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_Alfred Stieglitz _
By: Austin Jones
Alfred Stieglitz was an influential photographer who spent his life fighting
for the recognition of photography as a valid art form. He was a pioneering
photographer, editor and gallery owner who played pivotal role in defining and
shaping modernism in the United States. (Lowe 23). He took pictures in a time
when photography was considered as only a scientific curiosity and not an art.
As the controversy over the art value of photography became widespread,
Stieglitz began to fight for the recognition of his chosen medium. This battle
would last his whole life. Edward Stieglitz, father of Alfred, was born in
Germany in 1833. He grew up on a farm, loved nature, and was an artist at
heart. Legend has it that, independent and strong willed, Edward Stieglitz ran
away from home at the age of sixteen because his mother insisted on upon
starching his shirt after he had begged her not to (Lowe 23). Edward would
later meet Hedwig Warner and they would have their first son, Alfred. Alfred
was the first of six born to his dad Edward and mom Hedwig. As a child Alfred
was remembered as a boy with thick black hair, large dark eyes, pale fine
skin, a delicately modeled mouth with a strong chin (Peterson 34). In 1871 the
Stieglitz family lived at 14 East 60th street in Manhattan. No buildings stood
between Central Park and the Stieglitz family home. As Stieglitz got older he
started to show interest in photography, posting every photo he could find on
his bedroom wall. It wasn't until he got older that his photography curiosity
begin to take charge of his life. Stieglitz formally started photography at
the age of nineteen, during his first years at the Berlin Polytechnic School.
At this time photography was in its infancy as an art form. Alfred learned the
fine arts of photography by watching a local photographer in Berlin working in
the store's dark room. After making a few pictures of his room and himself, he
enrolled in a photochemistry course. This is where his photography career
would begin. His earliest public recognition came from England and Germany. It
began in 1887 when Stieglitz won the first of his many first prizes in a
competition. The judge who gave him the award was Dr. P.H. Emerson, then the
most widely known English advocate of photography as an art (Doty 23). Dr.
Emerson later wrote to Stieglitz about his work sent in to the competition:
"It is perhaps late for me to express my admiration of the work you sent into
the holiday competition. It was the spontaneous work in the exhibition and I
was delighted with much of it", (Bry 11). The first photographer organization
Alfred joined while still in Berlin, was the German Society of the Friends of
Photography. After returning to the United States 1890, Stieglitz joined the
Society of Amateur Photographers of New York. These experiences would later
help him in years to come. By 1902 Stieglitz had become the authority in his
chosen field. Stieglitz found that his achievements were not enough to win
recognition for photography. Finally in 1902 he founded an entirely new
photography group of his own, the Photo Secession. The focus of the Photo
Secession was the advancement of pictorial photography. Stieglitz being the
leader gathered a talented group of American photographers headed toward the
same common goal, to demonstrate photography as an art form( Lowe 54). This
was the first of many Photo Secession shows through which Stieglitz set out
and demonstrated photography as an art. Their first Photo Secession exhibition
was held at the National Arts Club in New York. Photo Secession shows were
supported by galleries all over the world as well as Stieglitz's own gallery.
All these events were reported in Stieglitz's weekly magazine Camera Work,
which Stieglitz founded, edited, and published in fifty volumes from its
beginning in 1903 until its end in 1917. Although the Photo Secession group
never dissolved, it gradually diminished as an organized group. Stieglitz
continued to show new photographic work when he believed it was important. It
was all part of his fight for photography, but the battleground and the
participants had changed. In 1917 when Stieglitz was 54 years old Georgia
O'Keeffe arrived in New York (see pict.1). This event would change Stieglitz's
life forever. Stieglitz at first didn't know Georgia personally but showed her
pictures at his gallery "291". They would later meet during one of Georgia's
shows. Soon after they meet, Alfred took Georgia up to the Stieglitz home at
Lake George in the Adirondack Mountains. Soon Stieglitz was one of Georgia's
most eager supporters, arranging shows even selling some of her paintings.
Buying an O'Keffe was not only expensive, but a collector needed to meet
Stieglitz's standards for owning one ( Doty 135). In 1925 she and Stieglitz
moved into the Shelton Hotel in New York, taking an apartment on the 30th
floor of the building. They would live there for 12 years. With a spectacular
view, Georgia would begin to paint the city while Stieglitz photographed New
York. By 1928 Georgia began to feel the need to travel and find other sources
for painting. In May of 1929, Georgia would set out by train with her friend
Beck Strand to Taos, New Mexico, a trip that would forever change her life
(Lowe 100 ). Stieglitz would not accompany her. He remained in New York City
at his Lake George residence. In 1937 Stieglitz made his last new prints (see
pict.2). Stieglitz would later die at his Lake George home on July 13, 1946.
II. About Photography The word photography is derived from the Greek words for
light and writing (Lowe 12). A camera is a complex piece of equipment used in
photography. A camera is made up of a complex number of parts - a box carrying
a lens, diaphragm, and shutter (see pict.3) that are arranged to throw an
image of the scene to be recorded onto a sensitive film or plate (Peterson
54). Most people think of photography as snap and shoot, go to the store and
get it developed. However, there are many other things that are going on to
make that picture that is going into your photo album. One of the three most
important things that is needed in making a picture is a camera lens. The lens
is an image-forming device on a camera. If an object is far away use a higher
mm lens such as 1000mm. If the object is closer use a smaller mm lens like 10
mm. You also use the lens to focus in the object clearly. The closer the
object is, the smaller the focus is. The farther away the object is, the
bigger the focus is. The next important thing in making a picture is the
shutter speed. The shutter is the device on the camera acting as a gate
controlling the duration of time that light is allowed to pass through the
lens and fall on the film (Doty 76). Shutters help to take pictures of things
moving, without and shutter just about every thing you take a picture of would
be blurry making a pretty ugly picture. The last important thing is the film.
This determines what the picture's color will look like. Oftentimes, a
photographer uses black and white film to show emotion, color to show
movement. There are hundreds of different kinds of film to show different
feeling in each and every photo taken by a camera. These and other factors
make professional photography a complex process. III. What his art says.
Alfred Stieglitz's involvement in photography dated from 1883, the year he
purchased a camera and enrolled in a photochemistry course, to the year he
died in 1946. When Stieglitz returned to America from England, he found that
photography, as he understood it, hardly existed. An instrument had been put
on the market shortly before, called Kodak. The slogan sent out to advertisers
reading, "You press the button and we'll do with the rest". This idea sickened
Stieglitz. To Stieglitz it seemed like rotten sportsmanship (Peterson 10).
Stieglitz wanted to make photography an art so Stieglitz decided, to do
something about it. Camera Notes (1897- 1903) was the most significant
American photographic journal of its time (see pict.4). Published monthly by
the Camera Club of New York and edited for most of its life by Alfred
Stieglitz, the journal embodied major changes for american photography in
general and to Stieglitz' s career in particular. Camera Notes signaled the
beginning of the movement of artistic photography in the United States. Over
the course of the six years that Camera Notes was published, Stieglitz
witnessed the establishment of an American standard for artistic photography
and the "dissolution of his faith in members" of popular camera clubs. Camera
Notes ushered in not only a new century, but also an entirely different
attitude toward photography (Peterson 35). This journal represented a noble
effort on the part of Stieglitz to work within the territory of the American
Camera Club movement (Norman 67). The journal included a number of articles
and photographic illustrations he believed would inspire his readers to higher
levels of picture making and greater depths of artistic meaning (Peterson 10).
Later Stieglitz resigned from being the editor of Camera Club because of
others accused him of rule or run tactics. Stieglitz then created his own
magazine. Stieglitz had always dreamed of publishing and editing his own
independent magazine, Camera Work. In choosing the title Stieglitz felt that
he could form a growing belief in any medium. After publishing Camera Work
Stieglitz became widely recognized as an international leader in the
photographic world. Stieglitz and others who were making photographs of the
cultured merit at the turn of the century generally termed their work
pictorial rather than artistic (Norman 45). Pictorial photography meant
precisely artistic photography in their minds, but the phrase was used in part
because it was less threatening to an established artist. Despite this
approach, pictorialists were intent upon making pictures with their cameras,
by which they meant images of pleasing value. The word pictorial implied an
association with pictures, a class of visual phenomenon that was largely made
up of fine paintings, prints and drawings. Pictorialists worked with a narrow
range of subjects, in part because they wished to downplay the importance of
the subject matter. They would later flourish into painter photographers. At
the turn of the century, a new class of creative individuals, called painter-
photographer emerged. This group fulfilled Stieglitz' s dream for pictorial
photography. Its presence provided the movement with individuals who were
trained in the established arts and who legitimized the artistic claims of
pictorial photography by the fact that they were willing to use the
photographic medium. The very term painter photographer was made up in
reference to Frank Eugene who worked simultaneously with Stieglitz in media
for a decade. Eugene attended a German fine arts academy, and painted
theatrical portraits of the United States. In 1889 he mounted a solo
exhibition of pictorial photographs at the Camera Club of New York, which,
pointedly, was reviewed in Camera Notes as painting photography (Norman 23).
In conclusion Stieglitz's fight for photography developed into new ideas for
future generations. He continued to make his own experiments and to defend the
work of others also breaking new ground. The magazines he edited, like the
galleries he founded, swiftly became dynamic points of contact between artist
and public and a battleground for new ideas.
Word Count: 1926
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