Edward Steichen

162 pictures by more than 37 photographers, selected by one of the world's great photographers, form a tribute to Sandburg's life and work.

Contains primary source material.

"Joanna Steichen writes about her husband's views on photography; about how he moved away from painting ; about his experiments with abstraction; about the repercussions of commercial success in his life as an artist; about how he and Joanna first met and how their relationship changed as they became lovers, man and wife and, finally, artist and assistant.". "Joanna Steichen writes about Steichen's days as a colonel in World War I, in charge of aerial photography for the Air Force in France, and then as a captain in the Navy - past the age of retirement - in World War II, in charge of combat photography in the Pacific. She writes about his years as the European art scout for his friend Alfred Stieglitz, and of how Steichen later designed the gallery for the Photo-Secession's 291 and arranged exhibitions of the work of Matisse, Cezanne, Picasso and Brancusi, long before these names were known in America. And she writes about the couple's farm in Connecticut, which Steichen landscaped out of woods and rocks and hollows and photographed over the years, as well as the new hybrid of delphinium Steichen produced and the sunflowers he raised and studied through his lens."--BOOK JACKET.

"Conceived as an exhibition for MoMA in New York in 1955, with a catalogue published both by Maco Magazine Corporation and Simon and Schuster, The Family of Man has been heavily criticized, usually for its sentimentality and its disingenuous simplicity. Although indeed sentimental, The Family of Man was not as simple as it looked. ... The de-politicization of the photography was in fact a calculated piece of political image-making, stating that American values were the only universal values, and that the world could be one big happy family under the beneficent guidance of Uncle Sam. ... One of the ironic aspects of the project is the way its whole aesthetic derives from those German and Soviet exhibitions and propaganda books of the 1930s. The sententious tone, the grim determinism, the tendentious ideological stance, even the design, place The Family of Man in the propagandist mode of modernism rather than in the utopian wing to which it nominally aspires. Nevertheless, and this is an important point, it contains many fine photographs."--The Photobook : A History Volume II / Martin Parr and Gerry Badger. London : Phaidon, 2004.