Edward Steichen's Glamour Photography at the Flagler Museum

Actress Marlene Dietrich

Edward Steichen was an amazing artistic talent! He was the man  who transformed portrait photography into a dramatic art. He did this through his black and white celebrity photos for Vanity Fair and Vogue in the 1920s and 1930s. In the hands of conventional photographers of the day, these portraits would have resulted in stiff conventional poses. 

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L to R. Actress Gloria Swanson; dancer and choreographer Martha Graham; dancer Fred Astaire

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Amelia Earhart

But not through the eyes of Edward Steichen. He had a different vision. At these Conde Nast publications he broke from his "soft focus" style of the past and captured the essence of his subjects with dramatic black and white hard edge images. He had an uncanny knack of posing his subjects in ways that captured their total personalities--or even, one might say, their souls.

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Winston Churchill

​We were fortunate to have over 80 of his portraits on exhibit at the Flagler Museum this winter that included Steichen's iconic photographs of Gloria Swanson, Fred Astaire, Churchill and many others.  The exhibition ran from October 16, 2018  through January 6, 2019.

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