Person

Edward Steichen

---

In memoriam · 1879–1973

Self-portrait, 1901 (gum print). The earliest widely-published image of Steichen, then 22 and already corresponding with Alfred Stieglitz.Edward J. Steichen · Public domain (PD-old)

"I am a Luxembourgish boy." Edward Steichen, introducing himself to Grand Duchess Charlotte at the White House, Washington, 1963.

A Luxembourgish boy

Édouard Jean Steichen was born on 27 March 1879 in Bivange (Béiweng), a village in southern Luxembourg.¹ He was barely two years old when his parents emigrated to the United States, settling first in Hancock, Michigan’s Upper Peninsula copper country, and later in Milwaukee.¹

He bought his first camera, a secondhand Kodak “detective” box, in 1895 — at sixteen.² By 1900, the year he became a naturalized U.S. citizen, his photographs had drawn the attention of Alfred Stieglitz, the New York gallerist who would become his most consequential collaborator.²

The 1901 self-portrait at the top of this page appears in International Studio magazine in 1908; by then Steichen was already a defining figure in the Photo-Secession movement, the Stieglitz-led circle that argued photography deserved to stand alongside painting as fine art.

Stieglitz and the 291 Gallery

In 1905 Steichen and Stieglitz opened the Little Galleries of the Photo-Secession in what had been Steichen’s portrait studio. The space quickly became known by its address — the 291 Gallery.²

The Morgan portrait

In 1903 Steichen photographed J. Pierpont Morgan. The financier had agreed to only a few minutes. The light catching Morgan’s hand on the chair-arm reads, in this widely-circulated frame, as a blade — an optical accident that art-history literature has discussed since. The portrait remains one of the defining American photographs of the early twentieth century.

J. Pierpont Morgan, photographed by Steichen in 1903. The photograph would become one of the defining American portraits of the early twentieth century — celebrated for the optical accident in which Morgan's hand on the chair-arm reads as a blade.Edward Steichen · Public domain (PD-old)

The First World War

Steichen returned to uniform in the First World War. He commanded the photographic division of the American Expeditionary Forces and came out of the war an Army Colonel.² He would return to military service a quarter-century later, this time in the U.S. Navy.

Carl Sandburg, brother-in-law

Steichen’s sister Lilian Steichen married the poet Carl Sandburg in 1908.³ The marriage made Steichen and Sandburg lifelong collaborators: Sandburg would write the prologue to The Family of Man almost half a century later. The title is widely attributed to a Sandburg poem; the precise primary attribution has not been re-fetched in this round and is flagged accordingly in ².

Carl Sandburg, photographed in 1955 — the year of The Family of Man's opening — by Al Ravenna for the New York World-Telegram and Sun. Library of Congress.Al Ravenna / NYWTS · Public domain

Vogue, the Navy, and MoMA

From 1923 to 1938 Steichen served as chief photographer for the Condé Nast magazines Vogue and Vanity Fair, a body of work that established the modern grammar of fashion and celebrity portraiture and made him, by some accounts, the highest-paid photographer alive.²

The Second World War interrupted that trajectory. Steichen returned to the U.S. Navy and led the Naval Aviation Photographic Unit, an outfit of “six officer-photographers”⁴ tasked with documenting carrier aviation in the Pacific. The Wikimedia photograph below records him on the USS Lexington in November 1943, captioned by the National Archives as “Cmdr Edward Steichen.”

Cmdr Edward Steichen above the flight deck of the aircraft carrier USS Lexington (CV-16), November 1943, during his service with the U.S. Naval Aviation Photographic Unit. Photograph by Lt Victor Jorgensen.Lt Victor Jorgensen · U.S. Navy · Public domain

Steichen at sea, 1945. The Pacific years gave him the editorial scale and group-curation experience he would later draw on at MoMA.U.S. Navy · Public domain

In 1947 he was named Director of the Department of Photography at the Museum of Modern Art, a post he held until 1962. The CNA’s biographical portrait of him for this period puts the curatorial pivot bluntly:

“When he was named the director of the Photography Department at the Museum of Modern Art in New York from 1947 to 1962, Steichen’s photographer career became secondary and he dedicated his time to make other artists famous.”¹

Documented MoMA exhibitions Steichen organised before and during his directorship — and that secondary literature treats as precursors to The Family of Man — include Power in the Pacific: Battle Photographs of our Navy in Action on the Sea and In the Sky (1945, while he was still in uniform), Korea — The Impact of War in Photographs (1951), Five French Photographers (1951–52), and Postwar European Photography (1953).²

The Family of Man opened on 24 January 1955.

The Family of Man

The Family of Man opened at MoMA on 24 January 1955 and toured the world until 1965 — an arc the CNA describes as “the consecration of his most ambitious project: to explore the potential of photography as a means of communication and prove its capacity to interact with the world as much as it was showing it.”¹

The exhibition’s prologue was written by Carl Sandburg — Steichen’s brother-in-law (Sandburg married Steichen’s sister Lilian in 1908). Its installation was designed by the architect Paul Rudolph, then at the start of his career; he would later chair Yale’s School of Architecture from 1958 to 1965.

For the exhibition’s catalog and structure see the Photographs index, the Sections, and the Sources.

The 1963 meeting and the gift to Luxembourg

In 1963, during the Grand Duchess of Luxembourg’s state visit to Washington, Steichen met Grand Duchess Charlotte at the White House. He introduced himself with the line that has since become the keystone of the Luxembourg-Steichen story:

“the Luxembourg-born photographer met Grand Duchess Charlotte during a state visit to Washington in 1963, where he introduced himself by stating: ‘I am a Luxembourgish boy.’”⁵

The encounter triggered the diplomatic sequence that returned the exhibition to his birthplace:

“at his request, led to the US government’s donation of The Family of Man exhibition to Luxembourg in 1964.”⁵

In 1966 he visited the prints’ eventual home at Clervaux Castle, where he is reported to have said the castle was “the ideal place for the exhibition to reside.”⁵

Charlotte, Grand Duchess of Luxembourg (1896–1985), photographed in 1919 — the year of her accession. She reigned until 1964; her 1963 White House meeting with Steichen led directly to the U.S. government's donation of The Family of Man to Luxembourg.Unknown photographer · Public domain

Critical readings

The institutional voice that anchors this page — the CNA’s biographical portrait — is curatorial. Steichen’s exhibition has been read very differently by other voices.

Roland Barthes (1957) opens the modern critique in Mythologies. He argues that the show’s universalism — birth, death, work, love presented as shared human constants — flattens history and politics. By staging the universal as natural, the exhibition (Barthes writes) precludes the specific question that any honest political photograph should provoke: whose mortality, whose labour, whose family, under what conditions.⁶

Eric Sandeen (Picturing an Exhibition: The Family of Man and 1950s America, University of New Mexico Press, 1995) is the standard book-length historical study. Sandeen complicates both Steichen’s framing and Barthes’ counter-framing with archive evidence from the 1955 MoMA opening and the USIA tour: he reconstructs how the show was assembled, how it was received venue by venue, and how its Cold War sponsorship shaped what was shown and what wasn’t.⁷

These two readings — and the later voices of Susan Sontag (1977), Allan Sekula (1981), Blake Stimson (2006), and Fred Turner (2013) — are the conversation Steichen’s most-visited exhibition has provoked for nearly seven decades. See the Reception page for the full critical thread; the works above are recorded in the Bibliography.

Last years

Steichen had married Joanna Taub in 1960 — by Wikipedia’s account his third marriage, after Clara Smith (1903–1922) and Dana Desboro Glover (1923–1957). The CNA records Joanna as “fifty-four years his junior.”¹² He died at his home in West Redding, Connecticut, on 25 March 1973, two days before his 94th birthday.² Joanna Steichen survived him by thirty-seven years (2010 − 1973); she died in Montauk, New York, on 24 July 2010.²

What the collection became

The collection he assembled returned permanently to Clervaux Castle in 1994,⁸ twenty-one years after his death. It was inscribed on UNESCO’s Memory of the World register in 2003,⁹ recognising it as documentary heritage of universal significance, and was rebuilt under a major restoration program in 2010–2013.⁸

The Family of Man as it stood in 2015 at Clervaux Castle, in the Ösling region of northern Luxembourg — about a hundred kilometres north of Bivange, the village where Steichen was born.RG72 · CC BY-SA 4.0

The institutional custodian of the collection today is the Centre national de l’audiovisuel — see the Clervaux page for the present-day curation.

Perspective note Steichen's autobiography A Life in Photography (1963) and Penelope Niven's Steichen: A Biography (Clarkson Potter, 1997) are the standard book-length lives. Neither has been re-fetched in this round of citation work; specific anecdotes from those volumes that appear elsewhere on this wiki should be flagged as verified: false until they are. The CNA's institutional biography is the Tier-1 anchor used here.

1. Centre national de l’audiovisuel (CNA), Luxembourg. Edward Steichen: From a Man of His Time to an Artist Out of Time. Educational portal — src-cna-edu-steichen-bio. Anchors: birth in Bivange 1879; emigration “barely 2 years old”; MoMA Director 1947–1962; The Family of Man opens 1955 and tours to 1965; “in 1960 he remarried Joanna Taub – 54 years his junior.” ↩ ↩² ↩³ ↩⁴ ↩⁵

2. Biographical commonplaces grouped here are widely repeated in standard biographical references, including the Wikipedia entry for Steichen (fetched 2026-04-25) and the Niven 1997 monograph Steichen: A Biography. The cluster covers: first camera 1895; Stieglitz attention by 1900; naturalization 1900; the 1905 Little Galleries of the Photo-Secession / 291 Gallery with Stieglitz; Condé Nast chief photographer 1923–1938; the optical-effect framing of the 1903 Morgan portrait; First World War command of the photographic division of the American Expeditionary Forces and Army Colonel rank; the pre-FoM MoMA exhibitions Power in the Pacific (1945), Korea — The Impact of War in Photographs (1951), Five French Photographers (1951–52), and Postwar European Photography (1953); Steichen’s three marriages — Clara Smith (1903–1922), Dana Desboro Glover (1923–1957, who pre-deceased him), and Joanna Taub (1960–1973); and the death of Joanna Taub Steichen in Montauk, New York, on 24 July 2010 (aged 77). None of those primary biographical sources were fetched in this round; the bundle should be treated as verified: false until Niven 1997 (or an equivalent primary biographical source) is consulted directly. The same disclaimer covers the Sandburg-poem-as-title-source claim, which is recorded with primary citation in research/sections.md (citing src-moma-1955-press-release-book and src-moma-1955-catalog) but those primary sources were not re-fetched in this session. ↩ ↩² ↩³ ↩⁴ ↩⁵ ↩⁶ ↩⁷ ↩⁸ ↩⁹ ↩¹⁰

3. Wikipedia, Carl Sandburg (fetched 2026-04-25): “In 1907, Sandburg met Lilian Steichen (1883–1977), sister of photographer Edward Steichen, at the Milwaukee Social Democratic Party office. They married the following year [1908] and had three daughters.” Per CREDIBILITY.md, Wikipedia is pointer-only; the canonical primary source for this would be the Sandburg-Niven correspondence or Niven’s biography, neither re-fetched here. Carried as a tier-3-equivalent until upgraded. ↩

4. Wikipedia, Edward Steichen (fetched 2026-04-25): notes Steichen as one of “six officer-photographers” of the Naval Aviation Photographic Unit. Same Wikipedia caveat as [^5]. ↩

5. JCA. Cercle Cité Lecture Celebrates Life of Edward Steichen. Chronicle.lu, 1 April 2025 — src-chronicle-lu-2025-cercle-cite-steichen. The original speaker and primary archival sources for these three points (1963 meeting, 1964 donation, 1966 Clervaux visit) are not given in the press article; the underlying Cour-grand-ducale or CNA archival documentation should be consulted to upgrade these claims to Tier-1. ↩ ↩² ↩³

6. Roland Barthes, “The Great Family of Man,” in Mythologies (1957) — src-barthes-1957. The foundational critical reading: argues that the exhibition’s universalist humanism flattens history and politics. Barthes is the canonical counter-voice to the CNA’s institutional framing. ↩

7. Eric J. Sandeen, Picturing an Exhibition: The Family of Man and 1950s America (University of New Mexico Press, 1995) — src-sandeen-1995. The standard book-length historical study of the show — complicates both Steichen’s universalist framing and Barthes’ critique with venue-by-venue evidence from the USIA tour archives. ↩

8. Centre national de l’audiovisuel (CNA), Luxembourg. Familio de homo (German collections page) — src-cna-collections-deu-family-of-man. Verbatim attests the 1994 inauguration (“Präsentation der Sammlung als Dauerausstellung im Schloss von Clervaux”) and the 2010–2013 second restoration phase (“Eine zweite Restaurierungsphase wurde in den Jahren 2010-2013 unternommen”). Fetched 2026-04-25. ↩ ↩²

9. UNESCO Memory of the World International Register, The Family of Man — src-unesco-mow-2003. Inscription 2003. ↩

✏️ Edit this page 🐛 Suggest improvement 💬 Discuss