By Katherine Hobson

The 1923 advertisement hardly looks revolutionary. In the photo, a woman's hands are peeling potatoes, while the text extols the virtues of Jergens lotion in protecting against the ravages of housework. But the groundbreaking element was the photographer: not some anonymous ad agency employee, but the great Edward Steichen, who had earlier helped catapult photography into the realm of serious art. His peers shuddered, Steichen got rich, and a new era of commercial photography was born.

Steichen was already a well-known figure when he was wooed by Stanley Resor, then head of the J. Walter Thompson ad agency. After beginning his career as a painter while still very young, by the early 1900s Steichen had shifted his attention to the still-nascent art of photography. He and Alfred Stieglitz were drivers of the Pictorialist movement, which sought to shed the taint of amateurism and make photography an art in its own right, focused on beauty rather than mere image reproduction. But after serving in World War I and working abroad, Steichen returned to Manhattan with a very clear goal: to escape the demands of his private clients and launch his commercial career. Thanks to his reputation, he very quickly got a job as the chief photographer for Condé Nast Publications, home of Vanity Fair and Vogue.

His new employers, worried that Steichen wouldn't want to be associated with commercial work, offered to remove his name from any fashion photographs he took, but Steichen, no snob, refused their offer. Soon after, he signed on with J. Walter Thompson, intrigued by the idea of the Jergens campaign. Thanks to the agency's payment of $500 per black-and-white photo and $15,000 in guaranteed annual salary, he became the highest-paid photographer of his time.

None of that sat well with Stieglitz, who turned up his nose at his former colleague's move into commercial work. But Steichen's attitude came at a historic moment. Photography was winning favor among advertisers, thanks to new technological processes and a growing awareness of its potential to depict products better than drawings. In the early 1920s just 15 percent of illustrated ads included photos; that number rose to 80 percent by 1930. And the ad market itself was on a roll, thanks to booming U.S. industry, mass media, and the beginnings of a real consumer culture. Steichen and others who followed his lead saw the chance to get a piece of the action. "Artists really thought they could have it both ways: They could be really creative and have money, too," says Bonnie Yochelson, a freelance curator who has written about the era. "They didn't have to be starving bohemians in an attic somewhere."

Leaving the garret didn't mean becoming a hack. Steichen took his commercial work seriously, and, unlike Stieglitz, saw no distinction between that and photography for art's sake. His style progressed with the years–the Jergens campaign, as well as a later campaign for Eastman Kodak, featured very realistic images: photos of people using the product in a straight­forward way. Later on, his images became more opulent and manipulative as he discovered the potential of photography to persuade consumers. A 1920s campaign for Welch's grape juice, intended to make the drink appeal to a more upscale crowd, showed it in a fine-stemmed glass, surrounded by china and flowers. Sales jumped after the ads ran in Vogue.

The Depression took the wind out of the ad industry's sales, and though he continued to work through the early 1930s, Steichen officially retired from commercial work at the end of 1937. While the boom years were over, the opportunity for photographers to cross between genres lived on. Irving Penn started as a commercial photographer in the 1940s. (When Steichen, then a curator at the Museum of Modern Art, met with Penn to solicit work for a traveling show, he asked the younger photographer what his big project of the moment was. Penn's answer: "Jell-O.") In the 1960s, though, "he began to shift his attention from the printed page to the wall," says Colin Westerbeck, associate curator of photography at the Art Institute of Chicago, which houses Penn's professional archives. Very deliberately, he created an artistic career for himself.

The barrier may be broken, but the question still lingers: Is a photograph taken to sell hand lotion artistically equivalent to one taken with a more personally expressive motive? Steichen certainly thought so. His own book, Steichen: A Life in Photography, sort of a personal canon, makes no distinction between his early dreamy cityscapes, celebrity portraits, and advertisements. But Westerbeck disagrees. "In the end, straight ad work is not material I'd put on the walls as art," he says.

A better way to look at Steichen is to look at the effect of his work on society, argues Patricia A. Johnston in her book Real Fantasies: Edward Steichen's Advertising Photography. "His work is effective as art, and it was effective in attracting viewers to his advertisements," she says. After all, a Steichen photo is still a Steichen photo–even when taken in the service of Jergens.