Steichen: A man for all styles

Starting out as a Pictorialist fine art photographer, Steichen would later work as a commercial photographer, a fashion photographer, and a creator of portraits, still lifes, and landscapes. He helped set up the Army’s photo reconnaissance unit in World War I and, as a Navy photographer during World War II, did some of his most magnificent work. He was also an influential curator and, early in his career, painted seriously enough that he considered giving up his camera for brush and palette.

Two shows at the Williams College Museum of Art give a very full sense of the richness of Steichen’s career in photography up through the mid-’30s. “Edward Steichen: In High Fashion, the Condé Nast Years, 1923-1937’’ runs through Sept. 13. “Edward Steichen: Episodes From a Life in Photography’’ runs through Nov. 8.

The bigger and more eye catching of the two is the Condé Nast show. It includes almost 200 photographs. There are also a pair of display cases with vintage copies of Vogue and Vanity Fair, as well as an 11-minute silent film from the mid-’30s showing Steichen (cigar clenched in mouth) presiding over a fashion shoot in his studio.

Steichen’s going to work for Condé Nast in 1923 was a significant departure for him - so much so that the firm gave him the option of running his photographs uncredited if he feared accusations of giving up art for commerce. Steichen had enough faith in his own talent, and enough awareness of the possibilities offered by fashion photography and celebrity portraiture, to reject the offer. It’s a mark of how actively he would engage with the world of fashion that he even executed a number of textile designs during the ’20s.

“I [had been] putting my soul onto canvas,’’ Steichen wrote in 1928, “and wrapping it up in a gold frame, and selling it to a few snob millionaires who could afford it - after I got to thinking about it, I did not feel quite clean. But now I have an exhibition every month that reaches hundreds of thousands of people through editorial and advertising pages.’’

Steichen intuitively grasped something later articulated by John Szarkowski, his successor as curator of photography at the Museum of Modern Art. “Some might think that a serious interest in fashion is in itself vulgar, but to despise fashion and love art requires an athlete’s balance.’’

Szarkowski wrote those words about Irving Penn. Steichen’s fashion photography never transcends the genre, as does the work of Penn and Richard Avedon at their best. He was a technician of glamour, not an artist. Still - what technique! what glamour!

Prior to Steichen, fashion photography had been a thing of wisps and ardent unreality. Its reigning master, Baron de Meyer, presented couture as something enchanted and otherworldly - and its wearers as standing (more often reclining) outside of time. Steichen offered enchantment, too, but of the up-to-the-minute variety: crisp, vigorous, often playful.

It took Steichen a little while to find his way. The earliest images in the show are wan and tame - polite, really. He’s like a star ballplayer who’s just changed positions. The talent is unmistakable, but so’s the tentativeness. “All right, I’ve fielded the grounder. Now where exactly do I throw it?’’

Steichen soon developed two contrasting approaches, each fruitful, each innovative. The first exploited the dramatic use of lighting in studio settings - an arc-lit otherworldiness. Sometimes Steichen could take things too far. “Evening Shoes by Vida Moore,’’ from 1927, verges on self-parody. The lighting is so jazzed up it’s hard to read the image. Those curves and angles are . . . shoes?

More often, the play of shadows and light creates a sense of excitement and abundant vitality. “Self-Portrait With Photographic Paraphernalia,’’ from 1929, could be a visual calling card - an advertisement for himself - with its stark lighting, forthright display of apparatus, casual pose, sense of genial merriment, and, most important, of course, its effectiveness.

The other approach Steichen took was pioneering the use of natural settings. In the late ’30s, Martin Munkacsi took this faux-naturalness much further; and after the war Avedon practically copyrighted it. But it was Steichen who realized that the grammar of fashion photography has arrested motion as its predicate, not stasis. Steichen’s photographs declare that wearing clothes is never a passive act. It’s always active.

One source of this realization was Steichen’s affinity for dance. There’s a superb quartet of images of Martha Graham in the “Episodes’’ show; and you can almost see Steichen’s style loosening up in front of your eyes in a five-shot sequence from 1925, “Bessie Love Dancing the Charleston.’’

Bessie Love (a name that leaves one speechless with wonder) was a silent-film star. Long before Anna Wintour began putting movie stars instead of supermodels on the cover of Vogue, Steichen was using actresses in his fashion shoots. He understood that fashion is no less about performance than dress.

As “Episodes’’ makes plain, Steichen had become a distinguished portraitist well before signing on with Condé Nast. The human spirit, as most directly expressed through the human face, was as close to a central concern as his restless career had. When the photographers in his Navy unit would ask Steichen what to shoot, he had a standard reply. “Concentrate on the men. The ships and planes will become obsolete, but the men will always be there.’’ That’s a born portraitist speaking.

At Condé Nast, he was the Annie Leibovitz of his day - in overdrive. Steichen made more than 1,000 celebrity portraits during this period. Some of them remain instantly recognizable: Paul Robeson, brooding and implacable, in his “Emperor Jones’’ costume; Noel Coward so preposterously suave, even Coward must have approved; Charlie Chaplin using his cane as dexterously as Steichen was using the camera to record it. Other portraits aren’t as well known, but the sitters are: Greta Garbo, Winston Churchill, Herbert Hoover, Gary Cooper, Marlene Dietrich, Lillian Gish, William Butler Yeats.

One can imagine Steichen relishing so eclectic a roster. The 84 images in “Episodes’’ testify to his unwillingness to settle for a particular style or genre. A study of birds on a telephone wire flirts with abstraction. The sheer voluptuousness of a pair of avocados in a still life should incite jealousy in the ghosts of any of the actresses Steichen photographed. There are three ads, 25 photographs for an illustrated edition of Thoreau’s “Walden’’ (perfectly fine, if not much more than that), even photographs of two of his textile designs. The designs look a bit cluttered, actually. But one man, after all, can be expected to do only so much.

Mark Feeney can be reached at mfeeney@globe.com.