This portrait of Franklin D. Roosevelt (1882–1945) was taken by Edward Steichen (1879, Bivange, Luxembourg –1973, West Redding) in 1929. Roosevelt, then a governor of the State of New York, was later elected President of the United States in 1932. The photograph captures the politician in the year of the Wall Street Crash that severely tested the politician, who reacted with remarkable pragmatism, implementing extensive programmes of reform despite suffering from a paralytic illness. Steichen made countless portraits of celebrities, and this one was made during his tenure as a photographer for the publisher Condé Nast. Steichen would later pay homage to Roosevelt’s era of the New Deal, with his last exhibition as the director of the department of photography at MoMA in New York, entitled The Bitter Years.