Edward Steichen: In High Fashion, The Condé Nast Years 1923 – 1937
I love fashion but have always shied away from doing fashion shoots. I think this is due to the lack of confidence in using studio lighting (hopefully I will get to grips with this during my degree course) but a photographer who did master studio lighting was most definitely Edward Steichen.
Gloria Swanson, 1924 – Edward Steichen
Edward Steichen (1879–1973) was an American photographer, painter, and art gallery and museum curator. He took images of different genres of photography: portrait, landscape, still life, fashion, dance, theatre, flowers, advertising, as well as war reportage and aerial photography.
Steichen was born Éduard Jean Steichen in Bivange, Luxembourg and moved to the United States in 1881. At the age of fifteen Steichen while still painting he started a four-year lithography apprenticeship with the American Fine Art Company of Milwaukee. Steichen took up photography in 1895 but continued to paint for the next twenty years. In the first two decades of the century his images were Pictorial – softly focused, misty and atmospheric the same way as fine art paintings. In World War I Steichen worked in the aerial photography division of the Army. He abandoned Pictoralism for more “straight” photography as, through his reportage/aerial photography, he had a new appreciation of the beauty of realistic, factual and unmanipulated imagery. Steichen eventually rejected Pictorialism, and began to take more Modernistic images that were, uncluttered, high contrasting and sharply focused with a high level of detail. In 1923, Steichen was asked by the owner of Vogue and Vanity Fair fashion magazines, Condé Nast, to become his chief fashion photographer. He worked for Condé Nast Publications from 1923-1937 and during these years Steichen was regarded as the best known and highest paid photographer in the world. This exhibition celebrates this period of his career; the fashion photography and the portraits.
His predecessor at Vogue was Baron de Meyer and he used back-lighting to produce soft-edged Pictorialist images and De Meyer photographed clothes draped over mannequin looking women, Steichen captured the animated and full of life look of glamorous women in sharp focus and in high contrast. His models all look like they were at home and born to wear these haute couture garments. He used light, dark and shadows to outline his figures often creating dark silhouettes. He used different lighting angles and levels to create shadows which gave a theatrical look to his images. He created dramatic layouts in which models wearing eveningwear posed with grand pianos and fireplaces, muscular white horses or other grand settings but they were often quite simple and minimalistic.
I noticed that many of his images in this collection are left or right profile shots – Steichen knew his images would be accompanied alongside text, that is, his images worked perfectly within the framework of the magazine’s layouts. There are only a few straight ahead shots and the iconic image above is one of my favourite images in the exhibition. This image is a pin-sharp, black-and-white head shot of Gloria Swanson, a then famous silent-movie star, positioned behind a black lace screen. The date this image was taken was 1924 and this is significant as it was the year the first ever sound movies were being released and Swanson’s career was quickly coming to an end as it was proven she couldn’t speak and act and she was rapidly loosing her popularity. This image caught her looking haunting and distant as if she is peering from the darkness and wondering where her career was going. The catchlight that Steichen captured in Swanson’s eyes add depth, dimension and ultimately gives the eyes life within this portrait – it is as if she is staring right at you.
The exhibition consists of 200 ‘work prints’ from the Condé Nast archives and some Vogue and Vanity Fair magazine covers and pages. Some of the images show the crop marks to be used in the final printed publication and some show the cropping and crude retouching instructions. His images are considered to be the first modern fashion photographs.
Steichen has really inspired me to take fashion shots in the future and I can’t wait to visit a succeeding Vogue fashion photographer, Horst P. Horst, at the V&A Museum later this week…another review to follow, I’m sure!
- EDWARDS, O., 2009. In Vogue: a new book reminds us that Edward Steichen raised fashion photography to an Art. Smithsonian [online], 40(2) pp. 48-54 [viewed 13 November 2014]. Available from: Academic Onefile (GALE)
- EWING, A., T. BRANDOW and N. HERSCHDORFER, 2014. Edward Steichen: In High Fashion, The Condé Nast Years 1923-1937 [viewed 12 November 2014]. Exhibited London: The Photographers’ Gallery
- HAGER, L., 2009. A History of Lace in Seven Portraits: Gloria Swanson [online] [viewed 13 November 2014]. Available from: http://venetianred.net/2009/09/09/a-history-of-lace-in-seven-portraits-gloria-swanson/
- STEICHEN, E., 1963. Steichen: A Life in Photography. New York: Doubleday & Company
Visual Exploration 