Phony Promises of the Advertising Industry

Steiner evolved his soft-focus Pictorialism style to become a sharp-edged Modernist. His 1920s photos of typewriter keys and industrial power switches are “geometrically bold, stark, graphic images that celebrate the machine age,” says Anne Havinga, senior curator of photographs at Boston’s Museum of Fine Arts. His lens also captured warped movie, cigarette, and soda pop billboards that were “at once celebratory of mass culture and critical of the phony promises of the advertising industry,” according to Anne McCauley, a professor of the history of photography and modern art at Princeton.
Article about photographer Ralph Steiner