Charles Sheeler contends that Sheeler's fashion and portrait photography was instrumental to the artist's developing modernist aesthetic. Over the course of his time at Condé Nast, Sheeler's fashion photography increasingly incorporated the structural design of abstraction: rhythmic patterning, dramatic contrast, and abstract compositions. The subjects of Sheeler's fashion and portrait photography appear pared down to their barest essentials, as sculptural objects composed of line, form, and light. The objective, distant, and rigorously formal style that Sheeler developed at Condé Nast would eventually be applied to all of his artistic forays: architectural, industrial, and vernacular. The contributing essays to Charles Sheeler expose the artistic breadth and depth of Sheeler's Condé Nast oeuvre, over 300 images of which are gathered in this volume. Michener Art Museum curator Kirsten M. Jensen provides the historical context for Sheeler's experimentation in the years preceding his time at Condé Nast, as well as a comprehensive analysis of the artist's Condé Nast photography alongside his Precisionist work. Further essays explore the role of Condé Nast, the individual, in shaping the era's culture; investigate how Sheeler's work reinterpreted and shifted contemporary trends in architecture and fashion; examine the influence of Sheeler's experimentation with filmmaking on his later work; and analyze Sheeler's influence on later generations of fashion photographers, who have continued his studies into the model as a sculptural form. Hardcover, 256 pages.