Ralph Steiner
b Cleveland, OH, 8 Feb 1899; d Thetford Hills, VT, 13 July 1986).
American photographer and filmmaker. Steiner was a still photographer and filmmaker who spent most of his career in New York City and rural Vermont. He attended Dartmouth College, Hanover, NH, graduating in 1921, and then attended the Clarence White School of Photography in New York City in 1921 and 1922. Throughout the 1920s and 1930s he variously worked as a commercial photographer and documentary filmmaker and showed his photographs in a variety of gallery and museum exhibitions. In the 1940s he made an unsuccessful attempt at cultivating a career in Hollywood and returned to New York in 1947. In 1970, he moved away from the city permanently, settling in rural Vermont. In the 1970s and 1980s he devoted himself to photographic studies of nature, especially cloud formations, and worked on a series of avant-garde films collectively entitled The Joy of Seeing.
Although there were no formal classes in photography at Dartmouth College, Steiner published a small book of photographs of the campus upon his graduation (Dartmouth, 1922). While at the Clarence White School of Photography, he became friends with Margaret Bourke-White and was introduced to Alfred Stieglitz. Through the many rigorous exercises in the school’s curriculum, Steiner developed the photographic aesthetic that he would refine over the course of his long career. Unlike the pictorialism of White’s photography, Steiner’s aesthetic was a much cooler form of “straight photography,” predicated on a strong graphic sensibility, pronounced abstract patterns and an unmanipulated view of the hard edges of the physical world. Typewriter Keys (1921) has a strong, graphic appeal, as the individual keys form a diagonal pattern of white and black circles. Always (1921), a photograph of a billboard and storefronts in New York, represents another important aspect of Steiner’s photographic sensibility: his interest in the printed detritus of modern civilization and his wry sense of humor.
Steiner worked as a commercial photographer throughout the 1920s and had his first solo exhibition at the J. B. Neumann gallery in 1926. In 1927 he met Paul Strand, whose prints impressed Steiner so greatly that the younger photographer decided he needed to further refine his technique. The opportunity to delve into artistic technique came in 1928, when he spent the summer at the Yaddo artists’ colony in Saratoga Springs, NY. Working with an 8×10 camera in an improvised dark room, he created American Baroque, Saratoga Coal Company and two powerful images of Nehi soda advertisements against the rural American landscape.
After Yaddo, Steiner began to experiment with moving images. Among his earliest films was H2O (1929), a lyrical meditation on the patterns and rhythms of water in motion. H2O won a prize from Photoplay Magazine, and Steiner followed it with two more films: Surf and Seaweed (1929–30) and Mechanical Principles (1931). The formal beauty and abstract rhythms of the individual shots in these films is echoed by the larger rhythm created in their editing: images and motions reflect, invert and overlap one another in mesmerizing sequences. Steiner attributed the success of his films to compositional advice he received from his good friend in these years, composer Aaron Copeland (1900–90).
Over the course of the 1930s, Steiner was associated with a variety of leftist and radical groups, including the Group Theater (for whom he made two agitprop films in 1934, Café Universal and Pie in the Sky; now destr.), Workers’ Film and Photo League, Nykino and Frontier Films. He also worked for the government during this decade, making a short promotional film Hands (1934) for the Works Progress Administration, and collaborated with Strand and director Pare Lorentz on the dustbowl documentary The Plow That Broke the Plains for the Department of Agriculture in 1936. In 1938, with Willard Van Dyke, he filmed the documentary The City, which ran at the New York World’s Fair of 1939 to critical acclaim. By the early 1940s, Steiner had decided to pursue a Hollywood-style film career and moved to California. After several failed projects, however, he returned to New York City in 1947 and rebuilt his reputation in commercial photography. Walker Evans, a photo editor at Fortune, gave him an assignment to take portraits of captains of industry, and he demonstrated his ability to inject humor into commercial work with images such as Gypsy Rose Lee (Curves Ahead) (c. 1950). In 1960 he returned to filmmaking, creating a series that continued the formal explorations of his earlier work under the collective title The Joy of Seeing (including Seaweed (1960), Glory, Glory (1970–1) and A Look at Laundry (1971)). In 1970 Steiner moved to rural Vermont. Over the next one and half decades his photography focused on the rural world of New England, both Vermont and Monhegan Island, ME. An extended exploration of clouds resulted in an exhibition at the Smith College Museum of Art, Northampton, MA, in 1984, and an accompanying publication In Pursuit of Clouds (1985).
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