Edward Steichen

Edward Steichen (1879 - 1973) was born in Luxembourg, but immigrated to the United States, to Milwaukee, in 1880. In 1894, Steichen began a four-year lithography apprenticeship with the American Fine Art Company of Milwaukee. After hours, he would sketch and draw, and began to teach himself to paint. Having come across a camera shop near to his work, he bought his first camera, a secondhand Kodak box "detective" camera, in 1895.

In 1900, as Steichen headed to Paris to study painting, he stopped in New York. By that time he was an aspiring painter and an accomplished photographer in the soft-focus, Pictorial style and he made a pilgrimage to the Camera Club of New York to show his work to Alfred Stieglitz, the leading tastemaker in American photography. Stieglitz, vice-president of the Camera Club and editor of its journal Camera Notes, was impressed by the young artist from Milwaukee and bought three of his photographs-a self-portrait and two moody, atmospheric woodland scenes printed in platinum-for the impressive sum of five dollars each. Elated, Steichen then boarded the ship for Europe.

Once in France, Steichen quickly abandoned his painting studies and began to focus his energies on photography. He learned the technical intricacies of the gum bichromate process, popular among the members of the Photo-Club de Paris, and developed a reputation as a portraitist of noted artists, writers, and members of society. Arriving back in New York in 1902, Steichen rented a studio on the top floor of a brownstone at 291 Fifth Avenue and hung out his shingle; his work as a professional portrait photographer flourished.

That same year, Stieglitz announced the formation of the Photo-Secession-the name he gave to the loose-knit group of photographers he exhibited, published, and promoted during the next decade and a half-and the publication of a new, still more lavish journal, Camera Work. Over the fifteen-year, fifty-issue run of Camera Work, no other artist would be featured as prominently as Steichen, who had sixty-five photographs and three paintings reproduced in fifteen issues, including a "Special Steichen Supplement" in April 1906 and an all-Steichen double issue in 1913.

In 1906, Steichen determined "to get away from the lucrative but stultifying professional portrait business" and return to France with his family in hopes of resuscitating his idled painting career. It was a move with numerous consequences. For one, it positioned him to embrace the Autochrome, the process for making glass-plate color transparencies introduced by the Lumière brothers in 1907. Steichen-who had experimented with various methods such as gum bichromate to introduce color into his photographs-was enthralled by the technique. Steichen also made what he called his "first attempt at serious documentary reportage" in the summer of 1907, using a borrowed hand camera.

Steichen returned to the U.S. in 1914. Serving in the US Army in World War I (and the US Navy in the Second World War), Steichen commanded significant units contributing to military photography. After World War I, during which he commanded the photographic division of the American Expeditionary Forces, he reverted to straight photography, gradually moving into editorial and fashion photography. His portraits of Greta Garbo, Marlene Dietrich, Gloria Swanson, and other celebrities appeared in Vogue and Vanity Fair in the 1920s and 1930s.

From 1947-1962, Steichen served as the Director of Photography at New York's Museum of Modern Art.. Among other accomplishments, Steichen is appreciated for creating the 1955 exhibition, The Family of Man, at the Museum of Modern Art consisting of over 500 photographs. Steichen purchased a farm that he called Umpawaug in 1928, just outside West Redding, Connecticut, and lived there until his death.

Source: Howard Greenberg Gallery

Selected Books on

Edward Steichen: The Luxembourg Bequest

Edward Steichen, Michel Polfer, Gilles Zeimet

Edward Steichen: In High Fashion

Edward Steichen, Todd Brandow, William A. Ewing

Edward Steichen: Lives in Photography

Edward Steichen, Todd Brandow, William A. Ewing

Edward Steichen

Edward Steichen, Barbara Haskell

Steichen's Legacy

Edward Steichen, Joanna Steichen

Galleries

Lee Gallery

Howard Greenberg Gallery

Vintage Works, Ltd

Selected Books

Edward Steichen: The Luxembourg Bequest

Edward Steichen, Michel Polfer, Gilles Zeimet

Edward Steichen: In High Fashion

Edward Steichen, Todd Brandow, William A. Ewing

Edward Steichen

Edward Steichen, Barbara Haskell

Steichen's Legacy

Edward Steichen, Joanna Steichen

Inspiring Portfolios

Jesús Umbría Brito

Nanda Hagenaars

Carole Mills Noronha

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More Great Photographers To Discover

Carolyn Drake

United States

Carolyn Drake works on long term photo-based projects seeking to interrogate dominant historical narratives and imagine alternatives to them. Her work explores community and the interactions within it, as well as the barriers and connections between people, between places and between ways of perceiving. Her practice has embraced collaboration, and through this, collage, drawing, sewing, text, and found images have been integrated into her work. She is interested in collapsing the traditional divide between author and subject, the real and the imaginary, challenging entrenched binaries. Drake was born in California and studied Media/Culture and History in the early 1990s at Brown University. Following her graduation from Brown, in 1994, Drake moved to New York and worked as a interactive concept designer for many years before departing to engage with the physical world through photography. Between 2007 and 2013, Drake traveled frequently to Central Asia from her base in Istanbul to work on two long term projects which became acclaimed bodies of work. Wild Pigeon (2014) is an amalgam of photographs, drawings, and embroideries made in collaboration with Uyghurs in western China. In 2018, the SFMOMA acquired the body of work and opened a six month solo exhibition of Wild Pigeon. Two Rivers (2013) explores the connections between ecology, culture and political power along the Amu Dary and Syr Darya rivers and was exhibited at The Pitt Rivers Museum, the Soros Foundation, the Third Floor Gallery, and the Photo Book Museum, among other venues. In Internat (2014-17), Drake worked with young women in an ex Soviet orphanage to create photographs and paintings that point beyond the walls of the institution and its gender expectations. The work was exhibited at the Houston Center for Photography in the US, and at Si Fest and Officine Fotografiche Roma in Italy. Drake returned to the US in 2014 and is now based in Vallejo, California, from where she is currently making work that upends perceptions of gender, community, and safety in her own community. Drake is the recipient of a Guggenheim fellowship, the Lange-Taylor Prize, the Anamorphosis prize, an HCP fellowship, a Lightwork residency, and a Fulbright fellowship to Ukraine, among other awards. Her work has been published widely, in publications such as The New Yorker, Aperture, The New York Review of Books, Harpers, The New York Times Magazine, Prix Pictet, IMA, the British Journal of Photography, The Guardian, and Paris Review. She became a member of Magnum Photos in 2019. Source: carolyndrake.com

Walker Evans

United States
1903 | † 1975

Walker Evans was an American photographer best known for documenting the effects of the Great Depression for the Farm Security Administration (FSA). The large-format, 8x10-inch camera was used extensively by Evans during the FSA period. As a photographer, he aspired to create images that are "literate, authoritative, transcendent". Many of his works are in museum permanent collections, and he has had retrospectives at places like the Metropolitan Museum of Art or George Eastman House. Walker Evans was born into a wealthy family in St. Louis, Missouri, to Jessie (née Crane) and Walker. His father worked as an ad executive. He grew up in Toledo, Chicago, and New York City. In 1922, he graduated from Phillips Academy in Andover, Massachusetts. He attended Williams College for a year, studying French literature and spending most of his time in the library, before dropping out. In 1926, he returned to the United States to join the edgy literary and art crowd in New York City after spending a year in Paris. Among his friends were John Cheever, Hart Crane, and Lincoln Kirstein. From 1927 to 1929, he worked as a stockbroker's clerk on Wall Street. Evans began photographing in 1928, while living in Ossining, New York. In 1930, he published three photographs (Brooklyn Bridge) in Hart Crane's poetry collection The Bridge. Dock-worker, Havana, Cuba, 1932© Walker Evans Archive, The Metropolitan Museum of Art After spending a year in Paris in 1926, Walker Evans returned to the United States to join the edgy literary and art crowd in New York City. John Cheever, Hart Crane, and Lincoln Kirstein were among his friends. He was a clerk for a stockbroker firm in Wall street from 1927 to 1929. Evans took up photography in 1928 around the time he was living in Ossining, New York. In 1930, he published three photographs (Brooklyn Bridge) in the poetry book The Bridge by Hart Crane. Lincoln Kirstein sponsored a photo series of Victorian houses in the Boston area in 1931. In 1933, he photographed the revolt against dictator Gerardo Machado in Cuba for the publisher of Carleton Beals' then-upcoming book, The Crime of Cuba. Evans briefly met Ernest Hemingway in Cuba. With the camera, it’s all or nothing. You either get what you’re after at once, or what you do has to be worthless. -- Walker Evans Evans began a two-month photographic campaign for the Resettlement Administration (RA) in West Virginia and Pennsylvania in 1935. From October to December, he continued to photograph for the RA and, later, the Farm Security Administration (FSA), primarily in the South. While still working for the FSA, he and writerJames Agee were sent on assignment to Hale County, Alabama, by Fortune magazine for a story that the magazine later decided not to run. Allie Mae Burroughs, 1935 or 1936© Walker Evans Archive, The Metropolitan Museum of Art Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, a groundbreaking book published in 1941, featured Evans' photographs and Agee's text detailing the duo's stay with three white tenant families in southern Alabama during the Great Depression. Its detailed account of three farming families paints a heartbreaking picture of rural poverty. In her 1980 book Diana & Nikon: Essays on the Aesthetic of Photography, critic Janet Malcolm noted a similarity to the Beals' book, pointing out the contradiction between Agee's prose and the quiet, magisterial beauty of Evans' photographs of sharecroppers. The three families, led by Bud Fields, Floyd Burroughs, and Frank Tingle, lived in the Hale County town of Akron, Alabama, and the landowners told them that Evans and Agee were "Soviet agents," though Allie Mae Burroughs, Floyd's wife, later recalled her dismissing that information. Evans' photographs of the families immortalized their misery and poverty during the Great Depression. For its 75th anniversary issue, Fortune returned to Hale County and the descendants of the three families in September 2005. When Evans and Agee visited the Burroughs family, Charles Burroughs, who was four years old at the time, was "still angry" at them for not even sending the family a copy of the book; Floyd Burroughs' son was also reportedly angry because the family was "cast in a light that they couldn't do any better, that they were doomed, ignorant." The secret of photography is, the camera takes on the character and personality of the handler. -- Walker Evans Walker Evans remained with the FSA until 1938. An exhibition, Walker Evans: American Photographs was on display at Museum of Modern Art in New York that year. This was the museum's first exhibition devoted solely to the work of a single photographer. The catalogue also included an essay by Lincoln Kirstein, whom Evans had met in his early days in New York. Evans took his first photographs in the New York subway in 1938, with a camera hidden in his coat. Many are Called was a book that collected these stories in 1966. Evans collaborated with and mentored Helen Levitt in 1938 and 1939. Evans, like such other photographers as Henri Cartier-Bresson, rarely spent time in the darkroom creating prints from his own negatives. He only loosely supervised the printing of most of his photographs, sometimes only attaching handwritten notes to negatives with printing instructions. Evans was an avid reader and writer who joined Time Magazine's staff in 1945. He then worked as an editor at Fortune magazine until 1965. That same year, he joined the faculty of the Yale University School of Art as a photography professor. Evans completed a black and white portfolio of Brown Brothers Harriman's offices and partners for publication in Partners in Banking, which was published in 1968 to commemorate the private bank's 150th anniversary. He also shot a long series with the then-new Polaroid SX-70 camera in 1973 and 1974, after age and poor health made it difficult for him to work with elaborate equipment. In 1971, the Museum of Modern Art held another exhibition of his work, simply titled Walker Evans. Walker Evans died in 1975 at his home in Lyme, Connecticut. The Estate of Walker Evans donated its holdings to New York City's The Metropolitan Museum of Art in 1994. The Metropolitan Museum of Art is the sole owner of all Walker Evans works of art in all media. The only exception is a group of about 1,000 negatives in the Library of Congress collection that were created for the Resettlement Administration (RA) / Farm Security Administration (FSA). Evans's RA / FSA works are free to use. Evans was inducted into the St. Louis Walk of Fame in 2000. Images: © Walker Evans Archive, The Metropolitan Museum of Art

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United States
1938

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Takayuki Nakamura

Japan
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Peter Bogaczewicz

Poland/Canada
1974

Peter Bogaczewicz is a Canadian photographer and an architect currently developing projects in the Middle East. He divides his time between the two disciplines, often blurring the line between them, and uses his photography as a commentary on the built environment and the human community, how both are changing at a time of rapid progress and growing global interconnectedness, and the impact this has on the natural environment. There is no clearer reflection of a society's aspirations than through its collective "footprint" on nature; it is in the relationship of the constructed world to the natural world that a crucially revealing conversation takes place. Examining this dialogue captures Peter's imagination and appears as a common thread throughout his work, inviting the questions: How do we relate to the places we inhabit? And what does it reveal about us? Peter has recently had his photographs of Saudi Arabia published as a monograph by Daylight books and is regularly receiving recognition for his work. Kingdom of Sand and Cement Looking from the outside, the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia appears doubly inaccessible: a seemingly endless inhospitable landscape populated by a traditionalist culture distrustful of outsiders. But looking from the inside reveals a subtler view: the culture, as different as it is, struggles with its identity like other cultures do at a time of growing global interdependencies and pressures to progress. What distinguishes Saudi Arabia in its struggle is that this country has had very little time to adapt. Though its abundance of oil wealth has given it an unprecedented advantage, at the same time, it ironically threatens its way of life. "Kingdom of Sand and Cement" explores the particular challenge Saudi Arabia is faced with as the country transitions from the tribal desert culture to an influential world power. It is a profound change, taking its population from mud buildings to the tallest of skyscrapers in less than a century. And while the whole country rapidly transforms from arid landscapes dotted with settlements, that seem to simply grow out of the ground, to imposing modern interventions, cutting, filling, and monumentalizing dominance over nature and the land, Saudi Arabia finds itself precariously balancing at a crossroads of old and new. The population adjusts, straddling both tradition and modernity, while its changing landscape readies it for more to come. The Series documents this relatively unfamiliar place at a time of its unique turning point. By photographically examining its past and present "markings" on nature—that crucial intersection of the built environment with that of the natural environment—the Series brings to light the country's aspirations tensely juxtaposed with its traditionalist past. The contrasts reveal an image of a place much different from our own, yet a place ultimately not so dissimilar to others in its ambition to progress, and susceptible as any to the risks of rapid and often careless transition. More about the book Kingdom of Sand and Cement

Fang Tong

China/Canada

Fang Tong is an awarded-winning photographer based in Vancouver Canada. In 2015, she won first prize in the Nikon International Photography Competition. She had an interview with Canada Broadcasting Corporation CBC Arts in 2019. Fang Tong had solo and group shows in cities such as Paris, Sicily, Budapest, Barcelona, London, Shanghai, and Vancouver. Fang Tong is a cinematic-style photographer, as a spectator of life. Her works are embedded with an implied narrative, which is left to the viewer to resolve over time with their own imagination. Reflecting her background in classical art, photography is carefully planned to control the frame and the expression of details, giving her work an ethos of a painter. As a bystander, Fang Tong captures the potential that photography can embody pieces with an eternal quality, thereby creating a slightly fictional world that resembles reality but transcends consciousness. Fang Tong’s passion is for her work to border on the surreal, yet hold back enough to keep it firmly in the real world. Her photos provoke audiences to create a narrative out of cinematic pictures. There may be no clearly defined story behind the scene, but there is a strong mood and atmosphere throughout the whole image. The imaginary world is strangely familiar while the narrative arc takes audiences on a hyper-visual ride through people's subconsciousness. She nurtures the balance between the real and the surreal that pulls her audiences into the world she created, but she also allows the audience to discover their own answers.

Morris Engel

United States
1918 | † 2005

Morris Engel (April 8, 1918 - March 5, 2005) was an American photographer, cinematographer and filmmaker best known for making the first American film "independent" of Hollywood studios, Little Fugitive (1953), in collaboration with his wife, photographer Ruth Orkin, and their friend, writer Raymond Abrashkin. Engel was a pioneer in the use of hand-held cameras and nonprofessional actors in his films, cameras that he helped design, and his naturalistic films influenced future prominent independent and French New Wave filmmakers. A lifelong New Yorker, Morris Engel was born in Brooklyn in 1918. After joining the Photo League in 1936, Engel had his first exhibition in 1939, at the New School for Social Research. He worked briefly as a photographer for the Leftist newspaper PM before joining the United States Navy as a combat photographer from 1941 to 1946 in World War II. After the war, he returned to New York where he again was an active Photo League member, teaching workshop classes and serving as co-chair of a project group focusing on postwar labor issues. In 1953, Engel, along with his girlfriend, fellow photographer Ruth Orkin, and his former colleague at PM, Raymond Abrashkin, made the feature film Little Fugitive for $30,000, shooting the film on location in Coney Island with a hand-held 35 millimeter camera Engel had designed himself. This camera was compact and lightweight so it would be unobtrusive shooting in public. As such, it did not allow simultaneous sound recording; the sound was dubbed later. The film, one of the first successful American "independent films" earned them an Academy Award nomination for Best Writing, Motion Picture Story and a Silver Lion at the Venice Film Festival. The film told the story of a seven-year-old boy, played by Richie Andrusco, who runs away from home and spends the day at Coney Island. Andrusco never appeared in another film, and the other performers were mainly nonprofessional. Though their first film was a critical success, Engel and Orkin, who had since married, had a hard time finding funding for their next film, Lovers and Lollipops, which was completed in 1956. The film was about a widowed mother dating an old friend, and how her young daughter complicates their budding relationship. Like the first one, Lovers and Lollipops was filmed with a hand-held compact 35 mm camera, with sound dubbed in post-production. This was followed two years later by the more adult-centered Weddings and Babies, a film about an aspiring photographer than is often seen as autobiographical. This was Engel's first film to have live sound recorded at the time of filming, and is historically the first 35 mm fiction film made with a portable camera equipped for synchronized sound. In 1961, Engel directed three television commercials, including an award-winning one for Oreo cookies. The other two were for Ivory soap and Fab detergent. A half-hour short film The Dog Lover was made the following year, a comedy about a shop merchant whose life is turned upside down by the stray dog his kid brings home. He made a fourth feature in 1968 called I Need a Ride to California, which followed a group of young hippies in Greenwich Village. Post-production was shelved until 1972 when it was finally completed, but for unknown reasons, it was never released during his lifetime. It finally received its premiere in October 2019 at New York's Museum of Modern Art (MoMA); it was first released on home video in March 2021. In the 1980s, Engel began taking panoramic photographs on the streets of New York City. Engel and Ruth Orkin remained married until Orkin's death in 1985. In the 1990s, he returned to filmmaking, this time working on video. He completed two feature-length documentaries: A Little Bit Pregnant in 1994 and Camellia in 1998, each revolving around a different child in the Hartman family. First, in A Little Bit Pregnant Engel focused on the 8-year-old Leon's reactions, anxiety and wonderment to the impending birth of his baby sister Camellia. For the second film, two years later, Engel returned to the same family, who gave him a year of access to the now 2-year-old daughter Camellia, capturing her daily life and routines, and her relationships with her family and others. Both films were shown in private screenings, but never had a public release due likely to the Hartman family presumably holding the rights. Engel died of cancer in 2005.Source: Wikipedia Morris Engel was born in Brooklyn to immigrant parents from Lithuania. An early interest in photography led him to enroll in a class at New York’s Photo League, a group dedicated to raising social consciousness through modern photography. Some of the most influential photographers of the time were associated with the Photo League; Engel worked closely with Aaron Siskind on the project Harlem Document from 1936-40 and later assisted Paul Strand in filming Native Land. Like many Photo League photographers, Engel documented life in New York City, producing and exhibiting photo essays on Coney Island, the Lower East Side and Harlem. In 1939 he had his first exhibition at New York’s New School. In 1940 he joined the staff of the newspaper PM, but he left the publication one year later to sign on with the U.S. Navy as a member of a combat photo unit. He participated in the D-Day invasion of Normandy. In 1951 Engel momentarily quit still photography to pursue a career in filmmaking. He made a series of low-budget films with a custom 35 mm camera. His first feature film, Little Fugitive (made with his wife, the renowned photographer Ruth Orkin), earned an Academy Award nomination in 1953 for Best Original Screenplay and was screened in more than 5,000 theaters across the United States. Engel’s photographs are widely exhibited and found in the collections of the International Center of Photography (New York), the Museum of the City of New York, the Museum of Modern Art (New York) and the National Portrait Gallery (Washington, D.C.). His films continue to be screened at venues such as the Whitney Museum of Art (New York), the Brooklyn Museum and the American Museum of the Moving Image (New York).Source: American Photography Archives Group

Magdalena Berny

Poland
1976

Magdalena Berny is a graduate from the Pozna? University of Physical Education, self-taught photographer, passionate, mother of two. Over the years, she managed to create her own quite distinctive style. Works by Magdalena were published in Polish and foreign press dedicated to photographs, illustrations used as guides to photographing children and for projects of book covers.About her:" Children as the subject of my photos appeared with their coming into the world. They were and are the cause, they determine the choice of subject of my photos. Photography for me is not only to catch the moments lived with children is also a record of my own emotions, sometimes stronger, sometimes weaker. How I " steal " look and emotions of children is due in large part to my own feelings. In addition to the joy and smile on my photographs often guests reflection, thoughtfulness and even sadness. In photography,I avoid references to the modern world while I often try to embed them in a climate of fairy tales. The inspiration for me as a photographer is all that surrounds me - broadly defined art, but also the place where I live every day as well as those that I manage to visit , and would later become sceneries of my photos".

Nicola Balestrazzi

Italy
1979

Born and raised in Italy, Nicola Balestrazzi has worked in London as a trader in the financial sector. His love for photography and travels pushed him to undertake photography full time since 2022, dedicating more time exploring the world and shooting what satisfies his curiosity and stimulates his sight. He favors street and documentary/social photography, and more generally everything that documents human life and the surrounding environment. My Work I photograph what draws my attention to, from people to the beauty of nature, patterns, shapes, shadows, reflections, colors and light. Lately, my focus has been mainly on people: I feel the need to capture the humanity in them. I enjoy to watch how other human beings conduct themselves. I like to catch people staring, laughing, having fun, showing pain, when they are doing something that surprise me, often being oblivious to everything around them, catching them in off guard moments. I love being on the road and traveling without a predetermined purpose, usually. In the past few years, I have been attracted by the juxtaposition between traditions and modernity caught in a fast, ever-changing world. For this purpose, I started a long-term project on Mexicans and on India. They are mainly street photography projects, both colors and black & white, but with some documental and social elements in them. Being self-taught, my process is one of instinct rather than of intellect or thought. I don’t try to control, or stage anything. The idea is to collect as many interesting pictures as possible, and then figure out how to build a sequence and a narrative that reflect the main theme of modernity vs. tradition.

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Interview

Exclusive Interview with Josh S. Rose

Josh S. Rose is a multidisciplinary artist working across photography, film, and writing. His practice bridges visual and performing arts, with a strong focus on movement, emotion, and the expressive potential of the image. Known for his long-standing collaborations with leading dance companies and performers, Rose brings together authenticity and precise composition—a balance he describes as “technical romanticism.” His work has been commissioned and exhibited internationally, appearing in outlets such as Vogue, at the Super Bowl, in film festivals, and most recently as a large-scale installation for Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts. A sought-after collaborator, he has worked with major artists, cultural institutions, and brands, following a previous career as Chief Creative Officer at Interpublic Group and the founder of Humans Are Social. We asked him a few questions about his life and work.

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Interview

Interview with Maureen Ruddy Burkhart

Photographer Maureen Ruddy Burkhart brings a quietly attentive and deeply human sensibility to her exploration of the world through images. Shaped by a life immersed in photography, film, and visual storytelling, her work is guided by intuition, observation, and an enduring interest in the emotional undercurrents of everyday life. With a practice rooted in both fine art traditions and documentary awareness, she approaches her subjects with sensitivity, allowing subtle moments to emerge naturally rather than be imposed. Her series Til Death, selected as the Solo Exhibition for February 2025, reflects this long-standing commitment to photography as a space for reflection rather than spectacle. Drawn to moments that exist just outside the expected frame, Burkhart’s images suggest narratives without resolving them, leaving room for ambiguity, humor, and quiet connection. We asked her a few questions about her life and work.

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