As a photographer, painter, and gardener, Edward Steichen (1879–1973) taught himself to sketch and paint, and as a teenager bought a box camera, which inspired him to learn photography. Enroute to Europe in 1900, Steichen stopped in New York where he met the photographer and gallerist Alfred Stieglitz. Five years later, in 1905, Steichen joined Stieglitz’s Photo-Secession, and became instrumental in designing and curating exhibitions at “291,” helping Stieglitz secure work by notable European modern artists, including Cézanne, Matisse, Picasso, and Rodin. In 1908, Steichen settled in Voulangis, located about forty-five miles east of Paris, to focus on painting and photography. A fascination with planting and growing flowers also developed during this time. Spending spring, summer, and fall in France and winter in New York, Steichen became Stieglitz’s connection to Paris.
When the United States entered the war in 1917, Steichen’s life changed dramatically with his military service as an aerial photographer for the Army. After the Armistice, he temporarily abandoned art. His wartime experiences had left him depressed and indifferent to the pursuits that had previously sustained him.
Within a few years, Steichen resumed photography, and in the spring of 1920, he returned to his garden at Voulangis. Setting up his studio in a greenhouse, he steadily rediscovered himself as an artist while perfecting his technical skills. At the same time, he reignited his botanical interests, quickly becoming an expert gardener: “When I finally returned to my house and garden at Voulangis, I entered a time of deep, earnest soul-searching that led to three of the most productive years of my life.”1 Three Apples, a silver gelatin print in the Solari Foundation Collection dating from 1920, was made during a period of what has been described as his “second apprenticeship,”2 which rejuvenated his art.
Steichen re-engaged his photographic process by embarking on a rigorous formal and technical program, making thousands of negatives of a white cup and saucer under various lighting scenarios adjacent to a grey scale card that started with white and slowly led through a full tonal range until reaching black. Regarding this as a technical exercise demonstrating how light and chemicals can affect the negative, he made no prints. Once he had mastered this, he commenced making images of apples and pears picked from his garden wall, using various combinations of direct and diffused light, as well as soft and sharp focus to create pictures that most closely represented the realistic quality of the object. When he failed to achieve the results he wanted, he constructed a tent of blankets, covering the subject and the camera:
From a tiny opening not larger than a nickel, I directed light against one side of the covering blanket, and this light, reflected from the blanket, was all. Then, to get as much depth as possible, I made a small diaphragm that must have been roughly f28. I removed some of the blankets to compose and focus the picture, replaced them, and made a series of exposures that ran from six hours to thirty-six. The most successful ones took thirty-six hours.3
He had neglected to account for the contraction and expansion of the flexible sheet film that resulted from the change in temperature between night and day:
Instead of producing one meticulously sharp picture, the infinitesimal movement produced a succession of slightly different sharp images, which optically fused as one. Here for the first time in a photograph, I was able to sense volume as well as form. What was more, when the pictures were enlarged to four by five feet, the scale or actual size of the objects represented became unimportant. This elimination of the realistic element of scale made abstract images of these photographs.4
Steichen continued to create photographs of fruit and flowers during this year, particularly his favorite: the sunflower.
When Edward Steichen made Three Apples in 1920, he was forty-one years old, and not quite at the midpoint of his career, which had already been a notable one. The work combines his twin passions of photography and gardening, and marks a point of transition for the artist.
In 1923, Steichen moved back to New York and became chief photographer for Condé Nast, photographing for both Vogue and Vanity Fair. In 1929, he acquired a farm in Redding, Connecticut, where he spent his weekends and holidays photographing nature. The pictures he made and gardening kept him in contact with the earth: “Without this sustenance, I don’t believe I could have remained alive and interested in my professional photographic activities in New York for as long as I did.”5
During World War II, Steichen served as a combat photographer for the Navy, which took him away from a lucrative but unsatisfying career as a commercial photographer. The experience signaled a new career direction. In the late 1940’s, his work became more engaged with the social issues of the time, and was published in Life magazine. His powerful and effective photo essays now concentrated on the human condition, rather than on still life subjects and fashion layouts. In 1947, he replaced Beaumont Newhall as the Director of the Department of Photography at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, for which he curated his most famous exhibition, The Family of Man, in 1955. He retired in 1962, and published his 1963 autobiography, A Life in Photography, the next year. Since his death, a limited edition of one hundred gelatin silver prints plus thirty-two artist prints of Three Apples were authorized by his widow Joanna.6
Carrie Meyer
Edward Steichen, Three Apples, 1920, gelatin silver print, 19.1 x 24.1 cm, SOLARI 91.002.001L