Fashion Plates

On George Baher’s yacht: June Cox wearing unidentified fashion; E. Vogt wearing fashion by Chanel and a hat by Reboux; Lee Miller wearing a dress by Mae and Hattie Green and a scarf by Chanel; Hanna-Lee Sherman wearing unidentified fashion, 1928. Courtesy Condé Nast Archive, New York. © 1928 Condé Nast Publications

There are two ways of approaching "Edward Steichen: In High Fashion, the Condé Nast Years 1923–1937," the new exhibition opening at the AGO today: as a photography show displaying the work of a recognized hero in the field and as a fascinating bit of cultural anthropology. What we have in the first case is a master class in some of the foundational elements of photography, most especially composition and light. What we have in the second is a glimpse into the world that Steichen photographed and the cultural sensibilities that were prominent at the time.

Edward Steichen (1879-1973) began his artistic life as a painter. As recounted by William A. Ewing, director of the Musée de l´Elysée in Lausanne and co-curator of the exhibition, by 1923 Steichen was increasingly dissatisfied with the quality of his work, and though his paintings were selling at a very respectable rate he decided to give up painting and burnt many of his existing canvases. He then took the boat to New York (Steichen had been working in Paris previously), and shortly after his arrival came he across an article about himself in Vanity Fair. Reading, mistakenly, that he had given up photography for painting, Steichen called Vanity Fair to inform the publication of its error, and when he did Condé Montrose Nast, publisher of the magazine, invited the down-and-out Steichen to become head of photography for both Vanity Fair and Vogue. Though many of his contemporaries were shocked at such a downmarket shift, Steichen embraced the opportunity and began shooting for the magazines at once.

The entryway that leads into the exhibition shows Steichen's photography as it originally appeared—in magazines. It's an illuminating display, revealing the extent to which Steichen's (and, presumably, any photographer's) work was constrained by that medium: images were cropped into irregular shapes, surrounded with sketched-out (and stylistically incongruous) frames, and printed on paper that didn't do the nuances of each photo real justice. By contrast, the full-fledged photographs in the exhibition proper, though relatively small, are lush and textured and above all filled with light—Steichen's ability to control and deploy light was perhaps his most distinctive gift as a photographer.

Steichen's subjects—especially the fashion models—give the appearance of knowing that they are being watched: they are self-consciously posing (though they are not self-conscious in doing so). This provides an interesting contrast to much of today's fashion photography, in which there is at least a pretense of catching the subject unawares, in the midst of action. Steichen's photographs are mostly still, more about the sculptural qualities of the composition than about movement, and more about distilling the essence of the subject than capturing them naturalistically.

And mostly, you get the sense, he succeeded.

"Edward Steichen: In High Fashion, the Condé Nast Years 1923–1937" opens this Saturday, September 26 and will run until January 3, 2010.