Word: steichen
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...Pierpont Morgan sat for the most succinct photograph of big money ever taken: Alfred Steichen's portrait of the financial titan glaring at the intrusive lens, an old, suspicious bull walrus, one hand gripping the chair arm as though about to reduce its mahogany to flinders, highlights glittering sharply on his eyeballs. He looks like a boiler on the verge of explosion. If Morgan had never felt the impulse to collect, this photograph would still have given him a place in the history of art. But it would have been a footnote compared to the one he occupies. Morgan...
...awareness of the feminine contribution to photography. Such an effort has been a long time coming and it's a good idea: not only because there are strikingly female approaches to the art, but because women in the field have generally been ignored. The names of Alfred Stieglitz, Edward Steichen and Lee Friedlander are familiar to many people, and one will note they are all men. Now, when was the last time someone mentioned Doris Ulmann, Berenice Abbott or Gertrude Kasebier? Men control the publication of most books and magazines, write about photography's history and determine, according...
...very different. The calotype image has a soft, fuzzy, dreamy quality--a gentleness that interacts with the figure of the old, blind preacher playing his harp. In every photograph on exhibit--from a mystical photogravure protrait of Yeats to a study of shadows in gum-biochromate by Edward Steichen--the artist/photographer has deliberately chosen a technique that combines with and supports the visual effect he tries to achieve. This exquisite co-ordination of method and result is not Lady Eastlake's "unreasoning power," it is an expression of the great skill of the artist...
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...
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...