Edward Steichen- Jennifer Williams (sorry, forgot name)

This week I want to share with you all one of my greatest inspirations and one of my photographic heroes, Edward Steichen. This Master of Photography was actually a painter at in the early 20th century. He later, along with Alfred Steiglitz (a close friend at the time) became an important part of the Pictorialist Movement- in which photographers emphasized the "beauty" in a photograph, rather than just a reproduction of an image. The Pond-Moonlight, one of his early pictorialistist works, sold in 2006 for the highest priced photograph ever sold at an auction up to that time. Together Steichen and Stieglitz drove this movement, until after World War II, when Steichen moved back toward straight photography. It is clear, looking at this change in his work that the war affected the way he saw the world, and the way he chose to represent it.

Steichen served as Director of the Naval Photographic Institute, and was an important part of documenting the war. He became Director of Photography at the New York's Museum of Modern Art. He was recognized in his own lifetime as one of the great photographers of the 20th century. He curated the exhibition The Family of Man in 1955, in which some of his own works were included. This exhibition included hundreds of photographs from over two hundred photographers with the intention of showing the humanity that connects us all. It was one of the greatest achievements of his life, and has been turned into a book which has sold more than 4 million copies.

But let's get around to the reason I chose to talk about Edward Steichen, and his relevance to my own work. There is a definite point in Steichen's career when he began to reinvent himself. He began shooting fashion photography, and advertisements. He shot matches arranged in an interesting way to be used as inspiration for a clothing designer. He captured the elegance of the time period and the growing independence of women in his fashion portraiture. According to Alan Riding of the New York times, he made his name as the first modern fashion photographer. His friend Stieglitz shunned him for this, calling him an "ad-man," a dirty word at that time. Purists like Stieglitz felt Steichen was selling out to commercialism, and that because he was getting paid, the work was not "art." Steichen, in the other hand, felt that these photographs were an extension of his own aesthetic vision. When Conde Naste offered to remove his name from fashion images he refused. I really look up to Steichen for taking a stand on this issue. He realized that just because one takes money for photography, it doesn't mean it can't be art. He said it best himself.... even Michelangelo like to be paid well for his work. (Riding, The New York Times).