One photograph, more than any other, sums up the man. Taken in 1938 by Dana Steichen, it catches her husband red-handed: gardening gloves on, bent over a stand of delphiniums, crossing a white plant with a deep violet one in hopes of enlarging the white variety’s blooms. The title says it all, with the tender humor of a wife who knew her subject well: “Mr. Steichen Is Caught by Mrs. Steichen Crossing a White Delphinium with a Dark Violet Delphinium to Increase the Size of the Flowers of the White Variety.” The setting was Umpawaug Farm, in Connecticut. By then, Steichen was no longer quite a photographer. Day by day, he had become a plant breeder.

Born in 1879 in Bivange, Luxembourg, and died in 1973 in Redding, in the United States, Edward Steichen lived through nearly every revolution the twentieth century had to offer. A pioneer of Pictorialism, he went on to become a portraitist of stars for Vanity Fair and Vogue, before curating “The Family of Man” in 1955, an exhibition whose tour has never really ended. Trained first as a painter, he carried that eye for grain and texture into his photography. But “The Nature of Edward Steichen,” assembled by Ruud Priem from Luxembourg collections and exceptional loans from the Estate of Edward Steichen, takes the opposite approach to the official biographies: it shows the man with his hands in the soil.

Dana Steichen, Mr. Steichen is caught by Mrs. Steichen crossing a white delphinium with a deep purple to increase the size of the white flower variety, Umpawaug Farm, Connecticut, United States, 1938. Spuerkeess Collection. © 2026 The Estate of Edward Steichen / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York

Delphiniums, he did not merely photograph. He grew and hybridized them, patiently, year after year. Sunflowers fascinated him for their geometry; lotuses, for their nearly impudent symmetry. In Bouquet of Sunflowers, photographed in 1963 at Umpawaug Farm and now held by the MNAHA in Luxembourg, orange petals stand out against an absolute black background, looking more painted in ink than printed on silver gelatin. The delicacy of the print, the depth of the blacks: this is a craft Steichen spent his whole life refining, from the misty Pictorialism of his early years to this almost scientific rendering of color and natural light.

Another image on view, just as delicate, may say even more about what these delphiniums meant to him: an entire bed of them, standing in spires against a backdrop of dark conifers, where deep blue, mauve, and near-white pink varieties of his own making sit side by side. No hand, no gesture in the frame. Only the result of decades of crossbreeding, become a subject in its own right. It is one of the most beautiful photographs on view in Arles this year.

Then there is the shadblow tree. For nearly ten years, Steichen kept returning to photograph and film the same tree at Umpawaug Farm, in every light and every season: this was The Shadblow Tree, a late and unfinished project, a kind of botanical diary in which obsession turns into tenderness. A 1960 print shows the tree in full white bloom, its flowers like snowflakes. Steichen, by then eighty years old, kept watching for that same familiar silhouette, season after season, the way one keeps watch over an old friend whose every feature is already known by heart.

“For Edward Steichen, growing flowers and making photographs were closely linked: both were ways of giving life to the art of nature and sharing it with the world,” says Ruud Priem, the exhibition’s curator. That idea illuminates everything else on view: the self-portraits, the portraits of family and friends caught in the garden, down to a grasshopper perched on an ear of wheat, photographed in 1920 in Voulangis, France, with the same near-microscopic attention he brought to Hollywood stars. Some seventy prints and documents make up this intimate exhibition. What emerges is a man who could devote a lifetime to watching a tree grow, and whose way of looking, patient, almost marital, may be one of the loveliest definitions of photography ever given.

“The Nature of Edward Steichen” is on view at La Mécanique Générale in Arles through October 4, 2026, as part of the Rencontres d’Arles festival.

Green Plants and Colorful Flowers: Edward Steichen’s Secret Garden