Edward Steichen, the Royal Photographic Society Collection.
Milan: Charta, 1997.
Edward Steichen: Art as Advertising/Advertising as Art
Works from the Collection of Norsk Museum from the
Fotografi-Preus Collection. Horten, Norway: Norsk
Museum for Fotografi-Preus Fotomuseum, 2002.
Steichen, Joanna.Steichen’s Legacy: Photographs, 1895–
1973. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2000.ANDRE
́
STEINER
French
Born in 1901 in Mihald, Andre ́Steiner chose exile
after the end of World War I and the proclamation
of the Republic of Hungary and at the age of 17
established himself in Vienna, Austria. During his
stay in Vienna between 1918 and 1928, Steiner
received a diploma in electrical engineering at the
Technische Hochschule, where he became the assis-
tant of Josef Maria Eder, the author ofGeschichte
der Photographie(History of Photography), a land-
mark in photographic literature.
It is almost certainly Eder who led Steiner to take
an interest in photography. Almost immediately,
Steiner placed photography at the disposal of his
two passions: his partner, Lily, of whom he took a
series of nude photographs; and sports, which he
associated with the rendering of movement and
instantaneity. He used a Leica, offered by the
Leitz firm itself. Through Eder, Steiner was asked
by the German company to test the potential of the
first small-format Leica prototypes. Particularly
suited to snapshots, this camera would remain Stei-
ner’s tool throughout his career.
To this point, Steiner had been practicing pho-
tography as an amateur. His departure to Paris in
1928 seems to have been a turning point. The
French capital was already hosting other Hungar-
ian immigrants, with several—Andre ́ Kerte ́sz,
Frantisek Kollar, and Brassaı ̈—taking part in the
photographic avant-garde. But Steiner, not yet
known as a photographer, did not make much
contact with with countrymen. In Paris, he worked
for Alsthom, until 1932, as a sound engineer for
Paramount Studios and the Phototone Society,
before collaborating with Gasparcolor on the
development of color film. It was only at the end
of these photography-related professional experi-
ences that Steiner decided to give precedence to
his passion for photography. In 1933, he opened a
commercial studio that provided him sufficient
financial return to carry on with his personal
experiments, based on the study of nudes and
movement. The same year, his research led him to
create a series entitledAnamorphose(Anamorphosis).
The image of objects, faces or hands, reflected by a
distorting mirror, demonstrated this well-known ar-
tistic process, namely anamorphosis. Close in spirit
to theDistorsions(Distortions), which Andre ́Kerte ́sz
produced the same year, Steiner’s work varied in
that it excluded nude figures.
This series punctuated Steiner’s research—
initiated in the 1930s—on cast shadows created by
various transparent or translucent materials. The
exploration of what is perceptible by the camera is
carried out, in Steiner’s work, within a limited
repertory of forms. TheAnamorphosisseries mate-
rializes this exploration by the use of a distorting
surface; the nude photography requires another
methodology. The pose of the model, the framing,
and the lighting are Steiner’s main parameters.
Through lighting, flesh itself becomes light, detach-
ing from a dark background. As he re-centers his
compositions, Steiner isolates, fragments, and rede-
fines the human body as pure plastic form. But, as
opposed to Man Ray, who also uses re-centering in
order to interpret the human body, there is no
surrealist ambition in Steiner’s work. For Steiner,
the question is to exalt the human body in its pre-
viously unsuspected aspects and to utilize it to
carry a new, modernist visual language based on
the specific technical capabilities of the camera. His
vision is also nourished by the numerous technical
inventions developed by modernist photography,
as his use of solarization demonstrates, as in the
worksVariation IandVariation IIof 1930.
Steiner’s interest in the human body also ex-
presses itself in a completely different arena—
sports. Participating in the general passion for lei-
sure and sports that existed in Europe between theSTEINER, ANDRE ́