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Essay on Alfred Stieglitz
| Date: |
08-12-01 3:19pm |
| Subject: |
Arts |
| Word Count: |
1775 |
| Page Count: |
7.1 |
Alfred Stieglitz
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.
Arts Essays
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