About the Photographer and Photographs

Photography became Henry Steiner’s insistent hobby six decades ago. His academic career led to trips to many parts of the globe. Steiner often worked into these travels a few hours or days of photography. Together with such trips, his touristic vacations, frequent hikes and rarer treks gave occasion for most of the prints on this website.

Over the years, the photography migrated predictably from black-and-white to color, and from film to digital. The subject matter never had a single focus, thematic or regional. Described in spacious terms, it embraces nature’s sheer majesty and diverse beauty, the designs and geometries that landscapes unexpectedly yield, and peoples around the world in their commonplace activities and remarkable physical and cultural distinctiveness. The subject matter ranges, that is, from what is everywhere to what is unique, from the universal to the particular.

These images straddle the four decades during which Steiner taught at Harvard Law School as well as the last seven years since he became professor emeritus. Over this period, human rights became his principal commitment in scholarship, teaching and consulting. Steiner now continues to explore questions of international human rights while engaging more systematically and intensely with this brave new world of digital photography.