Re: Steichen image in April's 'Vanity Fair'
Well, okay, since no one would answer my question I spent the afternoon out in a roaring sleetstorm looking for a copy of the April Vanity Fair to answer the question for myself. I went to the library and all the stores that might carry general interest magazines in my nearest big town, and no one has the April issue available yet. I was curious which print of Steichen's was reproduced, in an effort to make sense of the statement made earlier in this thread: ""There was a good article on this image in Photo On Campus about the one that sold for 3 million. That was a gum print, but it says there were three prints of this negative made so I wonder how the third one was made." For the record, the print that sold for $2.9 million was not a gum print, but gum over platinum. There were two other prints made from the same negative; one of them, which Stieglitz gave to the Metropolitan in 1933 and is still in the Met's collection AFAIK, has been analyzed and is believed to be hand-applied colori over platinum. The third, which is owned by MOMA, is platinum and cyanotype. I found an image online from the current Steichen exhibition at Greenberg that we can actually all look at so we can all be on the same page; I don't know if this is the one that was reproduced in Vanity Fair, and I also don't know why it seems to be on a gay website. The point is that it's an example of cyanotype over palladium, which Tom was asking about, and I think it's absolutely stunning. I have a number of Steichen monographs but I've never seen this particular image before. I wouldn't have believed it possible to get such warm flesh tones simply from a combination of palladium and cyanotype, but I'm told by someone who used to print with this combination that this is typical of the combination of processes. This is the first time ever that I have wished to print in any process than gum; I really love the way this looks. http://boyculture.typepad.com/boy_culture/2009/03/through-the-years.html Katharine On Mar 9, 2009, at 11:45 AM, Katharine Thayer wrote: I don't have Vanity Fair in front of me and it would take some
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