I also love the early Steichen work. Stieglitz bought his best pictorialist pieces and later donated them to the
Metropolitan Museum of Art. My favorite is The Flatiron, a gum over platinum print. There are three versions from the same negative and they're all stunning--true masterpieces of photography. Steichen revealed very little technical information about his equipment or processes, but he had a very deep mastery of the technical aspects of photography and process work. His first job was as an apprentice lithographer and he later worked in a photographic lab in Paris. The Flatiron is printed from an enlarged negative, since there's no evidence Steichen ever shot with any format larger than 8x10. We do know he had at least one early P&S Semi-Achromat, purchased at around the same time as his friend F. Holland Day.
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