Alfred Stieglitz, photography as art
« American photographer and gallerist (1864-1946), who established photography as a fine art in its own right. »
Born in Hoboken, trained in Berlin, Stieglitz returned to the United States in 1890 determined to elevate photography to the rank of the fine arts. He founded the Photo-Secession movement in 1902, the journal Camera Work in 1903, and gallery 291 in New York in 1905. Three vehicles for one cause.
His own work — The Steerage (1907), Equivalents (cloud series, 1925-1934) — moved from pictorialism to assumed modernism. The Steerage, shot stealthily from the upper deck of a liner, has become an icon: a composition cut by industrial lines, humanity below.
Stieglitz exhibited Cézanne, Picasso, Matisse and Brancusi in the U.S. for the first time. He married Georgia O'Keeffe in 1924 and made over 300 portraits of her. His legacy: photography was no longer a technique but a language — and museums began to take it seriously.