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Edward Steichen (1879 - 1973)
Edward Steichen was a Luxembourg-born American artist and gallerist who was a key figure in the development of photography. Steichen notably served as The Museum of Modern Art’s director of photography from 1945 until 1962. In his own photographs, such as The Flatiron (1904), the artist experimented with coloring techniques developed by the French Lumière Brothers. “Photography is a medium of formidable contradictions. It is both ridiculously easy and almost impossibly difficult,” he once explained.

Today, the artist’s works are found in the collections of the Art Institute of Chicago, the J. Paul Getty Museum in Los Angeles, and the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., among others.