![]() 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. 15.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). Alfred Stieglitz et al., “An Apology,” Camera Work 1 (January 1903), p. ![]() Alfred Stieglitz, “ Camera Work Prospectus,” August 25, 1902, reprinted in Richard Whelan, ed., Stieglitz on Photography: His Selected Essays and Notes (Aperture, 2000), pp. ![]() The last issue of Camera Work (49–50, June 1917) featured early work by Paul Strand, presaging Stieglitz’s own new direction toward straight photography. With these changes, and the advent of World War I, subscribers dwindled and the publication schedule became increasingly irregular. As 291’s exhibition program moved beyond photography to embrace painting and sculpture, the magazine began to cover modern art, taking on a more international focus. In the journal’s early years, Stieglitz prominently featured artists of the Photo-Secession, including James Craig Annan, Frank Eugene, Gertrude Käsebier, Edward Steichen, Frederick Evans, Alvin Langdon Coburn, Clarence White, and others. This was seen as a major improvement over the typical halftone reproductions employed in other publications. Most importantly for Stieglitz, Camera Work boasted high-quality photogravures-printed under Stieglitz’s supervision and tipped in by hand-in order to better represent subtle gradations of tone and value. Its Art Nouveau cover was designed by Edward Steichen, and the quarterly printed some of the best of American art criticism, often reproducing reviews of 291 shows from other publications. In the prospectus for Camera Work, he argued that the journal would be independent, “owing allegiance only to the interests of photography.” The first issue was published in January 1903, and Stieglitz declared therein his standards of inclusion: “Only examples of such work as gives evidence of individuality and artistic worth, regardless of school, or contains some exceptional feature of technical merit, will find recognition in these pages.” Ĭamera Work was a sumptuous, erudite publication. Stieglitz had edited two previous publications- The American Amateur Photographer and Camera Notes -before deciding in 1902 that he wanted to put his energies toward an autonomous, high-quality magazine intended to elevate and promote the art of photography.
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