Edward Steichen – 1879-1973

Born in Luxembourg, Steichen was taken to the United States as an infant. He became an important photographer, who began working in a pictorial or painterly style, but evolved into straightforward realism, specializing in portraiture of the most influential artists and celebrities of the 1920s and 1930s. In 1955, he organized quite possibly the most ambitious photographic exhibition ever, the “Family of Man,” a show of 503 master photographs chosen from some two million submitted from all over the world. Enormously popular, the exhibition, which traveled internationally, was seen by an estimated nine million people and was a declaration of the brotherhood of humanity.