AMSTERDAM.- Foam presents Edward Steichen: In High Fashion, the Condé Nast Years, 1923 - 1937 this summer. This exhibition, with more than 200 unique vintage photos, represents a high point in Steichen's long photographic career. The works that he made throughout this period for the influential Vogue and Vanity Fair magazines are some of the most impressive creations of the twentieth century. They have been brought together especially for this exhibition and are being shown for the first time in the Netherlands.

Edward Steichen (1879-1973) was already a famous painter and photographer on both sides of the Atlantic when, in early 1923, he was offered one of the most prestigious and certainly the most lucrative position in photography's commercial domain - that of chief photographer for Condé Nast's influential and highly regarded magazines Vogue and Vanity Fair. Summoning up his exceptional talents, and fired with prodigious enthusiasm, Steichen spent the next fifteen years showcasing the culture of that era and its most prominent exponents from the realms of literature, journalism, dance, sport, politics, theatre and film. It was for his images of haute couture, though, that Steichen remains best known.

Compared with his predecessors, Steichen accomplished a stylistic leap in fashion photography equal in magnitude to the transition from silent pictures to sound. He abandoned his artistic beginnings in photographic Impressionism, Art Nouveau and Symbolism to become - for those fifteen years, at least - the greatest photographer of Art Déco and the originator - no less - of glamour photography.

In addition to extraordinary photos for fashion houses such as Worth and Poiret, as well as for more well-known houses such as Chanel and Schiaparelli, the Steichen archive of Condé Nast, New York, contains impressive portraits including Greta Garbo, Cecil B. DeMille, Winston Churchill, Marlene Dietrich, George Gershwin, Frank Lloyd Wright, Amelia Earhart, Walt Disney and hundreds of other celebrities.

Steichen's genius, however, was not limited to 1930s fashion and glamour photography. Steichen was a major pioneer in the medium of photography from the late nineteenth century until far into the twentieth. He was a photographer (first and foremost an independent art photographer, but he also worked as a military photographer during WWI and WWII). He was a founding partner of the trail-blazing magazine Camera Work (1903-1917), together with Alfred Stieglitz, with whom he also introduced artists like Rodin, Matisse and Brancusi for the first time in the US. He was also curator of the famous international travelling exhibition The Family of Man, started in 1955, and became director of the photography department at MOMA.

Edward Steichen: In High Fashion, is produced by the Foundation for the Exhibition of Photography, Minneapolis.