Having been trained as a painter, Edward Steichen became an early member and champion of the Photo-Secession movement, a group of notable artists who sought recognition for and to elevate photography to the level of “fine art.” Founded in 1902 under the leadership of Alfred Stieglitz, the Photo-Secession movement rejected the prevailing notion of photography as a merely mechanical or documentary medium. By employing elaborate and layered techniques in the darkroom, including bromoil transfer, bichromate over platinum prints, and hand-tinting, they sought to imbue each print with evidence of the artist’s hand. The resulting prints possess an atmosphere and complexity that rivals their fellow contemporary painters, full of deep, rich tonality and layered, textured surfaces. Each work from this era was unmistakably unique, reflecting artistic vision and unique craftsmanship.

Lot 3, titled Road Into the Valley – Moonrise, 1904, is best known as a hand-tinted photogravure from the Steichen Special Edition of 'Camera Work', 1906. Steichen’s printing processes from this period are magical...and complicated. In Weston Naef’s masterful essays written as part of his investigations into the Stieglitz collection at The Metropolitan Museum of Art, he writes the following:

"During his Paris years Steichen was attracted to the pigment processes that were in vogue and subsequently did very little platinum printing. Stieglitz reported in Camera Work how difficult it was to reproduce Steichen's work because of the complicated accretion of processes: 'Some are in gum, some in platinum, some in bromide, and some in a combination of these processes.' ['Our Illustrations,' Camera Work, No. 14 (April, 1906)]. It was also noted that Steichen's detractors accused him of 'faking negatives and prints or both.' The meaning of the word 'faking' takes on special dimension when the Stieglitz collection is studied closely with the question of the specific processes used to make each print. It is evident that Steichen devoted much energy to devising ways of replicating in a second material (such as gelatine-silver or gelatine-carbon) qualities first attained in experimental prints where each was unique (gum-bichromate, for example), as exemplified by Cat. 476. The most accessible way of replicating unique originals was to rephotograph the experimental original and use the copy negative in combination with one or more printing methods such as gelatine-silver enlarging ('bromide') materials that were toned or overlaid with a single printing of pigmented gum-bichromate. The results were highly deceptive facsimiles of the original multiple gum prints few of which have survived (Biblio. 1174, cover illustration). The replications were made within a few years of the original negatives, setting a pattern that Steichen was to follow throughout his career in replicating in one process an original made in another medium. Although Steichen apparently did not identify the specific processes to Stieglitz, he was generally aware of the mixed-media aspect of Steichen's photographs, judging from what he wrote in Camera Work. About 1919 when Stieglitz identified photographs in his collection on blue parcel-post style labels, the information came from memory and often contradicted the consensus of modern opinion regarding date and medium.

Steichen recollected in his autobiography (Biblio. 751, p. 56) that the prints in the Stieglitz collection at The Metropolitan Museum of Art represent 'the major part of the good prints I made during this period, but also [are] the only surviving record of most of my early work.' The scarcity of surviving experimental gum prints that were the models from which Stieglitz collected his prints causes a puzzle for which many parts are missing. The lack of good original documentation necessitates studying the existing prints as circumstantial evidence of earlier models, about which much can be deduced from those that exist."

Weston J. Naef, The Collection of Alfred Stieglitz: Fifty Pioneers of Modern Photography, Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, 1978, p. 443.

The present lot is a hand-tinted gelatin silver print that is believed to be a reproduction print of the photogravure from Camera Work. Printed on gelatin silver paper, Steichen appears to have applied washes and tinting to the surface to re-create the deep blueish-green hue of the original photogravure.