The Play of Modern Hands (hands of Ilka Chase, Backgammon)

Edward Steichen was a modernist with a firm foothold in tradition. Five years after he began studies at the Milwaukee Art Students League he had his first photographic exhibition. A year later the work he submitted to the Chicago Print Salon was noted by Clarence White and Alfred Stieglitz. This marked the beginning of their working relationship with Steichen. Steichen joined the Linked Ring Brotherhood, a British Photographic Society dedicated to furthering photography as an art form, and later helped found the Secession movement, which opened its own New York gallery, "291". His career covered a wide range of photographic concerns from the artist to the commercial, the ambiguous to the accessible. Whilst mindful of contemporary issues in photography, his work which at times paralleled that of Stieglitz and Kertesz, was also influenced by developments in painting such as Cubism, Futurism and Abstraction. In 1955 he mounted a huge and internationally influential photography exhibition "The Family of Man".

Art Gallery Handbook, 1994