Edward Steichen was a Luxembourg-born American artist and gallerist who was a key figure in the development of photography. Steichen notably served as The Museum of Modern Art’s director of photography from 1945 until 1962. In his own photographs, such as The Flatiron (1904), the artist experimented with coloring techniques developed by the French Lumière Brothers. “Photography is a medium of formidable contradictions. It is both ridiculously easy and almost impossibly difficult,” he once explained. Born Éduard Jean Steichen on March 27, 1879 in Bivange, Luxembourg, his family immigrated to the United States in 1880. During the 1890s, Steichen worked as an apprentice lithographer, pursued painting, ...