While Steichen’s military experience challenged his views on photography, at the close of the war his future as an artist was unclear. After briefly contemplating a civilian career in aerial photography, he returned to his home in Voulangis, France, and began making still-life experiments prompted by his interest in modernism and straight photography. These images of objects from his home and garden, which Steichen later referred to as “finger exercises,” were in fact formal studies of shape, volume, scale, and tone that laid the foundation for the techniques that he would employ as a commercial photographer. They were his attempt at obtaining, in poet Carl Sandburg’s words, “the maximum amount of realism.” This image comes from a series in which he constructed visual interpretations of Albert Einstein’s theories regarding the space-time continuum, using common objects as symbols.

Figure 1. Edward J. Steichen (American, born Luxembourg, 1879–1973). Triumph of the Egg, c. 1921. Gelatin silver print; 24 x 19.1 cm. Bequest of Edward Steichen by direction of Joanna T. Steichen and George Eastman House, 1982.314. © 2015 The Estate of Edward Steichen/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.

Steichen returned to New York in 1923, his prospects uncertain. When he came across an article in Vanity Fair reporting that he had abandoned photography for painting—in fact the opposite was true—he went to meet with Condé Nast, publisher of Vogue and Vanity Fair, to set the matter straight. Nast, who had recently lost the fashion photographer Baron Adolf de Meyer to a competing publication, offered Steichen the job of chief photographer for the two magazines. Soon thereafter Steichen signed a separate contract with the J. Walter Thompson advertising company; through these positions he became the best-known and highest-paid commercial photographer of his time.

Steichen immediately embraced celebrity, fashion, and advertising photography. He dismissed criticism that such work would tarnish his artistic reputation and championed instead the cultural and economic potential of magazine and advertising photography (in earlier years he had regularly sought portrait commissions and had once done a fashion shoot). As Vogue art director Alexander Liberman later observed, “Steichen’s work dramatized the welding of pictorial journalism with the new means of communication,” an evolution that would take place during his tenure at Condé Nast. In undertaking this challenging endeavor, the organizational and technical skills Steichen gained during his time in the military and in Voulangis proved invaluable.

Figure 1. Edward J. Steichen (American, born Luxembourg, 1879–1973). Lily Pons, c. 1932. Gelatin silver print; 24.3 x 19 cm. Bequest of Edward Steichen by direction of Joanna T. Steichen and George Eastman House, 1982.361. © 2015 The Estate of Edward Steichen/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.

Figure 2. Edward J. Steichen (American, born Luxembourg, 1879–1973). Greta Garbo and John Gilbert, 1928. Gelatin silver print; 24.2 x 19.5 cm. Bequest of Edward Steichen by direction of Joanna T. Steichen and George Eastman House, 1982.337. © 2015 The Estate of Edward Steichen/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.

Steichen’s earliest work for Condé Nast continued the established Pictorialist style, but he soon began to use artificial light sources, high contrast, sharp focus, and geometric backgrounds—techniques borrowed from fine-art and stage photography, which gave his images a fresh, unprecedentedly modernist feel. Steichen’s greatest accomplishment was to blur the lines between celebrity portraiture, fashion photography, and advertising, creating a hybrid image genre of foundational importance to the mix of glamour and desire that dominates magazine photography to this day.

Steichen’s iconic fashion photographs and celebrity portraits for Vogue and Vanity Fair would redefine the field through their clever use of modernist aesthetics and advertising tactics. Steichen became a confident and influential impresario, promoting photography as a mass-media tool while retaining his fierce dedication to craft—views he upheld as head of the photography department at the Museum of Modern Art, New York, from 1947 to 1962.

Figure 1. Edward J. Steichen (American, born Luxembourg, 1879–1973). Noël Coward, 1932. Gelatin silver print; 21.9 x 19.4 cm. Bequest of Edward Steichen by direction of Joanna T. Steichen and George Eastman House, 1982.328. © 2015 The Estate of Edward Steichen/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.

An unlikely recruit at the age of 62, Steichen once again felt called to serve his country when the U.S. entered World War II in 1941. The Army was reluctant to have him, but based on his accomplishments in the AEF during World War I and his professional reputation, he convinced the Navy to appoint him head of a photographic unit.

Steichen and his men were officially tasked with creating images of Naval aviation for promotion and recruiting, and the resulting photographs are some of the most iconic images of World War II. During this time Steichen also curated two large-scale photomural exhibits at the Museum of Modern Art: Road to Victory (1942) and Power in the Pacific (1945). The shows were unabashedly populist, meant to lift the spirits of a country at war.

But Steichen also told his men “to focus on the enlisted man, as he would be the one that would win the war.”[1] Perhaps this humanist approach was inspired by the photographer’s experience of World War I, in which he realized that his preoccupation with the technical and logistical aspects of photography had obscured the horrors of trench warfare:

I had never been conscious of anything but the job we had to do . . . but the photographs we made provided information that, conveyed to our artillery, enabled them to destroy their targets and kill.[2]

The products of Steichen’s World War I service with the AEF are much less well-known than the stirring World War II images. But the earlier images represent a transition in Steichen’s career, when he turned towards the technical demands of “sharp, clear pictures.”

Figure 1. Artist unknown (U.S. Navy, Steichen group) (American, active 1939–1945). Second Battle of Philippines, 1944/45. Gelatin silver print; 31.7 x 27.2 cm. Henry Foundation Fund, 1996.103.

[1] Wayne Miller, “An Eye on the World: Reviewing a Lifetime in Photography,” 2003, oral history transcript, University of California, Berkeley.

[2] Edward Steichen, A Life in Photography (Doubleday, 1963), chap. 5, n.p.