What would have been a devastating blow to most people instead made Steckler more obsessed with sight. His former binocular vision became monocular, and he started to see the world with more clarity and concentration. It shows in his photography of recent years, and one can now observe more texture, intense colors, and formerly hidden shapes. Steckler brings this new dimension in a unique approach to image.

Len Steckler was born and raised in New York, was drawing by the age of five, and studied at Pratt Institute and the Art Student’s League. As a young illustrator, he won the National Academy Design Award and, after being part of the prestigious Charles Cooper studio, he gained prominence as the originator of the campaign for the first diet drink, Diet Pepsi. His illustrations appeared in all the leading magazines of the day such as, Collier’s, Good Housekeeping, The Ladies’ Home Journal, and The Saturday Evening Post. He was a member of the Society of Illustrators in New York.

While painting, he often relied on his photograph of the model for further reference, and magazine editors started to buy these photographs. Steckler studied photography with Alexy Brodovitch and Edward Steichen, Carl Sandburg’s brother-in law, who became his mentor. He phased out illustration, and in the 60’s and 70’s, Steckler became famous for his fashion and beauty photography. His work appeared in major ad campaigns for Revlon, Cover Girl, AT&T, many Proctor and Gamble products, and American Airlines, to name a few. His photographs appeared in Vogue and Harper’s Bazaar and he photographed celebrities such as Marilyn Monroe, Carl Sandburg, Andrés Segovia, John Wayne, and Joanne Woodward. He launched the careers of young models such as Jennifer O’Neill, Susan Blakeley, Cybil Shepherd, and he worked with supermodels Suzy Parker, Verushka, and Jean Shrimpton.

Expanding his career, he started to direct, produce, and film commercials. He gained national notoriety for putting pantyhose on Joe Namath for a Hanes commercial. And his Noxema spots with the famous phrase, “Take it off, take it all off!” became a pop culture phenomenon. Steckler directed and filmed all the live segments in the EmmyTM-award winning television special, “Free To Be You and Me”, which went on to become one of the most popular and influential children’s television specials of past decades. He won numerous awards, and many of Steckler’s commercials are now part of the collection in The Paley Center for Media.

Upon moving to Los Angeles, he embarked on a career of producing and directing movies for television, using such actors as Kevin Bacon, Katherine Ross, and the late Robert Young in an EmmyTM nominated role.

In the early 90’s, during a trip to the Middle East, Steckler had an epiphany that led him to withdraw from movie projects – and he returned to his first loves: photography and painting. Steckler quickly became a collected and exhibited photographer and artist.

Whether wearing the hat of an illustrator, photographer, painter, or director, Steckler’s images challenge our often-dismissive eye to linger on imagery that speaks a world of truth and eases us into the discovery of how to ‘see’ what is beautiful and compelling in these complex times.

Len Steckler resides in Los Angeles, and continues to create and SEE every day.

Eleanor Leonne Bennett is a 16-year-old internationally award-winning photographer and artist who has won first places with National Geographic, The World Photography Organisation, Nature’s Best Photography, Papworth Trust, Mencap, The Woodland Trust, and Postal Heritage. Her photography has been published in The Telegraph, The Guardian, BBC News Website, and on the cover of books and magazines in the United states and Canada. Her art is globally exhibited, having shown work in London, Paris, Indonesia, Los Angeles, Florida, Washington, Scotland, Wales, Ireland, Canada, Spain, Germany, Japan, Australia, and The Environmental Photographer of the year Exhibition (2011) amongst many other locations. She was also the only person from the UK to have her work displayed in the National Geographic and Airbus-run See The Bigger Picture global exhibition tour with the United Nations International Year Of Biodiversity 2010.

At age 18 Diane married Allan Arbus (divorced 1969), an employee at her family’s store. Before separating, they worked collaboratively, first taking photographs and creating advertisements for the store, then creating commercial fashion photography for Harper’s Bazaar, Show, Esquire, Glamour, The New York Times, and Vogue.

Eddie Carmel, Jewish Giant, taken at Home with His Parents in the Bronx, NY, 1970

Unlike many photographers with whom she overlapped, like Henri Cartier Bresson and Robert Frank, Arbus would often meet a subject and form a long relationship, the diaries and date books show. It could take 10 years for her to produce her best photographs of that subject.

Identical Twins, Roselle, New Jersey, 1967

Arbus’ best-known single work is her haunting photograph of side-by-side twin girls, whose identical faces are just enough different that they seem like a paradigm of good and evil, darkness and light. Stanley Kubrick liked them so much he alluded to the pair with the creepy children who haunt the giant hotel in his movie “The Shining.”

Toward the end of her life, she explicitly described her work in those terms. “I do feel I have some slight corner on something about the quality of things. I mean it’s very subtle and a little embarrassing to me, but I really believe there are things which nobody would see unless I photographed them.”

Arbus experienced “depressive episodes” during her life similar to those experienced by her mother, and the episodes may have been worsened by symptoms of hepatitis. Arbus wrote in 1968 “I go up and down a lot,” and her ex-husband noted that she had “violent changes of mood.” On July 26, 1971, while living at Westbeth Artists Community in New York City, Arbus took her own life by ingesting barbiturates and slashing her wrists with a razor. Her good friend Marvin Israel found her body in the bathtub two days later; she was 48 years old.

Diane Arbus, Teenager with a Baseball Bat, NYC, 196

Today Arbus, who once said her pictures sought to capture “the space between who someone is and who they think they are,” has become one of America’s best-known photographers and one of its most controversial.

Diane Arbus, Untitled (1), 1970-71, © The Estate of Diane Arbus. Courtesy of Masters of Photography

A collection of her photos was published in 1972 in connection with a successful major exhibition of her work at the Museum of Modern Art in New York City. That same year her work was shown at the Venice Biennale, marking the first time that an American photographer received that distinction. In 2003 an extensive exhibition of her work opened at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art and later traveled throughout the United States and Europe. An accompanying book, Diane Arbus Revelations (2003), contained some 200 photographs as well as excerpts from her letters and notebooks. In 2007 Arbus’s estate gifted her complete archives—including photographic equipment, diary pages, and the negatives of some 7,500 rolls of film—to the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City.

Diane Arbus, Mexican dwarf in his hotel room in N.Y.C., 1970, © The Estate of Diane Arbus. Courtesy of Masters of Photography

Diane Arbus, Untitled (7), 1970-71, © The Estate of Diane Arbus. Courtesy of Masters of Photography

Diane Arbus, A young man with curlers at home on West 20th Street, N.Y.C., 1966, © The Estate of Diane Arbus. Courtesy of Masters of Photography

Child with Toy Hand Grenade in Central Park, New York City (1962)

Jim Kazanjian’s surreal landscapes offer phantasmagoric visions of a where-is-this world, defined by impossibly complex architecture and M.C.Escher-esque black-and-white graphics. Inspired by the imaginary realms of cult author H.P. Lovecraft—whose wild, cosmic short stories set the mold for much of the 20th century’s best science fiction—Kazanjian’s aim is to redress the “misunderstanding that photography has a kind of built-in objectivity…to defamiliarize the familiar.”

It is our trust in photography’s inherent connection with naturalism, then, that makes the deliberate verisimilitude of his works so intriguingly disorienting. And the delightful confusion doesn’t end there: Even the question of whether Kazanjian’s art is photography at all is open to debate, given that he doesn’t shoot any of his own pictures, but rather manipulates “assemblages” of found photographs.