EDWARD STEICHEN (1879–1973)

A year after its construction, Vanity Fair commissioned Edward Steichen to photograph the imposing edifice of the Empire State Building. Steichen had been defining the magazine’s vision since 1923 (a tenure that would last until 1937) with his crisp elegance, earning him the title of being among the world’s greatest living portrait photographers by Vanity Fair’s editor Frank Crowninshield. The challenge with photographing the Empire State Building, the artist knew, was translating the awe-inspiring monumentality of the building onto the flat surface of a photograph. Ingeniously, Steichen chose to layer two separate negatives into a single frame, thereby imbuing the resulting image with a powerful sense of three-dimensionality and vitality. 'I conceived of the building as a Maypole and made the double exposure to suggest the swirl of a Maypole dance,' he later explained.

Eighty years later, Steichen’s image of the Empire State Building still captures the breathless beauty, energy and dynamism of the building. It is not surprising, therefore, that when the magazine published the image in July of 1933 it proudly announced that the image had been selected to be presented as a mural for Chicago’s World’s Fair, whose motto, accordingly, was 'Science Finds, Industry Applies, Man Adapts.'

The present lot is the actual print used for reproduction in the 1933 issue of Vanity Fair, which was the first time this iconic image was seen.