When it comes to early twentieth-century photography, Alfred Stieglitz and Man Ray are the names I’ve always associated with that era, but Steichen was the first person to publish what we’d now recognize as modern fashion photographs. Steichen was the most popular and highest paid photographer in the twenties and thirties. He also happened to win an Academy Award for Best Documentary Feature and, in the early 2000s, set a record for the highest price ever paid for a photograph at auction. Today, he still holds the record for the second most expensive photograph.
The résumé is staggering. His ability to zigzag across boundaries most artists would never cross is fascinating. He was a painter turned photographer, a pictorialist turned fashion innovator, a war documentarian turned museum director. He was a shapeshifter, moving from one sphere to another without apology. The lesson I draw from that is personal: perhaps the work that lasts, the work that resonates, is not the purest or the most uncompromising, but the kind that adapts.
Steichen began in the soft haze of pictorialism, producing images that looked like watercolors or charcoal drawings. At the time, photography still struggled to be taken seriously, and so he printed with platinum, manipulated light, and leaned into painterly effects. You can feel the yearning in those early prints, the desire to be admitted into the same halls where Cézanne or Matisse hung. He was close to Alfred Stieglitz, who made it his mission to drag photography into the realm of fine art, and for a while their partnership gave him credibility. But where Stieglitz chose the rigid path of purity, insisting on photography’s transcendence, Steichen made a more pragmatic choice. He didn’t want to live in the purity of the gallery alone. He wanted to see what photography could do in the broader world.
That decision took him into fashion, and here is where he changed the visual vocabulary forever. In Paris, in the early 1910s, he staged couture not as documentation but as spectacle. His 1911 shoot for Art et Décoration is often called the first true fashion spread, and you can see why. The clothes float in dreamlike frames. The women radiate presence, no longer just figures in fabric but emblems of style itself; models looked like icons, not mannequins. It feels astonishingly modern, like an early sketch of every Vogue and Harper’s Bazaar cover that would come later. I find myself most drawn to this chapter of his work because it feels like a refusal to be small. He didn’t shrink from commerce. He let commerce become his canvas. That’s not a compromise, that’s a form of invention.
Later, improbably, he became a Navy officer in his sixties, directing the Naval Aviation Photographic Unit during the Second World War. The same man who once cast Greta Garbo in silvery light was now filming bombers and carriers. The result, The Fighting Lady, won an Oscar. I can’t help but think of this turn as a revelation: the medium is never one thing. It is not sacred. It is not debased. It is a tool, endlessly adaptable. Fashion, war, propaganda, art—it all passes through the lens. I wonder what it means that I admire this so much. Maybe it’s that I want to believe the best work comes from moving between categories rather than defending one.
His tenure at the Museum of Modern Art drove that point home. In 1955, he organized The Family of Man, an exhibition of more than five hundred photographs from across the globe, meant to capture the shared experiences of humanity. It traveled worldwide and was eventually turned into a bestselling book. Audiences loved it; critics later scorned it as sentimental, naive, or evasive in the politics of the Cold War. And yet, millions walked through those rooms and felt connected to strangers they would never meet. The power of that ambition lingers for me. It makes me ask myself: am I more interested in austere technical mastery, like Ansel Adams, or in something that tries, however imperfectly, to bind people together? I am drawn to photography as connective tissue even if the attempt is messy.
Others are clearly drawn to this as well. In 2006, The Pond—Moonlight, a platinum print from his pictorialist youth, sold for nearly three million dollars, briefly becoming the most expensive photograph ever auctioned. A photograph made when he was still trying to prove that photography could be art, ended up, a century later, as a trophy of art-market validation. It reveals the long arc of Steichen’s influence. He did not choose between art and commerce. He inhabited both, and now history seems to reward that refusal to choose.
The contrast with his peers is instructive. Stieglitz clung to purity and spent his life insisting that photography mattered. Man Ray let it dissolve into surrealism, making photograms and dreamlike experiments. Edward Weston and Ansel Adams pared it down to formal perfection. Steichen, meanwhile, seemed to ask a simpler question: what can the photograph do here, in this moment, for this audience? That question feels like a guiding principle for me too. It makes me realize I don’t necessarily crave purity. I crave possibility.
When I look at Steichen’s photographs, I don’t just see the work of a single man. I see a philosophy of making. He never allowed the medium to harden into one form. He let it remain porous, moving between art and advertisement, propaganda and portrait, dream and documentation. Today, we live in a world of images that are all hybrids. An influencer’s selfie is also an ad. A campaign is also art-directed intimacy. A photograph can sell for millions in a gallery and be reposted a million times on Instagram. The borders dissolved long ago, but Steichen anticipated that collapse. He was not scandalized by it. He leaned into it.
That’s why his story resonates with me. It isn’t just admiration for what he accomplished—though his achievements are enormous. It’s that his life reflects a way of working I find meaningful. I don’t want to get trapped in a single lane, repeating the same thing for decades.
Don’t worry too much about whether something counts as art. Use the tools you have in whatever field they can be useful. If the moment calls for glamour, create glamour. If it calls for patriotism, make propaganda. If it calls for a grand exhibition of human connection, gather hundreds of images and let them breathe together.
When I return to his photograph of Greta Garbo, or to the pages of Vogue, or to the war documentary, or to the sentimental but wildly ambitious Family of Man, I don’t see contradictions. I see a restless imagination, testing the edges of what a photograph could mean. That restlessness feels instructive. Maybe the goal is not to perfect a single lane but to keep moving, to keep asking the question Steichen seemed to live by: what can the image do here, now, for these people? That feels to me like the honest path, the flexible one, the one most alive to the world.
unpublished alpha 