Edward Steichen

A brief biography of Edward Steichen, one of the most influential pioneers of photography on whose shoulders we stand.

 

“It is rather amusing, this tendency of the wise to regard a print which has been locally manipulated as irrational photography – this tendency which finds an esthetic tone of expression in the word faked. A MANIPULATED print may be not a photograph. The personal intervention between the action of the light and the print itself may be a blemish on the purity of photography. But, whether this intervention consists merely of marking, shading and tinting in a direct print, or of stippling, painting and scratching on the negative, or of using glycerine, brush and mop on a print, faking has set in, and the results must always depend upon the photographer, upon his personality, his technical ability and his feeling. BUT long before this stage of conscious manipulation has been begun, faking has already set in. In the very beginning, when the operator controls and regulates his time of exposure, when in dark-room the developer is mixed for detail, breadth, flatness or contrast, faking has been resorted to. In fact, every photograph is a fake from start to finish, a purely impersonal, unmanipulated photograph being practically impossible. When all is said, it still remains entirely a matter of degree and ability.” – Edward Steichen

In Luxembourg, a small country wedged between Germany, Belgium and France, is the little known Clervaux Castle secluded in the north of the country. It was built in the 12th century but destroyed in the Battle of the Bulge in the Second World War. Since then it has been restored and now houses the town’s administrative offices and a small museum.

The museum contains an exhibition of over 500 photographs collected from photographers in 36 countries that were assembled and first shown in 1955 at the New York Museum of Modern Art. Since its first showing, the exhibition has traveled around the world and has been seen by more than 9 million people. Finally, it was donated to the Grand Duchy of Luxembourg and reached its permanent home in the Castle.

00070138-01Éduard Jean Steichen was born on March 27, 1879 to Jean-Pierre and Marie Kemp Steichen in Bivange, Luxembourg. He was still a toddler when his parents moved to the United States and settled in Hancock located in Michigan’s upper peninsula where his father worked in the copper mines. When his father became incapacitated, they moved to Milwaukee. There his mother supported the family by working as a milliner.

He attended Pio Nono College, a Catholic boys’ high school when he was 15 and was already showing artistic talent in his drawings. But before finishing high school, he dropped out to become a lithography apprentice at the American Fine Art Company of Milwaukee. He continued drawing and took up painting. In 1895 at the age of 16 he bought his first camera, a secondhand Kodak box “detective” camera. Together with several of his friends who also enjoyed photography, they pooled their money to rent a small room in a Milwaukee office building and formed the Milwaukee Art Students League.

Steichen continued drawing and painting, but he also took to photography for which he obviously had an eye. The first showing of his photographs, at the age of 20, was at the Philadelphia Photographic Salon in 1899. In 1900 Steichen exhibited his photographs in the Chicago Salon. It is there that Clarence H. White, one of the leading proponents of Pictorialist photography and a colleague of the legendary Alfred Stieglitz, saw his photographs and was greatly impressed. He decided he had to introduce Steichen to the Stieglitz in New York, the photographer whose lifelong obsession was to establish photography as a legitimate art and the driving force behind the Pictorialist movement in America. White wrote a letter to Stieglitz, telling him of his find. Stieglitz was interested.

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Making a Photograph – Taking Flight

Follow all the decisions and resulting adjustments that went into the making of an expressive landscape photograph using Lightroom Classic.

A Desert Scene

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This image was taken in 20 Mule Team Canyon in Death Valley National Park. I was particularly excited about this when I saw it in the field. I was fascinated by the meandering dry stream bead that worked its way across the scene. The ever-present salt in Death Valley stood out white against the soft warm colors of the badlands behind it.

But there were several additional things that excited me. The badlands behind the stream bed also fascinated me and made the experience even richer. It is a concentration of diagonal lines, textures and forms. And the light, while the sun is fairly high in the morning sky, still crosses the badlands at an angle that accentuates its shadows. I intentionally clip_image005overexposed the image 2/3 of a stop to be sure to capture shadow detail and that’s why it looks washed out.

The histogram shows no particular challenges. There is no highlight or shadow clipping. You can see from the thin tail that moves towards the right edge, which was caused by the white salt, doesn’t quite touch it. If I had increased the exposure even a third of a stop more, there would have had highlight clipping on the salt.

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Alfred Stieglitz

Alfred Stieglitz left a lasting legacy on fine art photography. Read a brief history of his life and accomplishments.

“It is not art in the professionalized sense about which I care, but that which is created sacredly, as a result of a deep inner experience, with all of oneself, and that becomes ‘art’ in time.”

– Alfred Stieglitz

New Year’s Day in 1864 didn’t seem at first to be any more unusual than the start of any new year in recent years. It might have been thought to be special because it was leap year. But the Civil War was going full throttle and the United States was split asunder.

In Hoboken, New Jersey a boy was born to German Jewish immigrants Edward Stieglitz, a lieutenant in the Union Army, and his wife Hedwig Ann Werner. The baby boy was the firstborn to Edward and Hedwig and would be followed by five more siblings.

The child was given the name Alfred. There was no way in predicting in those early years that little Alfred would make the name Stieglitz synonymous with the most revered and influential photographer in America.

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Modernism Changes Photography

Photography finally stands on its own as a legitimate, independent art form.

The Pictorialist movement was born among photographers who were primarily scientists. They fervently believed that photography was not limited to faithfully recording the physical world. They saw the camera as more than a mere mechanical device and they were intent on proving it could create art.

It’s not surprising that they turned for guidance to paintings. If a photograph was to be regarded as art, what better way than to make a photograph that looked like a painting. And besides, painters had already worked out the principles and standards for art over centuries. Why try to invent something new when there was such a wealth of knowledge and tradition at one’s disposal.

If one was so inclined, one could mark the beginning of the Pictorialist movement in 1869 when Henry Peach Robinson used the word in his book Pictorial Effects in Photography…, although the tradition had already taken root. This approach of employing well established standards of painting to photographs had a powerful following that lasted for nearly 100 years.

The Influence of Modernism

At the same time, Modernism was beginning to sweep across Europe in the late 19th century. In many ways, Modernism was the antithesis of the Pictorialist movement. Instead of sanctifying tradition, Modernism rejected it in its entirety. It was utter rebellion against the sensibilities of the establishment. Modernism permeated science, mathematics, philosophy, politics, the economy, literature, psychology and painting.

The Modernist movement was triggered by advances of technology. As if out of nowhere, technology was changing people’s lives. Tasks that were tedious and time-consuming became effortless. Technology was ushering in luxury and leisure time that was available to the masses. It promised a utopian way of life.

But it also shattered self-esteem and feelings of self-worth for many. Rather than a person taking pride from creating a product from start to finish, assembly lines reduced an individual’s contribution to one small, insignificant component.

In the realm of painting, the rejection of tradition was so entrenched that even as new, exciting movements were born, they were quickly discarded in favor of even newer movements. There was a rapid succession of isms: secessionism, fauvism, expressionism, cubism, futurism, constructivism, dada, and surrealism. Painters rejected the traditional notion that art had to be a realistic depiction of nature, people and society.

So, it’s not surprising that with all of this going on, Modernism infiltrated photography.

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Photography’s Struggle to be Recognized as Art – Pictorialism

Photography had a hard time establishing itself as a valid art medium. Read about the first movement that launched this push.

Photography is Mechanical

 

Between 1840 and 1860 the growth of photography was all about science.  The development of light sensitive media was dependent on a few brilliant scientists figuring out how to make them and experimenting with what would work best.  And Kodak was decades away from inventing roll film and the camera it came in.  If you wanted to be a photographer you had to master the chemistry of your chosen medium and in some cases, as we shall soon see, you had to be able to take your darkroom with you.

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The First Photographers: 1840 – 1860

Meet the influential pioneering photographers that created the medium in its first 20 years and on whose shoulders we stand today.

The First Photographers – 1840 – 1860

The 20-year period beginning in 1840 saw an explosion in photography. Prior to that the camera obscura could project upside down and backwards images on a sheet of paper that could be traced to produce a drawing. In fact, that is how painters used it. But the projection could not be captured and saved…, until Louis Daguerre invented the daguerreotype.

Before the daguerreotype, if you wanted a portrait you hired a painter, an option that was available to only the wealthy. But the daguerreotype made portraits available to many more people. Painters initially rejected the notion, believing that their portraits were superior. But most eventually conceded that the daguerreotype could reproduce a more accurate image of the person in less time and more economically.

The daguerreotype had a life of merely ten years and was followed first by the calotype and then by the collodion process.  And before the end of the century Kodak processed the role film which opened photography to everyone.  Read more at In the Beginning There Was a Camera but No Film.

Since the daguerreotype and its successors were fast, accurate and highly detailed, they were seen as great ways of documenting the physical world but incapable of creating art. But, even in those early days, some pioneering photographers pursued photography as a legitimate artistic medium and produced stunning, ground-breaking images that still touch our souls more than a century and a half later. The struggle to recognize photographs as art began with the daguerreotype and continues to this day (although to a lesser degree).

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In the Beginning There Was a Camera but No Film

Read how photography took off in the mid-1800s when its pioneers developed light-sensitive materials that were capable of captureing an image.

At the heart of photography is the camera, a device that uses lenses to focus the image, a variable aperture to control the brightness of the light and a shutter that can open and close in a precise duration of time. The other component is a light-sensitive medium to capture the image.

In the early 1800’s when much effort went into developing a light-sensitive medium, the camera was nothing new. The camera obscura had existed for centuries. In fact, there’s a high likelihood that you have created a camera obscura.

When there is a solar eclipse it is too dangerous to look directly at the sun without looking through very dark sunglasses. As an alternative, we take a piece of cardboard, punch a hole in it, and project the image of the sun on the sidewalk. As the moon consumes the sun, the projected image shows the image of the crescent sun.

Shining light through a small whole is the principle of the camera obscura. If the light shines on a screen, an upside-down image appears.

The Chinese understood this principle as early as the 4th century BCE knew when they created a sundial with a small hole in the gnomon, the sail-like piece that casts it’s moving shadow on the plate. The hole projected a bright spot on the plate which enabled the Chinese to not only tell the time from the position of the shadow but also the date from the position of the bright spot.

The camera obscura was used to study optics and astronomy in the 16th century. But by 1567, the camera obscura was being used by painters as a drawing aid.

Time passed until explorations into light-sensitive materials in the early 1800s began to produce results.

 

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Gestalt

Incorporating gestalt into your landscape photographs.

From time to time the term ‘Gestalt’ has come up in articles and classes on composition.  I never quite grasped the concept.  I thought Gestalt is an approach some psychologists use in their counseling. And to make matters even more confusing, the origin of the term didn’t help.  It comes from the German word that means ‘shape.’  It just wasn’t sinking in.  Until recently….

 

The concept started to make sense as I was preparing the Mastering Landscape Photography class for the Joshua Tree National Park Desert Institute here in California.  In this course I take a deep dive into light and composition.  I’ve been studying the ‘rules’ of composition for many years now and the authors tend to make broad generalizations on the effect they have on the viewers.  More recently I studied the impact colors have, not from the perspective of visual arts but rather from the studies performed by researchers in psychology.  Through their studies, the researchers found that the colors they studied, generally prime colors, can have either a positive or negative effect on their subjects. And the effect depended on many factors but based on these factors they were consistent.  That got me thinking. 

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How Many Megapixels Do You Need?

How many megapixels do you need? That depends….

Let’s face it, megapixels have been a great marketing tool. “The more there are, all the better,” or so the logic goes. And when a camera manufacturer announces another big jump in megapixels, the photography world sits up takes notice. The question, however, is, ‘How many megapixels do you really need?” Admittedly, this may be different from, “How many megapixels do you want?” The answer to the second question kind of depends on your financial resources and the desire to stay on top of new technology developments. But there is an objective answer to the first question (although it may not be gratifying). But to answer it we need to start at the beginning…

What is a Pixel?

A pixel, or picture element, is a term commonly used across many media – camera sensors, monitors, TVs, etc. But each has its own design. We will stick to the camera sensors.

A single pixel is made up of four elements called pixel sensors arranged in a square pattern. And each element has a colored filter – one red, one blue and two green. It’s called the Bayer pattern.

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Cambridge in Color has a great article titled Digital Camera Sensors, if you care to take a deeper look. The high-level overview begins with colored light coming through the lens and falling on the sensor. At each pixel element the intensity of red, green or blue light is captured. The intensity is voltages that capture a continuous range of brightness, something like dimming or brightening a light bulb. The computer’s processor, among other things, converts the continuous signal from each element into 32,766 discrete digital steps (14 bits). And that is what gets saved on your memory card as a RAW file.

The important takeaway, however, is that each pixel is made up of four elements – one red, one blue and two green.

By the way, you’re probably asking, “Why two green elements?” Well, as it turns out, that mimics the color sensitivity in our eyes. You see, the cones in our retina are sensitive to red, green and blue light. But it turns out that our eyes are more sensitive to green than red or blue. So, making the sensors with two green elements mirrors what the way our eyes work.

Moving on….

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2019 Big Sur Photography Workshop

Explore the Big Sur coast with your camera. Broaden your photographic skills with award winning photographer, Ralph Nordstrom.

After a two-year absence from Big Sur due to the landslides of 2017, it’s past time to return. The Big Sur Photography Workshop is on for next month, November 11-14, 2019 and there’s an opening with your name on it.

Big Sur holds some of the most stunning coastline in the entire United States. The mile-high Santa Lucia mountains plummet into the Pacific Ocean, creating a scenery seen nowhere else.

Big Sur Coast

Big Sur is also the home to redwood groves and waterfalls, found in the streams that cascade down the face of the mountains. One particularly famous waterfall spills onto the beach in McWay cove.

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Much more awaits along this 100 mile stretch of coast that will challenge and reward you photographically.  Would you like to join me and experience this beautiful coast for yourself? More information can be found on this link – Big Sur Photography Workshop. Or email me at Ralph@RalphNordstromPhotography.com.

See you in Big Sur!

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