Artist: Edward J. Steichen (American (born Luxembourg), Bivange 1879–1973 West Redding, Connecticut)
Date: 1904
Medium: Platinum print with applied color
Dimensions: Image: 39.7 x 48.2 cm (15 5/8 x 19 in.)
Frame: 73.7 × 86.4 cm (29 × 34 in.)
Classification: Photographs
Credit Line: Alfred Stieglitz Collection, 1933
Accession Number: 33.43.40
Using a painstaking technique of multiple printing, Steichen achieved prints of such painterly seductiveness they have never been equaled. This view of a pond in the woods at Mamaroneck, New York is subtly colored as Whistler’s Nocturnes, and like them, is a tone poem of twilight, indistinction, and suggestiveness. Commenting on such pictures in 1910, Charles Caffin wrote in Camera Work: “It is in the penumbra, between the clear visibility of things and their total extinction into darkness, when the concreteness of appearances becomes merged in half-realised, half-baffled vision, that spirit seems to disengage itself from matter to envelop it with a mystery of soul-suggestion.”