Using a painstaking technique of multiple printing, Steichen achieved prints of such painterly seductiveness they have never been equaled. This view of a pond in the woods at Mamaroneck, New York is subtly colored as Whistler's Nocturnes, and like them, is a tone poem of twilight, indistinction, and suggestiveness. Commenting on such pictures in 1910, Charles Caffin wrote in Camera Work: "It is in the penumbra, between the clear visibility of things and their total extinction into darkness, when the concreteness of appearances becomes merged in half-realised, half-baffled vision, that spirit seems to disengage itself from matter to envelop it with a mystery of soul-suggestion."

Result #1

In the absence of the photographers's hand, the vision becomes an alibi for the artist's.In the end, this exhibition was a feast of images. There were photographs of the artists (in their spare, almost college-ish poses) and their acquaintances, portraits of the local youth and the famous, and, in the end, an album of forty-eight glass-fronted cases containing the prints of Steichen's images. The cases, which were arranged on the floor, formed a circle around the room. The photographs were hung side by side on the walls and on the floor. A few were placed directly on the floor, others were hung on the walls, and the images were distributed in groups of two, four, ten, and fifteen. The shows was one of a number of such group exhibitions. Its subject was the extraordinary vision of the young, and the vision of the artist as a young man—the vision of the artist as a youth. In Steichen's world, the artist's youth is a place of promise.

Result #2

Using a painstaking technique of multiple printing, Steichen achieved prints of such painterly seductiveness they have never been equaled. This view of a pond in the woods at Mamaroneck, New York is subtly colored as Whistler's Nocturnes, and like them, is a tone poem of twilight, indistinction, and suggestiveness. Commenting on such pictures in 1910, Charles Caffin wrote in Camera Work: "It is in the penumbra, between the clear visibility of things and their total extinction into darkness, when the concreteness of appearances becomes merged in half-realised, half-baffled vision, that spirit seems to disengage itself from matter to envelop it with a mystery of soul-suggestion." . . . With the ink, the sun, the red, the oil, the white, the green, the black, the gold, the violet, the white, the yellow, the blue, the green, the orange, the red, the yellow, the black, the blue, the white. . . . The lights that shine on the luminous body of water . . . become the streams of blood that run from the vessels of the heart to the mouth of the mouth, that pass from the face to the hair of the face. . . . The sea of blood that flows from the mouth of the face . . . and the sea of water that flows from the mouth of the face . . . become one. The sea of blood that flows from the mouth of the face, that passes from the face to the hair of the face, becomes the sea of blood that flows from the mouth of the face, that passes from the face to the head of the head. . . . The blood that flows from the head of the head becomes the blood that flows from the head of the face. . . . The blood that flows from the head of the face becomes the blood that flows from the head of the face. . . . The blood that flows from the head of the face becomes the blood that flows from the head of the face. . . . The blood that flows from the head of the face becomes the blood that flows from the head of the face. . . . The blood that flows from the head of the face becomes the blood that flows from the head of the face. . . . The blood that flows from the head of the face becomes the blood that flows from the head of the face. . . . The blood that flows from the head of the face becomes the blood that flows from the head of the face. . . . The blood that flows from the head of the face becomes the blood that flows from the head of the face. . .

Result #3

We have seen this with many different kinds of portraits—from the astonishingly gentle image of a young boy with his head bowed, to a man in a pajama top, to a man in a suit, a bicycle, and a cane. But this is the first time Steichen has taken up the task of depicting a landscape. Her photographs are not landscapes, but are not the edge of the world, but the edge of the world that passes through the periphery of the frame. Steichen is seeking the edge of the world that is not a landscape, but the edge of the world that is a landscape, and she has succeeded in making it look like one.

Result #4

Steichen's pictures are like that, but they are also like the ones made by the artists of the twentieth century—artists who followed the line of demarcation between real and imaginative worlds. By focusing on the ideal of the romantic, Steichen succeeded in getting the aesthetic to be as great as any other in his own generation, and he was one of the few painters whose images remain as penetrating as any of them.

Result #5

I am not saying that the cinema-filling cinematic spectacle of Steichen's pictures is any less seductive. But the seduction of his visions is, at the end of the century, a luxury that has been lost, and the same may be said of the first filmic projections. In a sense, Steichen's images are anachronistic, but they are not merely historical. Their appeal lies precisely in their self-effacement, their admission of the impossibility of the eternal, in which the filmic illusion is given a naturalistic appearance.