The Condé Nast studio on Lexington Avenue, an afternoon in late 1928. Greta Garbo sits on a wooden stool against a black backdrop. A single Klieg light is angled high and hard from the left. Steichen’s eight-by-ten view camera stands ten feet away on a heavy oak tripod. He instructs her to lift her hands to her head, close her eyes, and tilt her face up into the light. The shutter opens for an eighth of a second. The negative goes into a wooden plate-holder the size of a manila folder. The resulting photograph will become one of the most reproduced images of the twentieth century, and one of perhaps a dozen Steichen makes that year that will outlive everything else he ever does. This is the room where modern fashion photography was invented.
The Pictorialist Painter
Steichen was born Eduard Jean Steichen in Luxembourg on March 27, 1879, and brought to the United States by his parents at the age of two. He grew up in Milwaukee and trained as a lithographer’s apprentice before turning to painting and photography in his late teens.
The photographs of his early career were Pictorialist, the dominant photographic aesthetic of the era. Pictorialist work was soft-focus, hazy, and painterly, made with diffusion lenses and gum-bichromate printing techniques that turned a photograph into something closer to a charcoal drawing than a sharp lens record. The goal was to convince the art establishment that photography was a fine art rather than a mechanical curiosity.
In 1902, he co-founded the Photo-Secession movement with Alfred Stieglitz, the photographer and gallerist who would become his mentor, collaborator, and eventually his estranged former friend. He spent the years before the First World War shuttling between New York and Paris, working in both painting and photography, and was widely understood as one of the most important young photographers in the world.
The War Changed the Image
In July 1917, three months after the United States entered the First World War, Steichen volunteered for the American Expeditionary Forces. He was thirty-eight years old. The army assigned him to the new aerial reconnaissance photographic unit, which produced the photographs that artillery units used to plan their barrages and infantry commanders used to plan their advances.
The job changed his understanding of photography. Soft-focus aerial photographs were useless. A blurred enemy position could not be targeted. The photographs the war required had to be sharp from corner to corner, evenly exposed, and readable at high magnification. By the time Steichen was discharged in 1919, he had supervised the production of over a million aerial photographs and had stopped believing in Pictorialism as a serious aesthetic.
He returned to his property in Voulangis, France, in 1922 and burned most of his remaining Pictorialist canvases and prints in the garden. The bonfire was witnessed by a small group of friends. The painter who had spent twenty years arguing that photography belonged to the fine arts had decided the question was settled. Photography belonged to itself.
The Condé Nast Hire
In 1923, Condé Nast personally offered Steichen the position of chief photographer for Vogue and Vanity Fair. The salary was $35,000 a year, equivalent to roughly six hundred thousand dollars today, and made Steichen the highest-paid photographer in the world. The offer included a fully equipped studio, a team of assistants, and complete creative authority over the visual direction of both magazines.
The position had been vacated by Baron Adolf de Meyer, a German aristocrat who had been Vogue’s principal photographer through the 1910s and had defined the magazine’s visual identity. De Meyer was the leading Pictorialist society photographer of his generation. His photographs were soft-focus, hazy, and intensely flattering to his society subjects. He had been the visual ambassador of Vogue for over a decade. In 1922, he had been hired away by William Randolph Hearst’s Harper’s Bazaar for a higher salary, leaving Nast looking for a replacement who could compete on a different terrain.
Nast’s instruction to Steichen was a single sentence. Modernize the magazines. Steichen had been waiting for the assignment for four years, since the day he had burned his Pictorialist canvases in the Voulangis garden.
The Studio at the Graybar Building
The studio occupied the upper floors of the Condé Nast offices, then in the Graybar Building at 420 Lexington Avenue. The lighting equipment came directly from Hollywood. Klieg lights, mercury-vapor lamps the size of car headlights mounted on rolling iron stands, each capable of putting out the intensity of bright sunlight focused into a single beam.
The cameras were view cameras with eight-by-ten inch negatives, producing detail at resolutions that no smaller format could approach. The view camera was mounted on a heavy oak tripod and could not be picked up by one person. The lenses were German, manufactured by Zeiss and Schneider. The film holders were wood, hand-machined to fit the camera bed, and each one held two exposures.
Backdrops were hand-painted in geometric Art Deco patterns by a small team of scenic artists who had worked previously on Broadway productions. Each shoot was scheduled like a film production. Subjects arrived by appointment. Assistants set the lights. The dresser adjusted the wardrobe. Steichen looked through the camera once, made one or two exposures, and ended the session. The rate of failure was very low.
The De Meyer Style Versus the Steichen Style
The shift in Vogue’s visual language between 1922 and 1924 is one of the clearest before-and-after transitions in twentieth-century image history. Put a 1921 de Meyer plate next to a 1925 Steichen plate and you are looking at two different epochs.
The de Meyer photograph is soft-focus throughout, with diffusion silk over the lens. The light comes from behind the subject through gauze, producing a glowing halo that erases the edges of the figure. The subject is usually a society woman in evening wear, photographed half-length, in a pose borrowed from John Singer Sargent. The technical strategy is to make the photograph look as much like a charcoal portrait as possible.
The Steichen photograph is sharp from corner to corner. The light is hard and directional, often coming from above at a steep angle to throw clean shadow under the subject’s nose and cheekbones. The composition is built on geometric blocks of light and dark, the same vocabulary the Chrysler Building’s architects were drawing in at the same moment. The subject is treated as iconic rather than decorative. The technical strategy is to make the photograph look like a photograph, with no apology.
The Hollywood Portraits
The work that established Steichen outside fashion editorial was his celebrity portraiture for Vanity Fair. The Condé Nast contract allowed him to photograph nearly every major figure of the late silent and early talkie eras.
Gloria Swanson sat in 1924. Steichen draped a black lace veil over her face and shot the result as a study in pattern and shadow, with her eyes burning through the lace. The photograph became the defining image of her career.
Charlie Chaplin sat in 1925 in his Tramp costume, exhausted from a publicity tour, photographed sitting on the studio floor with his bowler hat in his lap. The photograph showed a tired man behind the most famous comic mask in the world and changed how stars were photographed for the next forty years.
Greta Garbo sat in 1928, near the end of her silent film career, hands lifted to her head, eyes closed, face turned up into the key light. The photograph reduced her face to a sculptural surface and has been reproduced thousands of times since.
Marlene Dietrich, Anna May Wong, Lillian Gish, Douglas Fairbanks, Pola Negri. The Hollywood portrait convention, glamorous and dramatic and intimate, was locked in by these sittings between 1924 and 1929.
The Advertising Pivot
Through the 1920s, in parallel with the Vogue and Vanity Fair work, Steichen accepted assignments from the J. Walter Thompson advertising agency, the largest in the world. The campaigns he photographed included Lucky Strike cigarettes, Welch’s Grape Juice, Cannon Towels, Pepsi-Cola, and Jergens lotion. The work paid extraordinarily well and was treated by Steichen with the same care he gave to his editorial portraits.
The advertising work ended his friendship with Alfred Stieglitz. Stieglitz had spent his life arguing that photography was a fine art that should be protected from commerce. Steichen’s high-paying ad campaigns for cigarettes and grape juice struck him as a betrayal of everything Photo-Secession had stood for. The two men had been close collaborators for twenty years. After 1925, they barely spoke.
Steichen never apologized. The image industry, he argued in interviews for the rest of his life, was inseparable from commerce. The photograph that sold soap and the photograph that hung in a museum used the same technical equipment, the same compositional vocabulary, and the same human eye behind the lens. Pretending otherwise was the dishonest position.
The Long Shadow
Steichen left Condé Nast in 1938 after fifteen years. The Second World War interrupted his retirement. At the age of sixty-two, he returned to active duty as the director of the United States Naval Aviation Photographic Unit, supervising combat photography across the Pacific theater from 1942 to 1945. He left the Navy with the rank of captain.
From 1947 to 1962, Steichen was the director of the Department of Photography at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. In 1955 he curated The Family of Man, an exhibition of 503 photographs by 273 photographers from 68 countries. The exhibition traveled to 38 countries over the following eight years and was seen by nine million people. It remains the most-attended photography exhibition in history.
He died at his home in West Redding, Connecticut, on March 25, 1973, two days before his ninety-fourth birthday.
Every fashion photographer working since 1929 inherits the visual grammar Steichen built between 1923 and 1929. Avedon, Penn, Newton, Lindbergh, Demarchelier, Testino. The toolkit has been refined a hundred times. It has not been replaced. The photograph of Greta Garbo from 1928 is still the most accurate description of what fashion photography is.