Alfred Stieglitz American, 1864-1946

Alfred Stieglitz (1864–1946) did more than any other individual to establish photography as a fine art in America, and his contribution extends far beyond his own pictures. As photographer, publisher, curator, dealer, and polemicist, he argued that a straight, unmanipulated photograph could be a vehicle for personal expression, and he built the institutions, journals, and galleries needed to prove it.

Born in Hoboken, New Jersey, Stieglitz moved with his family to Germany and enrolled in 1882 as a student of mechanical engineering at the Technische Hochschule in Berlin. The following year, he encountered photography in a photochemistry course taught by Hermann Wilhelm Vogel. What began as a technical problem became an artistic one. He returned to New York in 1890, immersed himself in the city’s photographic societies, and became editor of Camera Notes, the journal of the Camera Club of New York.

When the Camera Club membership turned against his increasingly restrictive editorial line, Stieglitz and others broke away in 1902 to found the Photo-Secession. He began publishing Camera Work, which ran until 1917 and remains the most influential photographic journal produced in America. Its photogravures were printed to such a high standard that the reproductions became works of art in their own right.

In 1905, with Edward Steichen, who provided the studio space, Stieglitz opened the Little Galleries of the Photo-Secession at 291 Fifth Avenue. Known simply by its address as 291, the gallery showed photography alongside works by Paul Cézanne, Henri Matisse, Pablo Picasso, Constantin Brâncuși, and Auguste Rodin, with Steichen reporting from Paris on what Stieglitz should bring to New York. He ran 291 until 1917, followed by the Intimate Gallery and, from 1929, An American Place, which he maintained for the rest of his life.

Stieglitz’s own photographs evolved alongside his arguments. The Terminal (1893), made with a hand-held camera in the snow on Fifth Avenue, and The Steerage (1907), taken from the upper deck of the Kaiser Wilhelm II, transform ordinary scenes into structures of pure geometry and mark his break from the atmospheric effects of Pictorialism.

Stieglitz made his first portraits of Georgia O’Keeffe at 291 in 1917 and more than 140 in the two years that followed. The extended portrait eventually comprised more than 300 prints of her face, hands, and body, and the two married in 1924. Beginning in 1922, at Lake George, he photographed clouds for more than a decade, producing the Equivalents, among the first intentionally abstract photographs. Printed small, often as contact prints and frequently without a horizon, the images encourage the clouds to be read as forms rather than as sky.

Bruce Silverstein Gallery devoted Cloud 9 to the Equivalents in 2009, alongside cloud photographs by Edward Weston and Imogen Cunningham, and has since presented Stieglitz’s work in Photographer as Sculptor, Sculptor as Photographer, Summer Glow, and In Sequence.