Career, Camera, Corn

(See next page)

On Manhattan's 69th Street last week, in a white-tiled studio which was once a garage, a rangy man who looks a little like Abraham Lincoln and more like the Pied Piper ran his fingers through his long grey hair, folded his arms, grinned, yelled, gestured, strode to & fro, swung his spectacles. On this occasion Photographer Edward Steichen was not engaged in conjuring life out of some apathetic sitter. He was helping several assistants dismantle his studio for good. As of Jan. 1, 1938, Edward Steichen was through with commercial photography.

If Chrysler Corp. were to retire from the automobile industry or Metro-Goldwvn-Mayer from the cinema, the event would be more surprising but no more interesting to either business than Steichen's retirement was to his. During the past 15 years he has devoted a famous talent to the development of photography for the magazine market. His name was about the first to mean anything under a fashion photograph. Since 1923 his portraits of stage, screen, society, sporting people have made the most striking pages in Vogue and Vanity Fair.

The reason that Edward Steichen retired last week was that all this had not been enough for him. To rigorous lovers of photography as an important art, Steichen's achievement, measured against his gifts and his opportunities, was not quite enough either. When Steichen told old Photographer Alfred Stieglitz that he was getting out of business, the impresario of "An American Place" was so pleased he could scarcely speak.

Stieglitz had a right to his emotion, for he and Steichen together led the U. S. to take photography seriously before the War. At 23 Steichen. who had lived with Rodin in Paris and taken a famed, dramatic photograph of the sculptor, suggested and helped establish in 1902 Stieglitz's gallery at No. 291 Fifth Avenue. First U. S. showings of Rodin's sketches, in 1905, and Matisse's paintings, in 1908. were arranged for "291" by Steichen. Among the "Photo-Secessionists" who were then contributing to Stieglitz's magazine. Camera Work, Steichen did what was considered the most beautiful work.

In those days Steichen spelled his first name "Eduard." He was a painter as well as a photographer and his photographs tended to be Whistlerian. Rembrandtesque or merely misty. Stieglitz, who never painted a stroke, was meanwhile doing a number of clear, cold outdoor pictures which have since become classic examples of great photography. In 1917 and 1918 "Eduard'' saw much more of France than he had ever seen before. He saw it from above, as chief of the photographic section of the U. S. Air Service. In aerial photography clarity is the first and last requisite. When the War was over, Colonel Edward Steichen burned all his paintings, spent one solid year photographing still life to learn just how much detail he could get under different lights.

With his new technical range. Steichen set out on a new career. His attempts to photograph the "essence" of flowers, insects, fruit are among the most subtle reproductions of textures ever made. A bubbling, generous, rather boyish man. Edward Steichen had no great struggle with himself over going commercial. Besides his job with Conde Nast he contracted to do advertising photographs exclusively for J. Walter Thompson Co. (agency for Pond's Cold Cream, Welch's Grape Juice. Simmons Mattresses, Jergens Lotion, etc.).

"If my technique, imagination and vision are any good." he told his brother-in-law, Carl Sandburg, in 1929, "I ought to be able to put the best values of my non-commercial . . . photographs into a pair of shoes. ..." By that year he had already set a new standard for commercial photography and was the highest paid cameraman in the U. S. He and his second wife, Dana Desboro, bought a 240-acre farm at Redding, Conn, and developed the most cultured delphiniums in North America.

While Steichen was thus occupied, a younger generation of photographers had come along who believed that when Steichen turned his back on painting he had not turned far enough. They saw the camera as essentially a documenter of physical reality. They admired Matthew Brady's diamond-clear, sober pictures of the Civil War, Eugene Atget's photographs of Paris in the early 1900s a great deal more than Steichen's highly lit personalities in Vanity Fair. Steichen's love of lighting effects and studio magic (see cut) seemed to them stagy. Among these photographers were Berenice Abbott. Edward Weston, Paul Strand. Ralph Steiner and Walker Evans. The virtue of photography, Evans recalled, lay in the "difference between a quaint evocation of the past and an open window looking straight down a stack of decades."

Last week Photographer Edward Steichen, 58, admitted that lately it had been "a little difficult to get any fun out of advertising photography." Furthermore, there were things he wanted to do. First off, he was going to Yucatan to see if he could find out anything about the origins of Indian corn. Corn now seems to him the basis of North American civilization. Before he dies he wants to plot out and at least partially complete a vast photographic mural of America, beginning with astronomical photographs of the heavens, indented lower down with mountain ranges, cities, factories, then breaking up into smaller scenes of streets, homes, offices, hospitals, with a winding decoration composed of the tasseled. growing corn.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.