LIVES IN PHOTOGRAPHY – EDWARD STEICHEN

When we talk about Edward Steichen (Luxembourg, 1879 – Umpawa, United States, 1973) we are in fact talking about a large part of the History of Photography. Photographer, painter, publisher, businessman and MoMA curator, he was dubbed “the best photographer of all time”. The Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía presents, for the first time in Spain, a retrospective of Steichen, who was considered the first well-known name in photography in the early 20th century when the medium was not regarded as an artistic discipline.

Edward Steichen was born in Luxembourg, but soon moved with his family to the Unites States. At the age of sixteen, he began his career as a photographer and at twenty-one moved to Paris to learn to paint. During his early years, he adopted a pictorialist approach to photography –clearly influenced by his facet as a painter. Almost immediately Steichen replaced the romantic concepts with a modernist trend characterized by powerful industrial images. It was at this time that he and photographer Alfred Stieglitz set up the Little Galleries of the Photo-Secession, a group that focused on self-expression and shunned traditionalism. Steichen also collaborated on Camera Work, Photo-Secession’s prestigious official magazine. The two photographers also founded Gallery 291, an art gallery in New York, in order to display major works by Rodin, Matisse, Cézanne, Picasso, Toulouse-Lautrec.

After the armed conflict, having established himself as a key figure in modern photography, Steichen moved into exhibition organization and became Director of MoMA’s Department of Photography. Here he organized a major exhibition of his greatest work, The Family of Man (1955), consisting of 500 photographs on the theme of fraternity and human commitment in 68 countries. This exhibition is now part of the Permanent Collection at the Château de Clervaux, in Luxembourg. In 2006, Steichen’s The Pond Moonlight (1904) broke the world record for a photograph at an auction in Sotheby’s New York, making it the most expensive photograph in the world.

Lives in Photography analyzes Steichen’s contribution in all the fields he was involved in, as well as making us reflect on the tension between artistic and commercial photography.

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