The Pond, Moonlight

The Pond, Moonlight is a photograph made by Edward Steichen in 1904 near Mamaroneck, New York, showing a forest across a still pond with part of the moon appearing through a gap in the trees. Steichen made it using the gum bichromate process, hand-coating the paper with light-sensitive pigmented gums in overlapping layers, a technique that let him work color and tone into the print by hand, so that each surviving version differs slightly from the others; only three examples of this image are known, held today by the Museum of Modern Art and the Metropolitan Museum of Art, with a third in private hands. A print sold at auction in February 2006 for 2.9 million dollars, at the time the highest price ever paid for a photograph, and the image remains one of the most celebrated works of the early twentieth-century Pictorialist movement, which treated photography as a hand-worked artistic medium rather than a purely mechanical record.