(no subject)
Cori Drumheller
Alfred Stieglitz paper
Modern art
Photography. Look at how far this medium has come in the past hundred and fifty years. Now one can see kids under five taking pictures and sending them over the Internet to share with others in commercials advertising PC computers. Since when could a five year old use a computer? When digital cameras hit the scene photography started catering to the masses enabling anyone with the money the tool necessary to create fine art with the simple click of a button. Photography had begun pushing its way through the digital age and is now elbowing it’s way away from the old processes that masters like Man Ray, Edward Muybridge, and Alfred Stieglitz created only a short time ago. Even disposable cameras and Polaroid’s are becoming ancient picture making tools for on the go, digital cameras are practically the only tools that people seem to care to use these days.
In large chain stores like Wal-Mart and Target used to develop and print color pictures for anyone who paid for them, now they have done away with the color processing of film in the stores. Isn’t it kind of depressing when the only option you have is to be digital? It kind of limits the playing field in a way. Technology is forcing us to accept the new and to ditch the old processes and techniques because digital is faster, better and easier. Now combination printing which is incredibly difficult to manipulate in the darkroom and takes hours to get one or two prints that work correctly is just a mask in Photoshop that the average person could accomplish with minimal Photoshop skills within a few hours. However it was not too long ago that the struggles to have photography acknowledged as a true art form were only just beginning. With such an image driven society its funny to think that a little over a hundred years ago photographers were trying so hard to have their prints recognized as a powerful medium and a worthy art form. Photography probably would have been left on the cutting room floor if it not for the help of Alfred Stieglitz.
Not only was he a man who lived for his own art but also was he a man that helped develop and further the lives of other struggling American artists of all mediums. He helped to create a new world for American art especially for his passion of photography. He has accomplished all that and more though out his life of seventy-two years on this earth. There have been hundreds of people that have written thousands of words about Alfred Stieglitz and how he changed the face of photography forever. This paper is going to examine some of the struggles he faced getting people to accept and to acknowledge photography as art that should be respected like any other. It was only through his persistence and constant effort that we can now see what he left behind was real and worth fighting for.
Alfred Stieglitz was born on January 1st 1864 in Hoboken New Jersey. He was the eldest of six children and was mostly raised in Manhattan on the lower east side. The Stieglitz family lived here until 1881 until Stieglitz father decided that the education that Alfred was getting was just not up to par. Alfred went to a private school where he just was not being pushed to his full potential, Alfred found the classes to be quite unchallenging. The family moved him to public school in his last year so that he could get into the city college that his uncle taught at, but he soon found in public school that he was already much more advanced than the rest of his peers and that went on to discourage him even more. It was then his father decided that the family was going to move to Europe where Alfred could excel and get a proper education. In the next year he started to study mechanical engineering at the Technishe Hochschule in Berlin however this did not last long and he soon switched to photography. (Wiki 2)
In 1883 Stieglitz saw a camera in a shop window and decided to buy it. He later wrote “I bought it and carried it to my room and began to fool around with it. It fascinated me, first as a passion, then as an obsession.”(Rleggat) It is hard now to see how people could have been so close-minded to such a new and interesting medium. Why everyone was not more welcoming to the art is somewhat obsurb to think about in today’s day and age. One would have thought more people would have jumped at such a fresh new idea and way of thinking and taking on the art world from a completely different angle. In Europe Stieglitz was beginning to get noticed for his pieces that reflected peasants working and his natural landscapes; he even won a few prizes that helped him to get his foot in the door.
After his sister died giving childbirth in the late 1880s Stieglitz was ordered by his father to return to the states or else his allowance would be revoked. He reluctantly returned to the city he hated and started his new professional life in New York. A short while after Alfred returned to the states he went to see a play called Camille, where the star was an Italian woman whose voice was pricelessly beautiful and instantly reminded him of his time spent learning over seas. Her name was Eleonora Duse. To Stieglitz Europe embodied a life of vibrant beauty and culture that was very much different from the America he was being somewhat forced to embrace; America to him had become dark and lonely. (Norman)
After seeing this woman Alfred Stieglitz said “ I felt for the first time since I had left Europe that there was a contact between myself and my country once more; that if only there were more things like that woman and that play in the United States, then the country might be bearable.”(Norman 5-6) After being in the states for a short time Stieglitz found some photography clubs that he joined. In 1896 both the Society of Amateur Photographers and the New York Camera club merged into one group in which they called themselves the Camera Club of New York.
Here Stieglitz was able to take over the production of its journal in which he called Camera Notes. Within the journal he was able to feature reviews of other artists works as well as having the opportunity of discussing his standards of aesthetics and what other artists could aim to do with his guidance. (Hirsh 196) It was through this work that Stieglitz was finally able to put a voice behind his feelings of photography, it was finally on its way to being considered fine art and it in turn aided to help other aspiring artists to work towards the same goals that he was in the movement. Camera notes focused much of its energy on the “American pictorial movement as well as placing an importance on how a subject was handled rather than the subject itself.” Stieglitz wanted to produce a show that would embody the principle concerns that “stressed elaborate printing processes, post camera manipulations, atmospheric effects, and the tonal vales of the image over the subject matter.” A show of this structure would be able to reflect how photography was a tool for achieving ascetic effect. It would be able to reflect to people and artists alike that there was much more behind photography than just a camera and the prints it produced. (Hirsh 196) “Stieglitz’s luminous magazine established photography as an art form for North America and Europe, by being itself a work of art, a serious and intelligent devotion, the most artistic record of photography ever attempted.”(Bochner 89)
Unfortunately Stieglitz’s dream to have a show like this was not obtainable through the camera club that he belonged to however the Photographic society of Philadelphia was willing to produce a show under the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts in 1898. The catalog for this show said that its purpose was to “present work with distinct evidence of individual artistic feeling and execution.”(Hirsh 197) Stieglitz did well at this show but soon realized that the photo clubs and salons were not going to support the standards in which he valued. This is when he decided to open his own independent exhibition space, this space became known as the gallery 291. However before the gallery even opened its doors Stieglitz was well on his way to forming a group of artists known as the Photo Succession.
The photo succession was born in 1902. This was a group of photographers that were trying to get photography to be valued just as much as any other medium. They were American pictorial photographers who shared the same philosophies as other international photo clubs as well as rebelled the academic authorities, which ultimately lead to the organization of their own exhibitions. (Hirsh197) Some of it’s founders including Stieglitz who was the director of the council was John Bullock, Joseph Keiley, Frank Eugene, Gertrude Kasebier, Robert Redfield, Eduard Steichen, and Clarence White just to name a few. It was a hard task to push the art of photography since the means of producing their works was so mechanical and harsh compared to the other existing art forms that have been practiced for over a thousand years. Stieglitz was committed to the idea of photography being considered fine art. Once after a show where Stieglitz showed a number of his works he said
“ 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 could not understand why the artist would envy me: that they felt that my photographs were superior to their paintings, but that, unfortunately, photography was not an art. I could not understand why the artists should envy my work yet in the same breath decry it because it was machine- made-their ‘art’ painting because hand made, being considered superior. Then and there I started my fight- or rather my conscious struggle for the recognition of photography as a new medium of expressions, to be respected in its own right, on the same basis as any other art form. It was then and there that I decided to devote my life to finding out what people really mean when they say one thing and feel another, say one thing and do another.” (Norman)
How could people put down something that they did not understand fully? Just because his hand was not doing all the work, that the camera aided him in some way, how did that tool end up giving people such an issue with its crafting? Was it because they felt it was unnatural or perhaps that it in itself was crafted of too many components to be capable of creating such fine art work? Was it too new and foreign for the art world to handle where tradition was compromising nothing? There is craft in all art, why was it so hard for the world to accept photography as such? The bigger issue in all of this is what is art and who decides it? At this time there were collectors, critics, and artists that were all questioning these very ideas. . “Gradually, the fight for photography expanded into a fight for the creative spirit of man in all of its manifestations.”(Norman 8)
It is easy to see that Stieglitz was a man that had his eye on the ball from the moment it was shot. He knew early on that photography was a medium that offered opportunities to those with an eye. “While Stieglitz harbored no doubts that a photograph could be good art, he had to face the general opinion that even a very good photograph was not art as much as a very bad painting was.”(Bochner 26) Whether the tool is a brush or a chisel it was his mission to make people see that a camera was just as valuable as those tools that other artists used to produce their works. Taking a photograph was not just a simple click of a button as it is in present day but it was a technique and a skill that needed to be practiced. Method and conceptual thought is not only needed to take interesting and stunning images but there is also the film’s exposure as well as the chemicals needed to develop the negatives and prints, thus making photography a complicated science even. A lot can go wrong with all of these steps making photography like any other art form a process of trial and error.
Plus it should be taken into consideration that in the late 1800s and early 1900s the processes were much more difficult to master. Stieglitz used a hand held four by five camera and was also one of the first people to achieve great works with such. Most of the artists at this time used large and heavy glass plates to record their negatives and later used either photographic paper or sometimes tissue paper to achieve their desired prints. Also the manipulation in the dark room required skill and practice to learn how to maneuver. Practice makes perfect should be every photographer’s motto.
As time went on Stieglitz found that the photo succession was in need of a space in which they could call their own. A space where his works and the works of his fellow Photo Succession members could display their works free of the criticism that was not respecting their works to be art. This is when Stieglitz decided to lease a space on Fifth Avenue in New York City, which its address was 291. This is how the gallery of 291 came about. (Hirsh 196)
The gallery at 291 opened in 1905. The gallery itself was composed of 3 rooms. The largest of the rooms was fifteen feet by seventeen feet. The other two were fifteen feet by fifteen feet and the last was fifteen feet by eight feet offering them ample room to have multiple person shows and also solo ones. It has been the founding location for many American artists that not only were photographers but painters, sculptors, and much more. The vision Stieglitz had not only embraced photography as a new medium but on a whole he supported the American movement of art and helped to promote many unknown artists to the people. “One reason he became interested in modern art was that it seemed to him the opposite of what was being done with photography. He sensed a new direction in the works of Rodin, Matisse, and Picasso.”(Bry 16)
He provided a space where American and European artists could thrive and have their works displayed and seen by a large number of people. It was not only his quest for photography but it was a quest to have all American artists recognized. He showed many very well known European artists such as Auguste Rodin, Henri Mastisse, Paul Cezane and Pablo Picasso as well as many unknown American artists such as John Marin, Marden Hartley and Max Weber. With Stieglitz help many of these artists went on to have their own shows. Rodin and Matisse works now go for well over a million dollars a pop thus proving that Stieglitz had the right idea all along, now it was only a matter of getting the critics to see the vision that he had seen all along. Stieglitz felt that he needed to get people latched onto the idea of art existing in his prints and those of the other artists in the photo succession. Stieglitz became convinced that the only way to have photography seen as an equal, was to have it be placed in the same room on the same walls as any of the other arts out there.
There was a show held by the National Arts Club that was featuring a special exhibition of contemporary art that included photographs of many of the Photo Succession members. It was the first U.S show in which photographers were given the same rankings as painters. This was a big step for photographers and the art world. It was in the show at Albright art gallery where Stieglitz was asked to organize the whole event was he finally feeling that he was closest to his goal. He assembled over 600 prints that included 39 photographers including himself and many others from the photo succession. Stieglitz saw this as he was finally getting his dream and goal to come true, a show in which photography would be honored and finally hung in a respected museum was all that Stieglitz could have ever hoped for. It was the gratification that he had been longing for all along, his dream to have photography realized as the true art form that it always has been was here at last and was coming true right in front of his eyes. (Wiki 6)
“Throughout his life, his own photography paralleled his work as a public champion of the medium. His impact as a personal force on photographic history is almost beyond description. Photography, as well as life, was always a war for Stieglitz, and in it he was not only a fighter but one who had to- and did win.”(Bry 13) Stieglitz achieved everything he sought out to and much more. He took photography and molded into the hearts of all. He forced the art world to listen to his views and to embrace his works whether they be prints or his words he impacted so many people while he was alive and even now in his death. With some time and a tremendous amount of effort he ended up accomplishing his goal, it was not easy but he made it happen. Today photography is a respected and well sought after profession thanks to Stieglitz and his vision.
Alfred Stieglitz paper
Modern art
Photography. Look at how far this medium has come in the past hundred and fifty years. Now one can see kids under five taking pictures and sending them over the Internet to share with others in commercials advertising PC computers. Since when could a five year old use a computer? When digital cameras hit the scene photography started catering to the masses enabling anyone with the money the tool necessary to create fine art with the simple click of a button. Photography had begun pushing its way through the digital age and is now elbowing it’s way away from the old processes that masters like Man Ray, Edward Muybridge, and Alfred Stieglitz created only a short time ago. Even disposable cameras and Polaroid’s are becoming ancient picture making tools for on the go, digital cameras are practically the only tools that people seem to care to use these days.
In large chain stores like Wal-Mart and Target used to develop and print color pictures for anyone who paid for them, now they have done away with the color processing of film in the stores. Isn’t it kind of depressing when the only option you have is to be digital? It kind of limits the playing field in a way. Technology is forcing us to accept the new and to ditch the old processes and techniques because digital is faster, better and easier. Now combination printing which is incredibly difficult to manipulate in the darkroom and takes hours to get one or two prints that work correctly is just a mask in Photoshop that the average person could accomplish with minimal Photoshop skills within a few hours. However it was not too long ago that the struggles to have photography acknowledged as a true art form were only just beginning. With such an image driven society its funny to think that a little over a hundred years ago photographers were trying so hard to have their prints recognized as a powerful medium and a worthy art form. Photography probably would have been left on the cutting room floor if it not for the help of Alfred Stieglitz.
Not only was he a man who lived for his own art but also was he a man that helped develop and further the lives of other struggling American artists of all mediums. He helped to create a new world for American art especially for his passion of photography. He has accomplished all that and more though out his life of seventy-two years on this earth. There have been hundreds of people that have written thousands of words about Alfred Stieglitz and how he changed the face of photography forever. This paper is going to examine some of the struggles he faced getting people to accept and to acknowledge photography as art that should be respected like any other. It was only through his persistence and constant effort that we can now see what he left behind was real and worth fighting for.
Alfred Stieglitz was born on January 1st 1864 in Hoboken New Jersey. He was the eldest of six children and was mostly raised in Manhattan on the lower east side. The Stieglitz family lived here until 1881 until Stieglitz father decided that the education that Alfred was getting was just not up to par. Alfred went to a private school where he just was not being pushed to his full potential, Alfred found the classes to be quite unchallenging. The family moved him to public school in his last year so that he could get into the city college that his uncle taught at, but he soon found in public school that he was already much more advanced than the rest of his peers and that went on to discourage him even more. It was then his father decided that the family was going to move to Europe where Alfred could excel and get a proper education. In the next year he started to study mechanical engineering at the Technishe Hochschule in Berlin however this did not last long and he soon switched to photography. (Wiki 2)
In 1883 Stieglitz saw a camera in a shop window and decided to buy it. He later wrote “I bought it and carried it to my room and began to fool around with it. It fascinated me, first as a passion, then as an obsession.”(Rleggat) It is hard now to see how people could have been so close-minded to such a new and interesting medium. Why everyone was not more welcoming to the art is somewhat obsurb to think about in today’s day and age. One would have thought more people would have jumped at such a fresh new idea and way of thinking and taking on the art world from a completely different angle. In Europe Stieglitz was beginning to get noticed for his pieces that reflected peasants working and his natural landscapes; he even won a few prizes that helped him to get his foot in the door.
After his sister died giving childbirth in the late 1880s Stieglitz was ordered by his father to return to the states or else his allowance would be revoked. He reluctantly returned to the city he hated and started his new professional life in New York. A short while after Alfred returned to the states he went to see a play called Camille, where the star was an Italian woman whose voice was pricelessly beautiful and instantly reminded him of his time spent learning over seas. Her name was Eleonora Duse. To Stieglitz Europe embodied a life of vibrant beauty and culture that was very much different from the America he was being somewhat forced to embrace; America to him had become dark and lonely. (Norman)
After seeing this woman Alfred Stieglitz said “ I felt for the first time since I had left Europe that there was a contact between myself and my country once more; that if only there were more things like that woman and that play in the United States, then the country might be bearable.”(Norman 5-6) After being in the states for a short time Stieglitz found some photography clubs that he joined. In 1896 both the Society of Amateur Photographers and the New York Camera club merged into one group in which they called themselves the Camera Club of New York.
Here Stieglitz was able to take over the production of its journal in which he called Camera Notes. Within the journal he was able to feature reviews of other artists works as well as having the opportunity of discussing his standards of aesthetics and what other artists could aim to do with his guidance. (Hirsh 196) It was through this work that Stieglitz was finally able to put a voice behind his feelings of photography, it was finally on its way to being considered fine art and it in turn aided to help other aspiring artists to work towards the same goals that he was in the movement. Camera notes focused much of its energy on the “American pictorial movement as well as placing an importance on how a subject was handled rather than the subject itself.” Stieglitz wanted to produce a show that would embody the principle concerns that “stressed elaborate printing processes, post camera manipulations, atmospheric effects, and the tonal vales of the image over the subject matter.” A show of this structure would be able to reflect how photography was a tool for achieving ascetic effect. It would be able to reflect to people and artists alike that there was much more behind photography than just a camera and the prints it produced. (Hirsh 196) “Stieglitz’s luminous magazine established photography as an art form for North America and Europe, by being itself a work of art, a serious and intelligent devotion, the most artistic record of photography ever attempted.”(Bochner 89)
Unfortunately Stieglitz’s dream to have a show like this was not obtainable through the camera club that he belonged to however the Photographic society of Philadelphia was willing to produce a show under the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts in 1898. The catalog for this show said that its purpose was to “present work with distinct evidence of individual artistic feeling and execution.”(Hirsh 197) Stieglitz did well at this show but soon realized that the photo clubs and salons were not going to support the standards in which he valued. This is when he decided to open his own independent exhibition space, this space became known as the gallery 291. However before the gallery even opened its doors Stieglitz was well on his way to forming a group of artists known as the Photo Succession.
The photo succession was born in 1902. This was a group of photographers that were trying to get photography to be valued just as much as any other medium. They were American pictorial photographers who shared the same philosophies as other international photo clubs as well as rebelled the academic authorities, which ultimately lead to the organization of their own exhibitions. (Hirsh197) Some of it’s founders including Stieglitz who was the director of the council was John Bullock, Joseph Keiley, Frank Eugene, Gertrude Kasebier, Robert Redfield, Eduard Steichen, and Clarence White just to name a few. It was a hard task to push the art of photography since the means of producing their works was so mechanical and harsh compared to the other existing art forms that have been practiced for over a thousand years. Stieglitz was committed to the idea of photography being considered fine art. Once after a show where Stieglitz showed a number of his works he said
“ 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 could not understand why the artist would envy me: that they felt that my photographs were superior to their paintings, but that, unfortunately, photography was not an art. I could not understand why the artists should envy my work yet in the same breath decry it because it was machine- made-their ‘art’ painting because hand made, being considered superior. Then and there I started my fight- or rather my conscious struggle for the recognition of photography as a new medium of expressions, to be respected in its own right, on the same basis as any other art form. It was then and there that I decided to devote my life to finding out what people really mean when they say one thing and feel another, say one thing and do another.” (Norman)
How could people put down something that they did not understand fully? Just because his hand was not doing all the work, that the camera aided him in some way, how did that tool end up giving people such an issue with its crafting? Was it because they felt it was unnatural or perhaps that it in itself was crafted of too many components to be capable of creating such fine art work? Was it too new and foreign for the art world to handle where tradition was compromising nothing? There is craft in all art, why was it so hard for the world to accept photography as such? The bigger issue in all of this is what is art and who decides it? At this time there were collectors, critics, and artists that were all questioning these very ideas. . “Gradually, the fight for photography expanded into a fight for the creative spirit of man in all of its manifestations.”(Norman 8)
It is easy to see that Stieglitz was a man that had his eye on the ball from the moment it was shot. He knew early on that photography was a medium that offered opportunities to those with an eye. “While Stieglitz harbored no doubts that a photograph could be good art, he had to face the general opinion that even a very good photograph was not art as much as a very bad painting was.”(Bochner 26) Whether the tool is a brush or a chisel it was his mission to make people see that a camera was just as valuable as those tools that other artists used to produce their works. Taking a photograph was not just a simple click of a button as it is in present day but it was a technique and a skill that needed to be practiced. Method and conceptual thought is not only needed to take interesting and stunning images but there is also the film’s exposure as well as the chemicals needed to develop the negatives and prints, thus making photography a complicated science even. A lot can go wrong with all of these steps making photography like any other art form a process of trial and error.
Plus it should be taken into consideration that in the late 1800s and early 1900s the processes were much more difficult to master. Stieglitz used a hand held four by five camera and was also one of the first people to achieve great works with such. Most of the artists at this time used large and heavy glass plates to record their negatives and later used either photographic paper or sometimes tissue paper to achieve their desired prints. Also the manipulation in the dark room required skill and practice to learn how to maneuver. Practice makes perfect should be every photographer’s motto.
As time went on Stieglitz found that the photo succession was in need of a space in which they could call their own. A space where his works and the works of his fellow Photo Succession members could display their works free of the criticism that was not respecting their works to be art. This is when Stieglitz decided to lease a space on Fifth Avenue in New York City, which its address was 291. This is how the gallery of 291 came about. (Hirsh 196)
The gallery at 291 opened in 1905. The gallery itself was composed of 3 rooms. The largest of the rooms was fifteen feet by seventeen feet. The other two were fifteen feet by fifteen feet and the last was fifteen feet by eight feet offering them ample room to have multiple person shows and also solo ones. It has been the founding location for many American artists that not only were photographers but painters, sculptors, and much more. The vision Stieglitz had not only embraced photography as a new medium but on a whole he supported the American movement of art and helped to promote many unknown artists to the people. “One reason he became interested in modern art was that it seemed to him the opposite of what was being done with photography. He sensed a new direction in the works of Rodin, Matisse, and Picasso.”(Bry 16)
He provided a space where American and European artists could thrive and have their works displayed and seen by a large number of people. It was not only his quest for photography but it was a quest to have all American artists recognized. He showed many very well known European artists such as Auguste Rodin, Henri Mastisse, Paul Cezane and Pablo Picasso as well as many unknown American artists such as John Marin, Marden Hartley and Max Weber. With Stieglitz help many of these artists went on to have their own shows. Rodin and Matisse works now go for well over a million dollars a pop thus proving that Stieglitz had the right idea all along, now it was only a matter of getting the critics to see the vision that he had seen all along. Stieglitz felt that he needed to get people latched onto the idea of art existing in his prints and those of the other artists in the photo succession. Stieglitz became convinced that the only way to have photography seen as an equal, was to have it be placed in the same room on the same walls as any of the other arts out there.
There was a show held by the National Arts Club that was featuring a special exhibition of contemporary art that included photographs of many of the Photo Succession members. It was the first U.S show in which photographers were given the same rankings as painters. This was a big step for photographers and the art world. It was in the show at Albright art gallery where Stieglitz was asked to organize the whole event was he finally feeling that he was closest to his goal. He assembled over 600 prints that included 39 photographers including himself and many others from the photo succession. Stieglitz saw this as he was finally getting his dream and goal to come true, a show in which photography would be honored and finally hung in a respected museum was all that Stieglitz could have ever hoped for. It was the gratification that he had been longing for all along, his dream to have photography realized as the true art form that it always has been was here at last and was coming true right in front of his eyes. (Wiki 6)
“Throughout his life, his own photography paralleled his work as a public champion of the medium. His impact as a personal force on photographic history is almost beyond description. Photography, as well as life, was always a war for Stieglitz, and in it he was not only a fighter but one who had to- and did win.”(Bry 13) Stieglitz achieved everything he sought out to and much more. He took photography and molded into the hearts of all. He forced the art world to listen to his views and to embrace his works whether they be prints or his words he impacted so many people while he was alive and even now in his death. With some time and a tremendous amount of effort he ended up accomplishing his goal, it was not easy but he made it happen. Today photography is a respected and well sought after profession thanks to Stieglitz and his vision.