Alfred Stieglitz was born in New Jersey in 1864, and was raised in New York city. His family moved to Germany in 1881 and Stieglitz began college as an engineering student before quickly switching to photography. He spent most of his time traveling through the European countryside with his camera, and he achieved a level of skill that won him prizes and attention throughout Europe in the 1880s.

In 1890, Stieglitz returned to the United States anxious to show that photography should be considered a fine art - at least potentially the equal of painting and the traditional graphic arts. His strong personality quickly elevated him into one of the leader's of photography's fine-art movement in the United States.

By 1892 he was the editor of Camera Notes, the publication of the Camera Club of New York, and he used his position, and his ever-present, pressing personality, to advance the photographers and policies he favored. In 1902 the club's resentment toward him had reached a point where Stieglitz was forced to resign. He moved on to form his own organization and journal, The Photo-Secession, where he could further dedicate himself and others to promoting photography as an art form. In spite of the progressive name all the Photo-Secessionist photographers were committed in greater or lesser degrees to what was called the Pictorialist style, which favored the traditional genre subjects that had been blessed by generations of conventional painters. The technique was considered a blockage to people's understanding of the intrinsic editorial quality of photography and its use in every day life.

Stieglitz's thinking about his work and photography in general had begun to shift and by 1917 he was moving away from the concept of photograph-as-art. This style had begun to appear out of sync in an increasingly modern world. Stieglitz and his contemporaries began to acknowledge that photography was naturally suited to capturing the complexity and speed that increasingly defined modern life. The days of heavily manipulating the final print fell out of favor. Stieglitz began supporting the photography of Paul Strand and Charles Sheeler whom he thought captured the new approach to the medium and soon his own work began to reflect these changes.

He married Georgia O'Keeffe in 1924. Photographing her was one of his chief occupations between 1917 and 1925, and he produced several hundred photographs of the painter. They stayed married, but often apart for long periods, until his death.

He had three phases to his career, starting as a naturalist photographer sensitively portraying rural lifestyles followed by his pictorialist period creating impressionistic pictures, and finally he turned modern, embracing abstraction, photographic detail, and realistic tones. Stieglitz's own work and the wide influence of his ideas and activities on all forms of creative expression, defined him as a singular shaping force for a new American vision of the arts and culture.

Medium : 1 photomechanical print : photogravure

Created/Published : 1911

Creator : Alfred Stieglitz, photographer, 1864 - 1946

Housed in the Prints and Photographs Division of the Library of Congress

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Product #: cph3c02867