Edward Steichen

Edward Steichen was the highest-paid photographer in the world in the 1930s, ran aerial photography for the American army in one war and combat photography for the navy in the next, and curated the most-visited photographic exhibition ever mounted. He was born in Luxembourg, raised in Michigan, and began as a painter and a Pictorialist whose soft-focus prints - the Flatiron building at dusk, Rodin beside his Balzac - are among the most valuable photographs in existence. With Alfred Stieglitz he founded the Photo-Secession and the gallery 291, where he arranged the first American showings of Rodin, Matisse, Cezanne and Brancusi. The First World War changed his work completely: commanding aerial photography for the Expeditionary Forces, he abandoned soft focus for maximum sharpness and never went back. From 1923 he was chief photographer for Conde Nast at Vogue and Vanity Fair, inventing the modern celebrity and fashion portrait - Garbo, Chaplin, Gloria Swanson behind lace - and shooting advertising for enormous fees, which purists never forgave. In the Second World War, aged over sixty, he talked the navy into a combat photography unit and ran it. As director of photography at the Museum of Modern Art from 1947 he made The Family of Man in 1955, five hundred and three pictures from sixty-eight countries, which toured for eight years and was seen by around nine million people. He also bred delphiniums seriously enough for the Museum of Modern Art to exhibit them in 1936, the only plant show it has ever held. His 1904 photograph The Pond - Moonlight sold in 2006 for nearly three million dollars. He was still working in his nineties and died at ninety-three.

• Lived: 1879 CE – 1973 CE
• Nationality: American
• Roles: artist