Verenigde Staten, Luxemburg · 1879–1973
Edward Jean Steichen was een in Luxemburg geboren Amerikaans fotograaf, schilder, galeriehouder en museumcurator.
Edward Jean Steichen (Bivange, 27 maart 1879 – West Redding (Connecticut), 25 maart 1973) was een in Luxemburg geboren Amerikaans fotograaf, schilder, galeriehouder en museumcurator.
Geboorte · 27 maart 1879
Bivange
Gebeurtenis · Hancock
Emigration to the United States
His parents, facing straitened circumstances, decide to make a fresh start: his father moves to the United States in 1880 and settles in Hancock, in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula copper country, and his mother brings the eighteen-month-old Éduard to join him. The family is part of a large exodus of Luxembourgers displaced by worsening economic conditions.
Gebeurtenis · Milwaukee
Pio Nono College and a lithography apprenticeship
At fifteen he enters the Catholic boys’ school Pio Nono College, where his talent for drawing is noticed; he later quits it for a four-year lithography apprenticeship with the American Fine Art Company in Milwaukee. After hours he sketches and begins to teach himself painting.
Loopbaan · Milwaukee
First camera: the start of photography
Having discovered a camera shop near his work, he buys a secondhand Kodak box “detective” camera and begins to practise photography. He and his friends, who are interested in drawing and photography, then pool their funds and rent a small room in Milwaukee, calling themselves the Milwaukee Art Students League and hiring Richard Lorenz and Robert Schade for occasional lectures.
Ontmoeting · New York City
Meets Stieglitz on the way to Paris
He leaves Milwaukee for Paris to study art; on a letter of introduction from Clarence H. White he meets Alfred Stieglitz in New York, who praises his background in painting and buys three of his photographic prints. He will spend several years in Paris and discover avant-garde art there.
Loopbaan · New York City
The Camera Work logo and the Photo-Secession
When Stieglitz is planning the magazine that becomes Camera Work, he asks Steichen to design its logo with a custom typeface; Steichen becomes the most frequently shown photographer in the journal. In the same year he is one of the founders of the Photo-Secession in New York.
Family · 1 juli 1904
Daughter born: Mary Calderone
Tentoonstelling · New York City
The Little Galleries of the Photo-Secession
With Stieglitz he creates the Little Galleries of the Photo-Secession in what had been Steichen’s portrait studio; the gallery later becomes known as 291 after its address and presents some of the first American exhibitions of Rodin, Matisse, Cézanne, Picasso and Brâncuși. Constantly crossing between Europe and the US by steamship, he becomes, in the art historian William A. Ewing’s words, one of the earliest “jet setters,” bringing European art to America.
Werk · Paris
Ladies at the Longchamp racecourse
Borrowing a friend’s hand-camera, he candidly photographs dazzlingly dressed ladies at the Longchamp Racecourse, an early step towards fashion photography; together with Baron Adolph de Meyer he is credited as a pioneer of the genre.
Werk · April 1911
The first modern fashion photographs
Lucien Vogel, publisher of Jardin des Modes and La Gazette du Bon Ton, challenges him to promote fashion as a fine art through photography; Steichen photographs gowns by the couturier Paul Poiret, published in the April issue of Art et Décoration, two of them in colour beside Georges Lepape’s drawings. They are regarded as the first modern fashion photographs, in a soft-focus Pictorialist manner that idealised the garment.
Loopbaan · during the First World War
Aerial photography in the US Army in the First World War
Serving in the US Army, he commands the photographic division of the American Expeditionary Forces and teaches recruits the basics of aerial photography, emerging from the war an Army Colonel. The war pushes him towards uncompromising realism, and afterwards he gradually reverts to straight photography.
Loopbaan
Chief photographer of Condé Nast
Condé Nast hires him at an extraordinary salary of $35,000; until 1938 he is chief photographer of Vogue and Vanity Fair, and is called the “greatest living portrait photographer.” He also works for advertising agencies, including J. Walter Thompson, and in these years is regarded as the most popular and highest-paid photographer in the world.
Tentoonstelling · New York City
Delphiniums at the Museum of Modern Art
His new varieties of delphinium are the subject of Steichen’s first exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art, the only flower exhibition ever held there. By the start of the Second World War, in his sixties, he had retired as a full-time photographer and was breeding flowers.
Tentoonstelling · New York City
The exhibition “Road to Victory”
He curates for the Museum of Modern Art the exhibition Road to Victory; five duplicates of it tour the world. The photographs are credited to enlisted members of the Navy, Coast Guard and Marine Corps and to Steichen’s unit, many are anonymous, and some were made by automatic cameras in Navy planes operated while firing at the enemy.
Loopbaan · January 1942
Head of the Naval Aviation Photographic Unit
Refused for active service because of his age, he is invited by the Navy to direct the Naval Aviation Photographic Unit and is commissioned a Lieutenant-Commander. For the unit he picks six officer-photographers, among them Wayne Miller and Charles Fenno Jacobs, irreverently known as “Steichen’s chickens.”
Tentoonstelling · January 1945 · New York City
The exhibition “Power in the Pacific”
Following Road to Victory, the Museum of Modern Art shows Power in the Pacific: Battle Photographs of our Navy in Action on the Sea and In the Sky.
Loopbaan · 13 December 1945
Leaves active duty as a Captain
He is released from active duty under honourable conditions with the rank of Captain; for his Second World War service he is awarded the World War II Victory Medal, the Asiatic-Pacific Campaign Medal (with two campaign stars), the American Campaign Medal and numerous other awards.
Gebeurtenis · 29 April 1946
Ansel Adams protests the appointment
Ansel Adams writes to Stephen Clark (copying Beaumont Newhall) to say that replacing Newhall with a regime inevitably favourable to the spectacular and “popular” would be a body blow to the progress of creative photography; it is one of the loudest protests against Steichen’s hiring.
Loopbaan · New York City
Director of Photography at MoMA
On the strength of the attendance at his propaganda exhibitions Road to Victory and Power in the Pacific, he is appointed Director of Photography at the Museum of Modern Art, a post he holds until 1962; Beaumont Newhall resigns along with most of his staff. The appointment is protested by those who see him as anti-art photography: his own style seemed too commercial and popular.
Loopbaan · New York City
Buys Rauschenberg ahead of every museum
As director of photography he buys two prints by Robert Rauschenberg, ahead of any museum. More generally he bets on the “liveness of the melting pot of American photography”: he works with Robert Frank even before The Americans is published, exhibits the early work of Harry Callahan and Aaron Siskind, and brings in acquisitions from Europe and Latin America.
Werk
“The Family of Man”
Tentoonstelling · 28 March – 30 May 1961 · New York City
The retrospective “Steichen the Photographer”
Steichen’s only solo show during his years at the museum, the retrospective Steichen the Photographer, takes place only after he has announced his retirement; it is organised by Grace M. Mayer.
Loopbaan · 1 July 1962 · New York City
His successor: John Szarkowski
He hires John Szarkowski as his successor as director of photography (other accounts have Steichen leaving as early as 1961); Szarkowski promotes Grace M. Mayer to Curator. The culmination of his tenure is The Family of Man (1955): more than 500 photographs of life, love and death in 68 countries, with a prologue to the catalogue by Steichen’s brother-in-law Carl Sandburg; nine million people saw it, still a record for a photography exhibition, and at Steichen’s wish it was donated to Luxembourg, his country of birth.
Gebeurtenis
A submission to the Senate on copyright
Aged 88 and unable to attend in person, as a still-active member of the copyright committee of the American Society of Magazine Photographers he writes to the US Senate hearings in support of copyright law revisions, asking that “this young giant among the visual arts” be given equal rights.
Gebeurtenis · New York City
The Edward Steichen Archive at MoMA
The Edward Steichen Archive is established in the Department of Photography at the Museum of Modern Art; museum director René d’Harnoncourt says its function is to amplify and clarify the meaning of Steichen’s contribution to photography and to modern art; it was created by Grace M. Mayer.
