To Catch the Instant

Were photography nothing more than an aid to memory--snapshots to be pasted in an album--it would perform a service; but in the right hands, the camera goes infinitely beyond the mere literal record. "There is," says Edward Steichen, dean of U.S. photographers, "the photography which seeks to translate into pattern and design the magic of a detail of growth and deterioration. Photography records the gamut of feelings written on the human face, the beauty of the earth and skies that man has inherited, and the wealth and confusion man has created." In a word, photography has become, as only good art can, "a major force in explaining man to man."

Last week, as the majestically bearded Steichen reached a vigorous 82, Manhattan's Museum of Modern Art honored him with a retrospective of his work that was like opening windows on more than half a century of war and laughter, depression and song, tragedy and triumph. The world and the camera had come a long way since Steichen began, but at no time was there any doubt that the man behind the camera was an artist. And the fact that the word "artist" could be used in discussing photography at all was in part Steichen's doing.

The Secession. The son of Luxembourg immigrants who had settled in Milwaukee, Steichen started out to be a painter. But on his way to Paris in 1900, he stopped long enough in Manhattan to call on the already famous Alfred Stieglitz and to show him some photographs he had taken back home. Photographer Stieglitz looked them over, bought a batch for $5 apiece. "Well," he said as his 21-year-old visitor was leaving, "I suppose now that you are going to Paris you will forget all about photography." Steichen was already in the elevator when he blurted his reply. "I will always stick to photography," he said.

Though he also painted--somewhat in the manner of Whistler with a dash of Monet--he kept his word. In 1905 he helped Stieglitz start the Photo-Secession Galleries in New York, a rallying point for those who wanted to "secede from the notion that photography is only literal representation." Steichen wanted to "push out the realm of the camera." He loved "wet days, yellow, foggy days, twilights," and to catch the mood, he would purposely blur the picture by kicking the tripod or wetting the lens. In developing his famed Steeplechase Day, Paris; After the Races, a carefree scene at the Longchamp track, he kept the background dark, highlighting the figures until they became three dimensional.

The Bonfire. When war came, Steichen got on General Billy Mitchell's staff as officer in charge of aerial photography. That experience only increased his desire to communicate through art with as wide an audience as possible. His own paintings--"so much wallpaper in gold frames"--were obviously not the answer. One day he collected every unsold canvas he had and destroyed them in a bonfire.

Going to work for Conde Nast (Vanity Fair and Vogue), he raised commercial photography to a level it had never known. Some of the world's best-known personalities--J. P. Morgan, Greta Garbo, Teddy Roosevelt, Charlie Chaplin, Eugene O'Neill, the sculptor Brancusi--paraded before him, and all left a part of themselves behind on film. He showed the Depression in one great picture: a group of homeless women from a shelter. "Even in their poverty, they primped a little," he remembers. During World War II he headed all combat photography for the U.S. Navy.

Today, married for the third time to a young beauty of 28 (he has been once divorced, once widowed), Steichen spends much of his time photographing a small tree near his home in Ridgefield, Conn. It has become for him a friend whose moods change with the hour and the season. Last week the little tree had its place alongside all the faces, famous and unknown, and the scenes of uproar and repose that are Steichen's autobiography. What is their magic? Steichen's answer is simple. "We all cry and laugh," says he, "but never at the same time or for the same reason. It is up to the photographer to catch the instant that is the reality of the person or of the moment."

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