“At that moment, the woman came out, like the sun coming out from behind the clouds. The full beauty of her face was revealed.”
—Edward Steichen
Edward Steichen’s photograph of Greta Garbo is perhaps the definitive portrait from his tenure at Vanity Fair magazine. He was hired by the magazine to photograph her on the set of A Woman of Affairs. In his autobiography, Steichen recounts that he dismissed the high-tech cinema lighting the stagehands set up for him, favoring a more generalized light that would better suit his purposes. During the ten-minute session, Steichen let Garbo direct herself for his camera. When Steichen commented that the actress’s hair kept getting in the way, she impulsively pulled it back off her forehead. He writes, ‘At that moment, the woman came out, like the sun coming out from behind the clouds. The full beauty of her face was revealed.’ Through Steichen’s adept handling of his subject, and the glamorizing power of his vision, one of the great portraits of the 20th century was made.
