Edward Steichen

From Philosopedia

Edward Jean Steichen (27 March 1879 - 25 March 1973)

Edouard Jean Steichen was born in Bivange, Luxembourg, to a family that moved in 1881 to the United States, and he became a naturalized citizen in 1900.

The American photographer, trained as a painter, frequently used chemicals that resembled fuzzy mezzotints or wash drawings.

In 1900 on his first trip from Milwaukee, Wisconsin, to New York City, he met Alfred Stieglitz, joining him in 1902 in forming the Photosecession Group that promoted photography as a fine art. His style evolved from painterly impression to sharp realism, and his portraits of artists and celebrities from the 1920s and 1930s evoke their character.

In 1955 he organized the Family of Man exhibition of 503 photographs that were selected form over 2 million - the exhibition was seen by more than 9 million worldwide.

A Quaker, he married singer Clara Smith Steichen in September 1914 - they divorced in 1922 but had two daughters, Katherine "Kate" Steichen and the physician-activist Mary Steichen Calderone.

When 80, he married Joanna E. Taub (22 February 1933 - 24 July 2010) , the daughter of a dental surgeon. She had gone to Smith, majoring in drama. Then she worked on "Steichen's Legacy" for four decades, in collaboration with the photographer George Tice. She grouped 315 of his photographs by theme, not presenting them chronologically.

He served in the US Army Air Corps during World War I, becoming a Lieutenant Colonel and retiring in 1918.

Steichen became chief photographer for Vogue and Vanity Fair. From 1947 to 1962, he was Director of Photography at the Museum of Modern Art and was given the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 1961.

He wrote A Life in Photography (1963, a memoir) and was the subject of Carl Sandburg's Steichen, the Photographer (1929).

In 1979 Joanna Steichen announced that Steichen's negatives and prints would go to the George Eastman House in Rochester, New York, which surprised many who had thought the negatives and prints would go to the Museum of Modern Art. She explained that Eastman House was chosen because it was "entirely a photographic museum � photography is not treated as a stepchild there." The Modern's large Steichen collection, she added, is "as big as they can handle."

Steichen died in West Redding, Connecticut.

(See Steichen's Camera Obscura photographs]). {<http://www.nytimes.com/2010/08/07/arts/design/07steichen.html?_r=1&scp=1&sq=Joanna%20Steichen&st=cse>}