Charlie Chaplin
Edward Steichen
EDWARD STEICHEN, 1931. GELATIN SILVER PRINT.
At the turn of the 20th Century, Edward Steichen was creating the genre of fashion photography. Working in the contemporary milieu of artists who used the camera as a means to create fine-art image, he applied avant-garde aesthetics to commercial means and photographed dresses, celebrities and advertisements with soft focus and physical manipulation of the prints. He was, by merit of these techniques, firmly in the world of Pictorialism - a style that was concerned with not straightforwardly recording through the camera, but creating art with it through manipulation of the images it captured. However, at the onset of the first World War, he was recruited by the American military to head up a photographic unit. Steichen took thousands of Ariel photographs for the military, and any sense of the camera as a tool for self-expression disappeared as it became an increasingly essential utilitarian object. After the war, Steichen continued to photograph, but his style changed drastically. Informed by his war-time efforts, he photographed elegantly simple portraits, creating art in the room but allowing the camera to capture only what was ahead of it. The images are detached, almost cold, and for the same reason, a strikingly truthful depiction of their subjects - Steichen found beauty and art not inside the camera, but in the world outside.