s National Portrait Gallery from April 11 through September 1. For more information, visit the gallery’s Web site.
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