The Patriarch of the Family of Man

By R.H.

He was one day short of his 94th birthday. In the seven decades of work that lay between Edward Steichen's birth in Luxembourg and his death in Connecticut last week, he had become the most justly famous photographer in America: a patriarch in reputation and appearance, with his grizzled pepper-and-salt beard, his short way with bores and fools and his boundless kindness to younger photographers in whom he recognized signs of talent. His was an enormous life, comparable in range to Picasso's; his portrait subjects spanned modern history, from the actress Eleanora Duse and Auguste Rodin to Eleanor Roosevelt. The projects ran from a laxative advertisement (done before 1900) to what is still the most popular photography show in history, The Family of Man, which he selected for New York's Museum of Modern Art in January 1955 and which was seen by more than 9,000,000 people in 69 countries. All through his long career, it was very largely Steichen who implanted photography indelibly in the public's consciousness as an art. The results of his success are still becoming apparent.

Challenge. The brilliance of Steichen's early work was augmented--not facilitated, since it can never have come easily--by the open-endedness of both painting and sculpture at the time. It was his opportunity and pleasure to explore, with lens and plate, a range of relationships between the aspects of a whole visual culture that was not so accessible to earlier masters of photography like Nadar and Oscar Rejlander. In his 20s, Steichen's prints frankly imitated the "look" of paintings; a famous image of J.P. Morgan, glaring over his bottle nose out of the gloom, comes as near to Titian as photography can, and the gum-print and pigment-print portraits that Steichen made of himself and his friends, reworking the image with eraser and fingers, seem like deliberate homages to Whistler. The melting halftones, the silvery highlights and atmospheric blurs (he would spit on the lens, or kick the tripod as the shutter clicked) are a poetic reprise of Impressionism, and one finds him cropping the image in imitation of Degas's paintings--themselves influenced by the arbitrary croppings of earlier photographs.

Gradually his photographs moved from dependence on painting into a challenge to it. His later masterpieces are such still-life images as An Apple. A Boulder, A Mountain (1921): one of a series done with tiny stops (down to f. 128) and immensely long exposures (up to 36 hours). The result is density: the image seems weightier, more substantial than any apple could be. It is not an imitation of Cezanne but a photographer's equivalent of those absorbed perceptions of tactility and gravity that Cezanne brought to the study of everything from fruit to Mt. Sainte-Victoire.

Throughout, Steichen was a meticulous craftsman. Much of his art lay in his impeccable and patient sense of selection; he could, and did, shoot a thousand frames to pick one image. And he was very much a functionalist. "If my technique, imagination and vision are any good," he once observed, "I ought to be able to put the best values of my noncommercial and experimental photography into a pair of shoes, a tube of toothpaste, a jar of face cream, a mattress or any object I want to light up and make humanly interesting in an advertising photograph."

This was precisely his achievement. He established, once and for all, that photography was and is an art form, and did so with enormous commercial success. He has many heirs, and will no doubt have equals, but nobody will have to "legitimize" photography again. That had to be done once--and Steichen did it.

--R.H.

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