Alfred Stieglitz
gigatos | January 5, 2022
Summary
Alfred Stieglitz was born on January 1, 1864 in Hoboken, New Jersey, USA and died on July 13, 1946 in New York City. He was an American photographer, gallery owner, publisher and promoter of modern European and American art. During his fifty-year career, he contributed to making photography a recognized art form.
Alfred Stieglitz was born in Hoboken, New Jersey, in 1864, to German-Jewish parents, Edward Stieglitz (businessman and landscape painter) and Hedwig Warner. The first of six children, he grew up in a well-to-do and cultured family that felt comfortable on two continents. After the family moved to New York, he attended the Charlier Institute, Townsend Harris High School and the City College of New York, where he was consistently ranked among the top ten students in his class. He lived across from Central Park at 14 East 60th Street in Manhattan. Beginning in 1872, his family began spending summers at Lake George in the Adirondacks, a tradition that Stieglitz continued as an adult.
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Berlin
In 1882, his father sold his wool trading business and the family returned to Germany to continue the children”s education, art appreciation and European travel.
Alfred Stieglitz first studied in Karlsruhe, then began studying engineering at the Berlin Polytechnic, where he was taught by the physicist Hermann von Helmholtz and the chemist and photographer Hermann Wilhelm Vogel, who in 1884 discovered how to make negatives sensitive to all colors except red. Stieglitz became interested in photography and was able to convince Vogel and the school”s administrators to allow him access to the darkroom twenty-four hours a day. In return, he would take care of the laboratory. With his training in chemistry and his desire to push the limits of the medium and perfect the darkroom technique, Stieglitz was now able to experiment intensively with photographic chemistry.
He collected books on photography and photographers. Encouraged by Vogel to investigate the properties and possibilities of the medium by tackling a range of subjects, including landscapes, portraits, architecture, genre studies, and art reproductions, he buys his first camera, a plate camera (8 × 10) that requires a tripod, and travels to the Netherlands, Italy, and Germany. He took pictures of landscapes and workers in the countryside. Photography,” he later wrote, “fascinated me, first as a game, then it became a passion, then an obsession.
The most innovative works of this period, and those that presage his future development, are the nuanced exploration of light and shadow patterns, both indoors and outdoors. It was during his stay in Berlin that he made his Sun Rays-Paula photograph, which he would not make public until 1921.
In 1887, he wrote his very first article, A Word or Two about Amateur Photography in Germany, for the new magazine The Amateur Photographer. He then wrote articles on the technical and aesthetic aspects of photography for magazines in England and Germany.
In 1887, he won first prize in London in The Amateur Photographer magazine, judged by Peter Henry Emerson for his photograph entitled The Last Joke, Bellagio. The following year he won first and second prizes in the same competition, and his reputation began to grow after his work was published in several German and British photographic magazines.
While Vogel had said that the camera could only be used during the day, he tried an experiment in a cellar where the only source of light was a light bulb activated by a dynamo. Exposure for 24 hours produced a perfect negative, proving that daylight is not always necessary. Taking on technical challenges inspires him. Later, Stieglitz developed techniques for making photographs during snowfall, rain or night and made the first successful shots of a Rainy Day, a Snowstorm and a Full Night.
Although Stieglitz worked diligently on the chemical and technical aspects of photography, he firmly believed that photography was an art form. “Artists who saw my early photographs began to tell me that they envied me, that my photographs were superior to their paintings, but that, unfortunately, photography was not an art. I didn”t understand why artists envied me for my work, and in the same breath, decried it because it was made with a machine – their painting of “art”, because handmade work was considered necessarily superior. This is where I began my fight for the recognition of photography as a new medium of expression, to be respected in its own right, just like any other art form.” .
In 1880, he joined the pictorialism movement, which claimed the artistic side of photography. He took great care in the production of his prints, often making platinum-palladium prints, a process known for producing images with a rich and subtly varied tonal range, and he achieved the desired closeness to painting through compositional choices and the use of natural elements such as rain, snow, and steam to unify the components of a scene into a visually satisfying pictorial whole.
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New York
At the end of the 19th century, his parents returned to the United States and in 1890 (after the death of his sister Flora), Stieglitz returned to New York. Thanks to his father, he became a partner in the Heliochrome Engraving Company from 1890 to 1895, which he hardly managed as a businessman but as a demanding photographer, he restructured it and renamed it Photochrome Engraving Company. During this period, he published articles for the magazine The American Amateur Photographer. He joined the Society of Amateur Photographers of New York in 1891; in 1896, this Society merged with the New York Camera Club to form the Camera Club of New York which organized exhibitions. He also concentrated on photographing the streets of New York. In late 1892, Stieglitz purchased his first portable camera, a Folmer & Schwing 4×5 film camera, which allowed him more spontaneity. He used all the means at his disposal to transform his images into “tableau photographs”. He radically reframed his negatives to eliminate disturbing elements that were foreign to his compositions. He enlarges them, often to make larger prints and to easily retouch certain parts of the images. He made charcoal, gum bichromate and photogravure prints in charcoal gray and brown, even red, green and blue. He carefully matted and framed the finished prints. Unlike his early European photographs, which he later mostly disowned, Stieglitz considered his early New York photographs to be the beginning of his modernist trajectory. Phyllis Rose mentions that he would later rework some of the images from this period, giving them a snapshot-like quality, which he called “snapshot”. Starting with the original negatives, he remade many of his early works as direct-contact (not enlarged), uncropped gelatin silver prints. Brighter, sharper and cooler than his earlier photogravures or platinum prints, the small silver prints have a much more modern look.
In November 1893, at the age of 29, Stieglitz married 20-year-old Emmeline Obermeyer, sister of his friend and associate Joe Obermeyer and daughter of a wealthy brewer, who did not share her husband”s artistic or cultural interests. In early 1894, Stieglitz and his wife left for a trip to France, Italy and Switzerland. Stieglitz photographed extensively during this trip, producing some of his first famous images such as A Venetian Canal, The Net Mender and A Wet Day on the Boulevard, Paris. While in Paris, Stieglitz met French photographer Robert Demachy, who became a lifelong correspondent and colleague. In London, Stieglitz met the founders of the photographic society The Linked Ring (en), George Davison and Alfred Horsley Hinton (en), both of whom also remained his friends and colleagues for much of his life.
From 1897 to 1903, he published with the Camera club the magazine Camera Notes.
He gained international fame by organizing, in 1902, at the National Arts Club in New York, an impressive exhibition of photographs in which the photographers of the Photo-Secession group participated. Among its founding members were Gertrude Käsebier, Edward Steichen, Clarence Hudson White (en), and Joseph Keiley (en), with whom Stieglitz became friends and collaborated regularly, perfecting the glycerine phototype process invented by Alphonse Poitevin. This exhibition does not include the work of well-known photographers such as Carleton Watkins, William Henry Jackson, or Edward Sheriff Curtis. From 1902 to 1917, he published, in addition to photographs of artists who had participated in the 1902 exhibition, a new independent magazine that he founded and directed, Camera Work, for which he employed Charles Henry Caffin. He works with the process of photogravure, method of reproduction of photographs, with ink for large prints of high quality.
It was during a trip to Europe that Stieglitz captured what is recognized as one of his most famous photographs, The Bridge, by pointing his camera at the lower-class passengers at the front of the ship. He did not publish it until 1907, four years later. For Lisa Hostetler, in this photograph the arrangement of shapes and tones betrays Stieglitz”s familiarity with Cubism. A copy is on display at the Musée d”Orsay in Paris.
During his stay in Europe, Stieglitz saw the first demonstration of the Autochrome-Lumière color photographic process and immediately experimented with it in Paris with Steichen, Frank Eugene and Alvin Langdon Coburn. He took three of Steichen”s Autochromes to Munich in order to have four-color reproductions made for inclusion in an issue of Camera Work.
From 1905 to 1917, he directed the “Gallery 291”, located at 291 Fifth Avenue in New York. located at 291 Fifth Avenue in New York, where, in 1908, he was the first to exhibit the works of European artists with unpublished drawings by Auguste Rodin or paintings by Pablo Picasso, Henri Matisse, Georges Braque, Paul Cézanne or Francis Picabia, sculptures by Brancusi and even Marcel Duchamp.
In his gallery, Stieglitz deliberately interspersed exhibitions of art he knew to be controversial with exhibitions of what Steichen called “understandable art” and exhibitions of photographs. The intention was to create a dialogue that would allow visitors to see, discuss, and reflect on the differences and similarities between artists of all ranks and types: between painters, draftsmen, sculptors, and photographers; between European and American artists; between older or more established figures and younger, more recent practitioners. On the advice of Marius de Zayas, he was also the first to exhibit African sculptures and children”s drawings, and to publish texts by Sadakichi Hartmann. Stieglitz was also advised by Paul Haviland and Picabia. At the same time, the National Arts Club held a special exhibition of contemporary art that included photographs by Stieglitz, Steichen, Käsebier, and White as well as paintings by Mary Cassatt, William James Glackens, Robert Henri, James Abbott McNeill Whistler and others. This was the first major exhibition in the United States in which photographers were on equal footing with painters.
In 1913, the Armory Show of modern art took place, which according to Jean-Pierre Delarge, Stieglitz” efforts anticipated.
From 1910 until the 1920s and 1930s, Alfred Stieglitz produced a series of portraits of American artists and authors who surrounded him. These images reveal Stieglitz”s abandonment of pictorialism in favor of straightforward photography, while at the same time demonstrating the photographer”s intimacy with his subjects. Daniel Catton Rich, notes that “his portraits of the greats of his time remain consecrated portraits. Almost all the portraits are the result of personal understanding; they are like archives of deep friendships.
He then managed other galleries, “The Intimate Gallery” (These last two small galleries were devoted almost exclusively to exhibitions of American modernist artists whom Stieglitz admired such as Charles Demuth, Arthur G. Dove, Marsden Hartley, John Marin and O”Keeffe, or Gaston Lachaise and Oscar Bluemner). To a lesser extent, he also exhibited the work of American photographers; in 1936 he exhibited the work of Ansel Adams, twenty years after Paul Strand, and two years later he exhibited the work of Eliot Porter. Through these efforts, Stieglitz contributed to the public”s respect for American art.
Around 1917, he ceased publication of Camera Work, and his photographic style changed; while at the beginning of the century, the best method of proving the legitimacy of photography as a creative medium seemed to suggest appropriating the appearance of drawing, print, or watercolor in finished photographic prints, such practices began to seem unwise after World War I. Stieglitz became increasingly intrigued with a more modern visual aesthetic for photography. He became interested in pure photography. He became aware of what was happening in avant-garde painting and sculpture and found that Pictorialism no longer represented the future, but the past. In this he was influenced in part by the painter Charles Sheeler and the photographer Paul Strand, and later by the young Edward Weston. He began a series of several hundred photographs of his “soul mate” or “female double” finally found, his future wife (twenty-four years his junior), Georgia O”Keeffe. His refusal to enclose the artist”s personality in a single image was in keeping with several modernist ideas: the idea of a fragmented sense of self, engendered by the rapid pace of modern life; the idea that a personality, like the outside world, is constantly changing, and can be suspended but not stopped by the intervention of the camera; and, finally, the realization that truth in the modern world is relative and that photographs are as much an expression of the photographer”s feelings for the subject as they are of the subject represented.
In a similar vein, he produced his finest work while living in the Adirondacks, including his clouds, named Equivalents. The cloud photographs were unmanipulated portraits of the sky that functioned as analogues of Stieglitz”s emotional experience as he clicked the shutter. Stieglitz, like many of the artists in his circle, argued that visual art could take on the same non-representational (figurative), emotionally evocative qualities as music.In 1923, the Museum of Fine Arts (Boston) at the behest of Ananda Coomaraswamy, asked him if he would donate some of his work to the museum. This was the first time that a museum exhibited photographs.
In 1924, he donated twenty-seven photographs to the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the first of its kind. The same year, he married Georgia O”Keeffe and received the Progress Medal from the Royal Photographic Society.
Alfred Stieglitz opened his last gallery, An American Place on Madison Avenue in New York in 1929, which he ran until his death. Stieglitz welcomed young artists and a stream of visitors eager to meet a living legend of the New York art scene.
In 1934, he published America and Alfred Stieglitz, a Collective Portrait, a collection of his photographic works.
In the 1930s, Stieglitz returned to photographs of New York, continued his “portraits” of Georgia O”Keefe, who was now asserting her independence, and found inspiration in the natural world near Lake George.
In the last decade of his life, Stieglitz devoted himself primarily to running his galleries, corresponding with young photographers such as Todd Webb, and making fewer and fewer photographs as his health and energy declined.
On July 13, 1946 Stieglitz succumbed to a fatal stroke. His ashes are buried in Lake George.
“In 1949, Georgia O”Keeffe and the heirs of Alfred Stieglitz donated 1,311 photographs by Alfred Stieglitz to the National Gallery of Art in Washington, DC, and placed an additional collection of 331 O”Keeffe portraits in escrow, which were subsequently donated to the gallery in 1980. This collection, known as the Key Set, is an unparalleled selection of Stieglitz”s photographs, containing at least one print of each mounted photograph in his possession at the time of his death. It traces the evolution of Stieglitz”s work from its beginnings in the 1880s to its rich maturation in the 1930s, and thoroughly documents all aspects of his decisive contribution to the art of photography.”
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