¡°I don¡¯t think that many people in Japan know who Edward Steichen is,¡± says curator Miki Tsukada in a surprisingly honest comment about visitors to the Setagaya Art Museum¡¯s current exhibition. ¡°But I do think a large audience in Japan is drawn to the ¡®high fashion¡¯ of the exhibition title.¡±
If couture is the attraction, ¡°Edward Steichen in High Fashion¡± will not disappoint. Famous in the West as a pioneer of fashion photography, Steichen is credited with taking the genre, which was then relatively new, to a level of sophistication that still inspires photographers today. In an age of black-and-white printing, his unprecedented use of studio lighting to chiaroscuro effect made him the favorite with Cond¨¦ Nast, for whom he was a chief photographer for Vogue and Vanity Fair during the 1920s and ¡®30s.
¡°When Shawn Waldron, the archive director at Cond¨¦ Nast, found the box of Steichen photos that prompted this exhibition, there were around 2,000 original prints in it,¡± says Tsukada. ¡°That is an unusually large number of prints by a single photographer to be kept and stored.¡±
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