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Lot Essay
Sensual and dramatic, this image of the model Dixie Ray was created by Edward Steichen as a preparatory study for a published advertisement for Woodbury Soap in 1935. Dixie Ray sits with her back to the viewer, her body curving to the right as she lathers he upper back. Steichen uses a strong light source to highlight the suds of the soap, creating dramatic contrasting shadows that trace the continuous curve of her crouched figure, from her bowed head, to the line of her shoulder and elbow, through to the bend of her knee. Steichen’s dramatic lighting and closely cropped composition leads the figure to dominate the frame, confronting the viewer with a monumental and isolated human form that, upon closer inspection, becomes increasingly abstracted.
Edward Steichen’s prolific sixty year career left no corner of the photographic medium untouched. Although perhaps most well-known for the dream-like images produced during his involvement in the early 20th Century Photo-Succession movement, Steichen was a versatile photographer, mastering celebrity portraiture, fashion photography, aerial photography during both world wars, and commercial photography for advertisements for brands like Woodbury Soap. Steichen had an expansive and all-encompassing idea of the purposes that photography could serve, and his firm belief of the ‘usefulness’ of the medium led him to “…propose a new connection between photography and popular culture, embracing the medium as a vehicle of mass communication, and, frequently, merging commerce and high art.” (Barbara Haskell, exhib. cat., Edward Steichen, Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, October 5, 2000-February 4, 2001, pg. 11).
“So my first real effort in photography was to make photographs that were useful. And, as I look back over the many intervening years, I find that usefulness has always been attractive in the art of photography.”- Edward Steichen (Steichen: A Life in Photography, np)
Steichen’s ‘first real effort in photography’ was in a commercial capacity, when, at a young age, the photographer was apprenticed as a designer in a lithographic firm. Unsatisfied with the unrealistic advertising materials the firm produced for flour mills, brewers and pork packers, Steichen provided the firm’s designers with his photographs of wheat and pigs in nearby fields, from which they created new, more realistic, designs. It was Steichen’s ability to blend utility and realism, with the theatricality of dramatic lighting and composition, that blurred the line between commercial photography and fine art.
Edward Steichen’s prolific sixty year career left no corner of the photographic medium untouched. Although perhaps most well-known for the dream-like images produced during his involvement in the early 20th Century Photo-Succession movement, Steichen was a versatile photographer, mastering celebrity portraiture, fashion photography, aerial photography during both world wars, and commercial photography for advertisements for brands like Woodbury Soap. Steichen had an expansive and all-encompassing idea of the purposes that photography could serve, and his firm belief of the ‘usefulness’ of the medium led him to “…propose a new connection between photography and popular culture, embracing the medium as a vehicle of mass communication, and, frequently, merging commerce and high art.” (Barbara Haskell, exhib. cat., Edward Steichen, Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, October 5, 2000-February 4, 2001, pg. 11).
“So my first real effort in photography was to make photographs that were useful. And, as I look back over the many intervening years, I find that usefulness has always been attractive in the art of photography.”- Edward Steichen (Steichen: A Life in Photography, np)
Steichen’s ‘first real effort in photography’ was in a commercial capacity, when, at a young age, the photographer was apprenticed as a designer in a lithographic firm. Unsatisfied with the unrealistic advertising materials the firm produced for flour mills, brewers and pork packers, Steichen provided the firm’s designers with his photographs of wheat and pigs in nearby fields, from which they created new, more realistic, designs. It was Steichen’s ability to blend utility and realism, with the theatricality of dramatic lighting and composition, that blurred the line between commercial photography and fine art.