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14 As a groundbreaking photographer, gallerist and museum curator, Edward Steichen was a driving force in establishing photography as an art form in its own right. He dedicated his life to the medium, leaving behind a legacy of images and exhibitions that were unequalled in their influence in the worlds of photography and art. Steichen was born Eduard Jean Steichen in Luxembourg, on 27 March 1879. Two years later his family emigrated to America and settled in St Francis, a suburb of Milwaukee, where his father had found work in a copper mine. Steichen showed a natural talent for draughtsmanship at school, and left to serve an apprenticeship at the American Fine Arts Company, a lithography firm, where he was soon made a designer. He was an accomplished painter and, after buying his first camera in 1895, pursued both photography and painting in his spare time. He was interested in Impressionism, and was influenced by such painters as Claude Monet and James Abbott McNeill Whistler, and the Pictorialist photographers championed by Camera Notes – the journal of the Camera Club of New York, edited by Alfred Stieglitz. In 1900, Steichen travelled to Paris to continue his artistic education at Académie Julian, visiting New York en route. There he sought out Stieglitz, the famous Pictorialist photographer and magazine editor, and showed him some of his photographs. Stieglitz was impressed, and bought three. In the same year, he also visited London where he participated in an exhibition of Pictorialist photographs with Frederick Holland Day and Alvin Langton Coburn. Steichen returned to New York in 1902 and began working as a commercial photographer, gaining particular fame for his portraits, which included J P Morgan and Auguste Rodin. In the same year his friendship with Stieglitz blossomed, and he became a founding member of a group of photographers called the Photo-Succession. Organised and championed by Stieglitz, the group consisted of American Pictorialist photographers and was intended as a joint effort to promote photography as a fine art. They held group exhibitions, and Stieglitz published their pictures in Camera Notes and then, from 1903-17, in his own publication, Camera Works. Steichen's pictures from this period are thick with atmosphere and painterly qualities, displaying dramatic contrast and strong graphic design. Images such as The Flatiron (1904), and The Pond-Moonlight (1904) have since become seminal works within the Pictorialist movement. The relationship between Stieglitz and Steichen developed further when, in 1905, they opened a gallery at 291 Fifth Avenue called 'Little Galleries of the Photo-Succession' (soon becoming known as simply '291'). This gallery was to become the principal exhibition space for photography in New York, but also for work by artists of the European avante-garde. In 1906 Steichen returned to Paris, and set about sourcing their pictures for his gallery, which became an outlet for them in America. Together, Stieglitz and Steichen showed work by Henri Matisse, Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, Auguste Rodin, Pablo Picasso, Paul Cézanne, Constantin Brancusi, and many other artists. However, whilst Steichen appreciated the Modernist style of such artists, he took longer to develop his own style, which remained firmly Pictorialist. Edward Steichen 1879-1973 04 Edward Steichen, Winston Churchill for 'Vanity Fair', 1932 Silver gelatin print, printed c. 1932 9 1/2 x 7 1/2 inches