Edward Steichen was born today, 147 years ago, in a stone house in the village of Bivange, Luxembourg. He would go on to become the most influential photographer of the twentieth century — not because he took the best pictures (though he did), but because he spent his entire career proving that the camera could do what the brush had always done: reveal the human body as something sacred, something worth looking at seriously.
If you know one Steichen photograph, it’s probably Rodin — The Thinker (1902). The image shows Auguste Rodin in silhouette, the sculptor’s dark profile set against his own creation — the bronze figure of The Thinker — while across the frame, the pale marble of the Monument to Victor Hugo looms like a ghost. It’s a photograph about the relationship between an artist and the bodies he made. Rodin doesn’t look at the camera. He looks at his own work. And Steichen, standing in the dark of the sculptor’s studio, watches a man watching the human form he spent his life studying.
That’s the whole game, right there.
From Luxembourg to the Photo-Secession
Steichen’s family emigrated to Michigan when he was eighteen months old, settling in the copper country of the Upper Peninsula before moving to Milwaukee. By fifteen, he was apprenticed to a lithography firm. By twenty, he’d taught himself to paint and bought his first camera — a secondhand Kodak box — and cofounded the Milwaukee Art Students League with friends who shared his obsession.
In 1900, en route to Paris to study painting, Steichen stopped in New York and met Alfred Stieglitz. Stieglitz bought three of his prints on the spot. It was the beginning of one of the most consequential partnerships in the history of photography — and, more quietly, in the history of how the Western world sees the human body.
Together, Steichen and Stieglitz created the Photo-Secession movement and the legendary 291 Gallery in New York. The gallery was Steichen’s former portrait studio, and it became the first American venue to exhibit Rodin’s drawings, Matisse’s paintings, Picasso’s early work, and Brâncuși’s sculptures. What linked all of them? The body. The insistence that the human figure — nude, fragmented, abstracted, real — was the central subject of serious art.
The Body Through a Lens
Steichen’s own relationship to the nude was complex and evolving. In his early Pictorialist phase — the soft-focus, hand-manipulated prints that made him famous — he photographed the body the way a painter would: shrouded in atmosphere, dissolved into light and shadow, more suggestion than anatomy. His photographs of Rodin’s sculptures treated bronze and marble bodies as living presences, lit with the dramatic intensity of a Baroque painting.
He was explicit about what he was doing. “Every photograph is already a manipulation,” he wrote. “There is never anything natural in photography.” He meant it as liberation. If the camera was always an interpretation, then it was also always an art. And if it was art, then it had the same right as painting to explore the most fundamental subject art has ever known: the unclothed human form.
After World War I — during which he commanded the photographic division of the American Expeditionary Forces — Steichen abandoned Pictorialism for what he called “straight photography.” He spent weeks taking over a thousand photographs of a single white cup and saucer, practicing tonal control the way a pianist practices scales. When he returned to photographing people, the sentiment was gone. What replaced it was precision — and an almost clinical fascination with how light falls across skin, bone, and muscle.
Fashion, Condé Nast, and the Democratized Body
In 1911, Steichen’s photographs of Paul Poiret gowns for the French magazine Art et Décoration became the first modern fashion photographs ever published. By 1923, Condé Nast hired him as chief photographer for Vogue and Vanity Fair at the then-extraordinary salary of $35,000 — the equivalent of over $500,000 today.
This matters for nude art because Steichen was doing something nobody had done before: using the camera to make the clothed body as carefully considered, as deliberately composed, as the nude body had been in painting for five centuries. He was reversing the equation. The old masters started with the nude and added drapery. Steichen started with drapery and made you see the body underneath.
His celebrity portraits of the era — Greta Garbo, Gloria Swanson, Charlie Chaplin — share the same quality. The subject is always a body in space, even when fully dressed. Steichen understood what figure drawing teaches: that the body is the grammar. Everything else is vocabulary.
The Family of Man
In 1947, at age 68, Steichen became Director of Photography at the Museum of Modern Art — the first time the position existed. He would hold it for fifteen years and transform how museums thought about photography.
His masterwork as a curator was The Family of Man (1955), a touring exhibition of 503 photographs from 68 countries. Nine million people saw it. The show included nudes — birth, breastfeeding, bathing, sleeping, dying. Not as titillation. Not as scandal. As the ordinary, irreducible reality of having a body. As what connects every human being who has ever lived.
In 2003, UNESCO added the collection to its Memory of the World Register. It remains the most visited photographic exhibition in history.
What Steichen Means for Nude Art Now
Steichen died on March 25, 1973, two days before what would have been his 94th birthday. He’d lived long enough to see photography move from a curiosity to the dominant visual medium of the twentieth century — and he was more responsible for that transformation than any other single person.
But here’s the thing that matters for what we do at Nude Art LA: Steichen never separated the body from art, or art from life. The same man who photographed Rodin’s nudes in 1902 photographed fashion models in the 1920s, directed combat photography in two World Wars, and curated the most humanistic exhibition of bodies the world had ever seen. For Steichen, the body wasn’t a genre. It was the subject — the only subject, really — and everything else was a variation.
When someone asks why nude art matters, point them to Steichen. Not because he was a nude photographer — he wasn’t, exactly — but because he understood that the body is where all seeing begins. Every portrait is a figure study. Every fashion photograph is an exercise in how cloth falls across anatomy. Every war photograph is a record of what happens to bodies.
One hundred and forty-seven years after his birth, that insight hasn’t aged a day.
Nude Art LA celebrates the body as the foundation of serious art. Get involved and join a tradition that stretches from Rodin’s studio to Steichen’s lens to your own eye.