Though Stieglitz hailed from Hoboken, New Jersey, New York was his adopted city. I did not see why a photograph should not be a work of art, and I studied to make it one.” He said, “I saw what others were doing was to make hard, cold copies of hard, cold subjects in hard, cold light. In a 1908 article in the New York Herald, Stieglitz stressed the importance of the “personal touch” and the “individual expression” of the artist. Scholar Doris Bry says of him: “To define and fix a moment of reality, to realize the potential of black and white, through photography, fascinated Stieglitz.” But objectivity to Stieglitz was not enough. Stieglitz was concerned with both seeing life as it was and interpreting it morally. In 1897, Stieglitz published Picturesque Bits of New York, a volume of his New York scenes it sold for the then-whopping price of $15. Stieglitz was unquestionably the leader of the movement to gain artistic recognition for photography.Ī pioneer in subject matter, technique, and treatment, Stieglitz shot many “firsts,” among them the first snow photograph, Winter, Fifth Avenue (1893), the first rain photo, A Wet Day on the Boulevard (1894), and the first night shot, Reflections – Night (1896). Photographers like Stieglitz were trying to prove to skeptics that the camera could be used not only as a journalistic tool (as Jacob Riis used it in How the Other Half Lives) but that photographs could also have value as art. Photographers who wanted to go beyond “mere” journalism or documentary photography had to show their critics the value of their “mechanistic” art. With their compressed space, simplified geometric forms, and stacked and tilted planes, these photographs embody Stieglitz’s conscious translation of cubism to photography.In the 1890s, as Alfred Stieglitz was beginning his career, photographers were fighting for artistic recognition. But Stieglitz explored this cityscape not for its subject matter, but to study form-much as Picasso had done with his cubist studies of the Spanish village of Horta. Unlike his earlier vistas of the city’s iconic sites and structures, these humble views lacked any obvious drama. In 19, Stieglitz made a series of photographs out of 291’s back window that marked a turning point in his understanding of modernist photography (Key Set number 417). In these complex, multilayered portraits, Stieglitz expressed his understanding of a subject’s personality by linking sitter, setting, and formal elements a portrait of Francis Picabia, for instance, rhymes an archlike shape in the painting with the painter’s brow and hunched shoulders, and the back of the chair on which he sits (Key Set number 403). The soft focus and brooding lighting of his first portraits (Key Set number 369) gave way to a more direct style by 1913, when he started posing sitters in front of works of art-often, if they were artists, their own (Key Set number 384). He made his gallery, 291, his informal portrait studio, reinforcing its primacy as the epicenter of modern art. Old and New New York, in which the geometric frame of a massive building under construction looms over low-slung brownstones, points to the city’s-and Stieglitz’s-modernist future (Key Set number 344).Īfter 1910, Stieglitz turned his photographic attention to making portraits of his circle of artists and colleagues. In his rigorously composed view of the sleek Mauretania, the world’s largest and fastest ocean liner, the shapes on the pier in the foreground are echoed in the ship’s funnels, uniting the city with the triumphs of modern technology (Key Set number 334). The monumental The City of Ambitions-a view of the Manhattan skyline from a ferry-features the soaring Singer Building and plumes of smoke that attest to the city’s bustling activity (Key Set number 342). ![]() Stieglitz in 1910 made a series of photographs focusing on the modernity of New York City. ![]() With its dense, grid-like patterning and compressed pictorial space, the photograph has an almost cubist structure-a connection Stieglitz first highlighted in 1911, when he published it in an issue of Camera Work that also included a cubist drawing by Pablo Picasso. In 1907 Stieglitz made what he later considered his first modernist photograph: a view of ship passengers in steerage, taken from the first-class deck (Key Set number 313).
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