Word: steichen
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...sometimes felt that because photographs are the product of a mechanical tool, a camera, that some of the great pictures made by photojournalists are simply lucky shots, accidents. One day when Edward Steichen, the late dean of American photography, was taking a group of visitors through an exhibition of pictures by photojournalists, he was asked, "If you were to take all the lucky pictures, the accidents, out of this exhibition, how many pictures would you have left?" Steichen pondered that, and then he said, "Not many, perhaps. But have you ever thought how many great accidents have been made...
...scramble for a way to distinguish themselves from the mobs of snapshooters. Their response was pictorialism, an international style of soft focus, poetic yearnings and darkroom tricks that were beyond the abilities of the untrained. During the pictorialist phase of their careers, Alvin Langdon Coburn in England and Edward Steichen in the U.S. turned away from mere realism toward a metaphysical art, one of broad hazy forms that hinted at an elusive realm of ideas and spirit...
...Vanity Fair never reached more than 99,000 buyers, and it reportedly lost money for Publisher Condé Nast (1873-1942) in all save one of its 22 years. But it featured writing by Thomas Wolfe, T.S. Eliot, Dorothy Parker and P.G. Wodehouse and photographs by Edward Steichen and Alfred Stieglitz. In an indulgent appraisal in 1960, Cleveland Amory contended that Vanity Fair had been "America's most memorable magazine...
...idea that landscape photography should be intentionally expressive did not really surface until the frontier was gone, by the turn of the century. Its bearers were among the pioneers of photographic modernism-Edward Steichen, Clarence White and Alvin Langdon Coburn, with their "symbolist," tremulous images of tree and field. In these artful and decorous prints, as Szarkowski remarks, "Nature has become ... a part of the known habit and syntax of art, like fruit or flowers arranged on the sideboard." After them, the problem was to recomplicate the game of seeing; to show how the camera could deal with what...