Ralph Steiner miscellaneous acquisitions collection

Ralph Steiner (1899-1986) was known for his still photography and filmmaking. He was born in Cleveland, Ohio and in 1921 earned a degree in chemistry from Dartmouth University in New Hampshire, where he also began studying photography. He moved to New York City and was enrolled in the Clarence H. White School of Photography between 1921-1922 and worked at the Manhattan Photogravure Company and as a freelance photographer for magazine editorials and advertisements.

Steiner met photographer Paul Strand in 1928 and was encouraged by Strand to join the Film and Photo League in New York. In his photographs, Steiner was influenced by the sharp detail of 1930s photography, as well as pictorialist styles. He also began making films in the late 1920s, including H2O, a short art film, in 1929, moving toward social activism and documentary filmography in the 1930s. Steiner worked alongside Strand as the cinematographer on Pare Lorentz’s 1936 documentary film, The Plow That Broke the Plains, about storms in the Dust Bowl. In 1938 Steiner founded American Documentary Films, Inc. with Willard Van Dyke, with whom he co-directed the social documentary film The City, about New York for the 1939 World’s Fair.

Steiner worked for five years in Hollywood in the 1940s before returning to New York and to freelance and editorial photography and filmography in 1948. During the 1970s he worked on a series of films titled The Joy of Seeing and published a 1978 book on photography, A Point of View. Steiner moved to Vermont in 1970 and began photographing clouds, a pursuit that would last almost 20 years and would take him from Maine to Oaxaca, Mexico. Steiner published a book of these photographs, In Pursuit of Clouds, in 1985, shortly before his death in 1986.