Wit & Attitude Quote by Edward Steichen

Steichen starts with a disarming confession: he once chased photography-as-status, “the whole cheese,” a wonderfully unpretentious phrase that punctures the old anxiety of a medium always auditioning for the museum. Early 20th-century photographers fought to be taken seriously by borrowing the manners of painting (soft focus, tasteful allegory, salon legitimacy). Steichen helped build that world. His pivot, then, isn’t naïveté but renunciation: a maker admitting that the gatekeepers’ approval is a cramped ambition.

“I don’t give a hoot in hell” is doing cultural work. It’s not just bravado; it’s a rejection of the fine-art hierarchy that once treated photography as either mechanical evidence or second-rate imitation. Steichen shifts the argument away from objects and toward relationships. The “mission” language reframes the camera from trophy-maker to translator: photography becomes a social instrument, a way to bridge distance between people and within a person’s own self-understanding.

The subtext is mid-century and postwar. Steichen’s most famous institutional act, curating The Family of Man at MoMA (1955), aimed to sell a humanist vision of shared experience through images of labor, love, birth, grief. Critics later called it sentimental, even ideologically convenient in the Cold War. This quote contains that wager: that photographs can build empathy at scale, even if they also risk smoothing over power, conflict, and difference.

Steichen isn’t arguing that photography should stop being art. He’s arguing that “art” is the wrong courtroom. The camera’s real authority, in his view, is ethical and psychological: not to be admired, but to make us legible to one another.