Eduard Steichen and the Autochrome, 1907-1909

Abstract

When Joseph Kei1ey viewed Eduard Steichen's Nocturne of the Red Lanterns at the Linked Ring Salon of 1908, he proclaimed the photograph to be the ‘gem’ of the exhibition. The memory of it ‘still haunts me like ghostly music, a phantom of perfect harmonies’, be wrote. What made the impression so strong was the photograph's ‘bold, vigorous, color expression’.¹ Colour or the lack thereof was one of the reasons that some critics gave for devaluing photography as art. Colour was an undeniable visible difference between a painterly pbotograph and a photographic painting. James Henry Moser, a Washington area watercolourist and a professor of painting at the School of the Corcoran Art Galleries, visited the Photo-Secession exhibition bcId there in January 1904. Moser was very impressed by wbat be saw but he considered colour to be a barrier to full pbotographic artistic expression. It is ‘only a question of color… an element so subtle … only elusively present in nature’.² It proved to be elusive on film as wen.