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Meantime he took photographs and sent them to exhibitions. He had learned how to get suffused-light effects by spitting on the lens, how to jar the camera for double-vision. But he quickly abandoned these "arty" expediencies. His work came to the notice of Alfred Stieglitz who then, as ever, was championing rebel art-causes. In the New York Camera Club Steichen met Stieglitz. He showed his work and Stieglitz, delighted, bought some prints at $5 each.
In Paris Steichen met the late great Sculptor Auguste Rodin. The two became fast friends. Steichen journeyed around France photographing people of repute and of no repute. When he finally decided that photography, not painting, was his metier, he bonfired all his canvases.
When the War came he was made a U. S. Colonel, chief of the Photographic Section of the Air Service. Under him were 55 officers, 1,000 men. They flew over German lines, "shot" the enemy territory.
Today Edward Steichen is the highest-paid photographer in the country. For his cold cream and lotion ads, his celebrities for the Conde Nast smartcharts Vogue and Vanity Fair, he often receives $1,000 a print. To his Manhattan studio have gone such notables as Henry Louis Mencken, Greta Garbo and Gloria Swanson.
At 50 Steichen is tall and kinetic. He speaks with the shade of an accent, is didactic, extremely fussy. He believes that most fine art has been accomplished for a price and has no patience with "art for art's sake." He may spend hours for his own pleasure posing a grasshopper until he gets a superb metallic-looking magnification of the insect, or picturizing scores of flowerpots in a wheelbarrow (his favorite photograph) because they suggest a queer infinitude of curves, or revealing a dark moth in awesome shadows ("Diagram of Doom").
*STEICHEN THE PHOTOGRAPHER—by his brother-in-law Poet Carl Sandburg—Harcourt, Brace, & Co. ($25).