From its very beginnings, photography has been recognized as an ideal tool for recording the likenesses of friends and loved ones. The most compelling portraits often reflect the relationship between the artist and sitter. Like Alfred Stieglitz, whose images of Georgia O'Keeffe may have inspired the look of this sensitive palladium portrait, Edward Steichen took a series of intimate portraits of a woman he was close to, Dana Desboro. This pensive picture of the beautiful young actress who later became his second wife was made not long after the two first met in 1923. Dana's dreamy expression and tousled hair are skillfully rendered in soft, natural light in a style very different from the glamorous artifice of Steichen's studio portraiture and fashion-magazine work of the period.

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