Alfred Stieglitz
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encyclopedia)
Alfred Stieglitz (January 1,
1864 – July 13, 1946) was an American photographer who was instrumental
over his fifty-year career in making photography an acceptable art form
alongside painting and sculpture. Many of his photographs are known for
appearing like those other art forms, and he is also known for his
marriage to painter Georgia O'Keeffe, most famous for her large-scale
paintings of flowers.
Stieglitz was born the eldest of six children in Hoboken, New Jersey and
raised in a brownstone on Manhattan's Upper East Side. His father moved
with his family to Germany in 1881. The next year, Stieglitz began
studying mechanical engineering at the Technische Hochschule in Berlin and
soon switched to photography. Traveling through the European countryside
with his camera, he took many photographs of peasants working on the Dutch
seacoast and undisturbed nature within Germany's Black Forest and won
prizes and attention throughout Europe in the 1880s .
Throughout his life, Stieglitz was infatuated with younger women. He
married Emmeline Obermeyer in 1893, after he returned to New York, and
they had one child, Kitty, in 1898. Allowances from Emmeline's father and
his own enabled Stieglitz to not have to work for a living. From 1893 to
1896, Stieglitz was editor of American Amateur Photographer magazine;
however, his editorial style proved to be brusque, autocratic and
alienating to many subscribers. After being forced to resign, Stieglitz
turned to the New York Camera Club (which was later renamed The Camera
Club of New York and is in existence to this day) and retooled its
newsletter into a serious art periodical known as Camera Notes. He
announced that every published image would be a picture, not a photograph
- a statement that allowed Stieglitz to determine which was which.
Big camera clubs that were the vogue in America at the time did not
satisfy him; in 1902 he organized an invitation-only group, which he
dubbed the Photo-Secession, to force the art world to recognize
photography "as a distinctive medium of individual expression." Among its
members were Edward Steichen, Gertrude Kasebier, Clarence White and Alvin
Langdon Coburn. Also in 1902 he ceased being editor of Camera Notes and in
1903 started a new independent journal of his own, Camera Work.
Photo-Secession held its own exhibitions and its work was published Camera
Work, which became the pre-eminent quarterly photographic journal of its
day, although in later years its popularity declined markedly and it
ceased publication in 1917.
From 1905 to 1917, Stieglitz managed the Little Galleries of the
Photo-Secession at 291 Fifth Avenue (which came to be known as 291). In
1910, Stieglitz was invited to organize a show at Buffalo's Albright-Knox
Art Gallery, which set attendance records. He was insistent that
"photographs look like photographs," so that the medium of photography
would be considered with its own aesthetic credo and so separate
photography from other fine arts such as painting, thus defining
photography as a fine art for the first time. This approach by Stieglitz
to photography gained the term "straight photography" in contrast to other
forms of photography such as "pictorial photography" which practiced
manipulation of the image pre and/or post exposure.
Stieglitz divorced his wife Emmeline in 1918, soon after she threw him out
of their house when she came home and found him photographing Georgia
O'Keeffe, with whom he moved in shortly thereafter. The two married in
1924 and were both successful, he in photography (he would take hundreds
of pictures of her throughout his life), she as an artist who had received
notoriety from Stieglitz at 291 in 1916 and 1917. Stieglitz began in 1916
photographing O'Keeffe and over the next two decades comprised one of his
greatest works, his collective portrait of O'Keeffe (over 300 images)
which was a collaborative process between both sitter and photographer.
The marriage between O'Keeffe and Stieglitz was strained as she had to
care more for his health due to a prevailing heart condition and his
hypochondria. Following a visit to Santa Fe and Taos in 1929, O'Keeffe
began to spend a portion of most summers in New Mexico.
In the 1930s, Stieglitz took a series of photographs, some nude, of
heiress Dorothy Norman, who became in O'Keeffe's mind a serious rival for
Stieglitz's affections. Both these photographs and those of O'Keeffe are
often considered the first photographs to recognize the artistic potential
of isolated parts of the human body. In these years, he also presided over
two non-commercial New York City galleries, The Intimate Gallery and An
American Place. It was at An American Place that he formed his friendship
with the great 20th century photographer Ansel Easton Adams. Adams
displayed many prints in Stieglitz's gallery, corresponded with him and
also photographed Stieglitz on occasion.
Stieglitz was a great philanthropist and sympathizer with his fellow human
beings. He once received a phone call on one of Adams' visits. A man
wanted to show Stieglitz some work. He invited him over, looked at the
prints, looked at the man in a rather disheveled state of affairs, looked
at the work again. He then offered to buy one of the paintings, wrote him
a check for $150, gave him five dollars and told him to get something good
to eat.
Stieglitz stopped taking photographs in 1937 due to heart disease. Over
the last ten years of his life, he summered at Lake George, New York and
worked in a shed he had converted into a darkroom and wintered with
O'Keeffe in Manhattan. He died in 1946 at 82, still a staunch supporter of
O'Keeffe and she of him.
