Edward Steichen

"The camera is a witness of objects, places, and events.... The technical process simply serves as a vehicle of transcription and not as the art."

--Edward Steichen

Edward Steichen was born in Luxembourg in 1879. At the young age of 16, he became interested in photography. For years, he would combine photography and painting in many of his early Pictoralist pictures. When at 21, he ventured to New York, he met Alfred Steiglitz (who we met last Sunday). Steiglitz purchased three of his photographs.

In 1923, Steichen went to work for the Condé Nast publications Vanity Fair and Vogue. He now got to photograph celebrities and fashions. He received advertisement commissions and even made photographic designs for fabric.


During World War II, he joined the Navy where he headed up a unit of photographers. He was also the first curator of photographs at the Museum of Modern Art in New York where he curated the "Family of Man" exhibit in 1953.