Edward Steichen: Sunday Night, 40th Street, 1925

Edward Steichen: Greta Garbo, Hollywood, 1928

Edward Steichen: Charlie Chaplin, New York, 1925

Edward Steichen: On George Baher’s yacht, 1928

Edward Steichen: Gloria Swanson, 1924

Steichen’s portrait of Gloria Swanson has taken on iconic masterpiece status overtime. Created in 1924, just as the first feature - length sound movies were emerging - effectively truncating the actress’s brilliant silent-film career - this image caught the essential Gloria Swanson: haunting and inscrutable, forever veiled in the whisper of a distant era. Steichen’s photograph has elements of turn-of-the-century pictorialism (moody and delicate, the subject seeming to peer from the darkness, as if from jungle foliage), yet it also projects modernist boldness, with its pin-sharp precision and graphic severity.

Maurice - Louis Branger: A la terrasse d’un café, Paris, vers 1925

(Source: fantomas-en-cavale)

Edward Steichen: L’actrice Carlotta Monterey, bandeau en diamants par Cartier, 1924

(Source: fantomas-en-cavale)

Imogen Cunningham: Snake (negative), 1927

Imogen Cunningham: Tuberose, 1920s

Imogen Cunningham: Nude, 1923

This image of Imogen’s was originally titled “Figures, No. 1” and was taken in the midst of Imogen’s interest in both nudes and plant forms.  Imogen’s shift from pictorialism to modernism is clearly evident in this 1923 work.  Imogen’s nude studies reflect some of the tone and feeling of other West Coast photographers and friends, particularly Edward Weston, Margrethe Mather and Johan Hagemeyer.