ALFRED A wunutoN worn have been written about Alfred Stieglitz, but it has proven difficult to find the right ones. And the end of the difficulty it We have been given hagiographies _memoirs, works of fastidious schol- arship, and works grounded on faith, but in spite of the virtues of these various views we still seen to have not quite a full and satisfying por- trait, Caricature—both graphic and literary— thas peshaps worked better (fig 1). Twenty years ‘ago Mahonri Sharp Young produced a splendid quick sketch, short enough for an epitaph, that tells us.as much as most of the thick books, and perhaps also suggests why even now we do not now the subject better. Stieglitz, he said, “was a hypnotist and American Gurdjieff, and those who remember him, believe in him still.”" But most of us do not remember him; there Are few left who do, If the rest of us choose to be lieve in hima, i¢ will be not because of the force ‘of his will or his pedagogical passion (which will be preserved more and more faintly, by hearsay) but because of his work as a photographer. Stieglitz is famous, but his work is little now. No other major figure of photographs modem era is known by so short a list of pie~ ‘ures, Even among painters, who are reasonably assumed to be less prolific than photographers, perhaps only van Gogh is known to broad art Public for so few works, and his mature output ‘was produced within five years, Stieglitz, whose life as a photographer spanned more than fifty years, has too often been anthologized from 4 standard list of half @ dozen pictures, none of which was made during the last half of his ‘working life, The reasons for this peculiar sita- ation are for the most part traceable to p STIEGLITZ AT LAKE GEORGE instituted by Stieglitz’ widow Georgia O'Keeffe, ‘acting in what she felt were the best interests of his memory and his art, and in the spirit of the crankily elitist perspectives that charac- ‘terized his thinking (or his feeling) during his last years? These policies resulted in highly re- stricted access to Stieglite’s work, except for the small fragment that had been previously pub- lished, primarily in Stieglite’s own mag Camera Work (1903-17). The history of these policies is interesting in itself, but only indirectly relevant to this study. What is directly relevant is the critical environment that resulted from a denial of access to his photographs. It has been ‘an environment in which Stieglitz’s words—and his words as recollected by others, often long after the fact—were more readily available than és pictures. One might say that they became ‘more important than his pictures. Stieglitz was of course more than a photog rupher; he was an editor, a publisher, a prosely~ tizer, a perpetual protester, an art dealer, and a visionary. Ici said that during the first decade of this century he introduced modern art to A ica, which is perhaps as true as so sweep~ ig @ statement should hope to be, After the famous Armory Show of 1913 had encouraged other evangelists to join him in praising (and sometimes selling) work by the great European pioneers, Stieglitz changed his ground, and be- tween the two World Wars he was the devoted agent and protector of most ofthe best Ameri- can painters of the time. In roturn he asked of these artists nothing but absolute unqualified ‘rust, oF at least the appearance of it Stieglitz was clearly “not just” @ photogra- pher; but his younger colleague and sometime CameraWork 1. Marius De Zayas. Cased (caricature of Steg). Pablished in Camera Work, 0.30 (Apri 191).2 Lewis W: Hine. Macon, eon {9e, The Museum of Modern Art New York. Stephen R Cuser Memorial Fund. 0 great collaborator Edward Steichen (himself a _man with more than one string in his bow) wrote near the end of his own life this: Stieglite's greatest legacy to the world is his photographs, and the greatest of these are the things he began doing toward the end of the 2gr days. 291" was Stieglitz first gallery, which pencil its doors at that Fifth Avenue address in 1905, lite later than and @ litle north of Daniel Burnhasn’s Flatiron Building. Ae frst the called The Little Galleries of the place wi Photo-Secession (the Photo-Secession being the group that Stieglitz had founded * to indicate that 19¢2) but soon it was called simply “201 its interests would not be limited to photogra phy. ‘The gallery closed in 1917, after holding eighty exhibitions, including one-person shows of the major figures of early twentieth- century art. ‘When “201” elosed Stieglitz was fifty-three This book and the exhibit consider Stieglitz’s work dur it accompanies the next two decades at his summer home, six hours north of the city, at Lake George. In 1910, at the age of forty-six, Alfred Stieg mounted an exhibition of six hundred photo: graphs, ranging chronologically from the ealo- types of David Octavius Hill and Rober Adamson—muacle in the 184¢s during photogra phy’s first decacle—to a substantial number of pictures (including eight of his own) that had been made in the very year 1910. The exhibition, ‘was an attempt to define the character and the achievement of the art of photography. Ic had been commissioned by the distinguished Albright Art Gallery of Buffalo, New York, ond Stieglitz had been given absolute control overits content and installation. The show thus pro: vided the opportunity for him to demonstrate in conerete terms the rightness ofthe positions that he had staked out and fought for during the pre~ the last half of that period Stie America, the leading ar biter of aesthetic and philosophic issues among the small world of photographers who claimed the status of fine artists; the Buffalo exhibition ight therefore also be regarded as an account. ing of his stewardship. Stieglitz took the chal lenge very seriously; his grand-niece Davidson Lowe says that he expended a greater effort on this show than on any other of his long, career Nevertheless, itis difficult w avoid the conclusion that the exhibition was a failure. Within the small world of pictorialist pho- tography the show was criticized for an ungen- ‘erous and parochial bias toward Stieglta’s own, circle, the Photo-Seeession, the group that he had decreed into existence in 1902 and over which he exercised vietwally dictatorial control The Photo-Pictorialiss of America, a larger buthharply focused rival group, claimed to have been under-represented, and they were perhaps right in terms of the projeet’s stated perspec~ tives, but from our vantage point the argument sooms a tempest in a teapot. In terms of quality, narrowly defined, the photographers of the Photo-Seeession were on average probably better than those of the Photo-Pictorialists of America, but both groups were playing the same game, and it seems now a game of very limited horizons. Stieglitz’s show included the work of ‘many photographers whose names are now mys- teries to all but the most specialized scholars, mably known then only and who were pi within the trade union of high-art photography. On the other hand, it did not inelude (for example) the work of Carleton Watkins or Eadweard Muybridge, who were famous and who, like Stieglitz, had won many medals; nor excepting Hill and Adamson, did itinelude work by any of the great nineteenth-contury Euro- pean photographers, which Stieglitz must surely have seen on his travels: nor a picture by Stieglitz’: New York neighbor Lewis W. Hine oe work and thought Stieglitz had known for years; y Emerson, whose nor one by Pe hor one by the great Frances Benjaznin Johnston fig. 3), who was an Associate Member of the Photo-Sevession, but unfortunately a profes- sional; nor was there (it would seem, from read- the catalogue) a photograph of an automobile, There was in ror litte painterly precedent to suggest how a photographer of hhigh-rt ambitions might deal with automobiles, ‘The work omitted from the Buffalo show surely seem to a modern viewer more original, radical, and challe Zing than the work included. Iris fair to assume, I think, shat it was ‘omitted because it did not conform to Stieglitz’s conception of art, and this fact now seems a lear indictment of that conception. It is difficult to evaluate the written eriti- ism of the Albright exhibitions it seems scant and parochial, and far from disinterested. Crit- ies tied to the photographic enterprise were nat- dred photographs hhad been hung in a distinguished n urally impressed that six hu seu, and inthe circumstances were pethaps disinclined to serutinize the content of the show too closcly. Even s0, after explaining that the exhibition was, yes, wonderful, and thanking the Photo- Secession for its “historic achievement,” one Ra that, “Ifone only gets a proper attitude of mind. all these rather weak-looking performances fall Lidbury spoiled i all by suggesting properly inta place as Milestones in the Path of a Movement."* Lidbury endl hs lengthy review in American Photography by stating his view that the exhibition was in several respects last. word, a signing off. He also thought (or pechaps ‘was the last photographic exbibi- tion ofits “gargantuan” size Sadakichi Hartmann also wroteon the show the Stieglitz hoped) that he had been closely associated wit Francs Benjamin Johnston Aaecubtare: Misng etlier 1Bo9-I900. Frm The Hampton Abn. The Maser of Moser Ar New York: Gift of Linco Kirstein2 camp for more than a decade, and has been credited with having been @ major influence on the evolution of Stieglitz’s artistic thought." His review of the Albright show was published in Camera Work—Stieglita’s own magazine. Nev- ertheless, after the obligatory compliments have been paid, Hartmann goes on to make it clear that, in his view, the achievements of pictorial photography have been quite limited, interesting and admirable, but limited: “One ean hardly say that photographic picture-making up to this day has revealed much of spiritual gravity.”” Most ofall we would want to know Stieglita’s opinion of the exhibition, but he seems to have said remarkably little about it. He told the Ger- man critic Ernst Juhl that the exhibition ‘was without a doubt the most important that has been held anywhere so far,” but he seems to have been speaking primarily of the show's political significance: “The dream I had in 1885 in Berlin has been resized —the full recognition of photography by an important art museun!™ Steichen wrote from France the month after the show opened, and (at the end of his letter) said that he was anxious to hear news of the Buffalo show, but if Stieglte replied, it did not elicit » further response from Steichen, who wrote again atleast three times in the next two months wit out again raising the question.” When an audience was available, Stig! spoke—on topics of his own choice—and al- though these generally focused on himself, he tended to exclude those episodes ofthe past that had not turned out to his satisfaction. It is in~ teresting in this regard to consider Alfred Stieglitz Talking by Herbert J. Seligman, per- haps Stioglite’s least critical Boswell.” On his ‘many visits to The Intimate Gallery (Stieglita’s second gallery) during the late twenties, Selig- ‘mann seems to have written down everything he heard Stieglitz say; and his report never once mentions the Photo-Secession or any ofits mem- bers, except for the longtime Associate Editor on Camera Work, Joseph Keiley (remembered in Seligmann’s book as one who did not at first ap~ preciate Stieglitz’s most famous photograph The Steerage)."" and Edward Steichen, who is re- ‘membered in these years as a veritable Judas." Stioglite seems not to have told us what he ‘thought of the Albright show; but we can try to make sense out of the facts we know: From the founding of the Photo-Secession in 1902 until 1910 Stieglitz had had litle time for his own pho- ‘ography and perhaps not much interest init. I is possible that the political battles were more compelling. In addition to competing with the other groups that claimed to speak for artistic photography, Stieglitz also had to be sure that the Photo-Secession itself was free of doctrinal crror, (In 19¢3, in @ general answer to inquiries concerning conditions for membership in the Photo-Secession, Stieglitz wrote in Camera Mork: “It goes without saying thatthe applicant rust be in thorough sympathy with our aims and principles.”)® ‘The Buffalo show was a pure expression of those aims and principles, the realization of Stioglitz’s dream, as he told Juhl, But once the battle was won it may slowly have begun to ‘occur to Stiegl that it had been the wrong battle, fonght on the wrong field. Nine years later, ina letir to Paul Strand, he wrote of the earlier years: “There was too much thought of ‘art,’ too little of photography.” In 1910 the art collector John Quinn, in # letter to the painter Augustus John, identified Alfred Stieglitz as a former photographer," but in that year Stieglitz again took up his eamera— presumably so he might properly represent him- self in the great exhibition that he was forming —and made atleast eight superior new pictures, ‘hich he included in the Buffalo show."*Stieglit’s choice of his own work for the exhibition reveals the remarkably spasmodic character of hisproduction. He chose twenty-nine pictures to represent a period of twenty-eight years—since he began his work as a photographer in 1883." In addition to the eight made in the year of the exhibition, ten date from 1894, all of them made in Europe. The remaining twenty-six years are represented by eleven pictures. Prior to thase pro- duced by the spurt of activity in 1910, the most vcent picture that Stieglitz considered worthy of the shaw had been made five years earlier The arthythmie of Stieglite’s achievement as a photographer continued until shout 1915, 11s useful to study the chronological n of the works reproduced in Alfred distribu Stieglts: Photographs and Writings (1983)," id from the collection of the National selec Gallery of Art—by far the most nearly complete holding of his work." In the National Gallery's selection, only nine (out of seventy-three) plates epresent the cwenty years between 1895 and t91g—that is, between Stieglita’s thirtieth and iftieth years, when one might expect an a be most prolific. The next twenty years, reach ing almost to the end of Stieglita’s working life, are represented by fifty-two picrures, The pictures of 1910 have @ confident new breadth about th a graphic sweep that dis- tinguishes them ftom his typical earlier work— but inthis Stieglitz is swimming with the tide of the time, In terms of mood, there is litle in the new pictures that challenges the sentimental endemic to the high-art photography of the time. Its difficult ro recall a more lavishly Tomentie vision of a modern metropolis than The City of Ambition (fig. 4)—New York seen beyond a ribbon of sparkling water, the back- ing converting every puff of steam and Stoke into a feather plume, and every counting house into aca le. Both in their romantic mood ‘and in their more consciously constructed for- mal character, he new pictures look rather like those of the young Alvin Caburn—younger even than Steichen, One of Stieglitz’ most impressive qualities as an artist was his ability to lean from younger artists. Consciously or otherwise, he accepted, adopted, and adapted the successes of his juniors. In his thirties he learned from Steichen and Clarence White; in his forties he learned from Alvin Langdon Coburn; at fifty he learned his greatest lesson, from the first mature work of Paul Strand and perhaps that of Charles Sheeler. At an age when most artists are content, to refine the discoveries of their youth, Stieglitz who had been famous almost forever, had not yet hegun his best work. Seeglit, The City of Ambition. ic. The Museum of Modem Art, New York, Purchase 1845: Aled Stigite, The Steeage. 907 The Museu of Madern At, New York, Purchase Alter the spurt of activity engendered by the Buffalo show; Stieglitz returned to relative quiescence until about 19 5, In my view, the work of 1910 records the high-water mark—and the end—of Stieglit”’s earlier understanding of the art of photography. The new work begins later, during the war years. Stieglitz’s own comments are not of uch, help in charting this change in his thought. To Stieglita it was less admirable to learn than to have always known, and when he changed ‘mind he characteristically did so retroactive) His rare ability to learn from younger arti ‘icant that he was able repeatedly to revise the trajectory of his future; in a less admirable way. his plastic sense of history enabled him also to revise his past. Teis in fact not quite possible to believe what Stieglite says, at least not in any narrow, literal way. He spoke, it would seem, in an experimen: tal mode: trying out one sequence of words to test them agai semi-effable truth, and then, dissatisfied, using 1 his intuition of some large ‘on the next telling a new and somewhat contra dictory sequence of words to tell what we would call, for convenience, the same story, To his most dedicated followers this unwill- ingness to be cowed by small-minded consis tency was a high virte. Hechert Seligman said that Stieglitz “might tell a story hundreds of times, but never twice the same... It was as if Steglite sought, always with regard tothe moment and the degree of understanding of his listeners, to arrive at the very core of the expe rience he was seeking to make clear. He seized parables out of the immediate day and hour sometimes treating facts allegorically."* It isnot altogether clear whether Seligm ‘means to say that Stieglitz treated facts allegor ically or that he treated them casually, but he does seem to be tell 1 when we listen to Stieglitz we should try to catch the spirit and not ‘rust coo much the letter This seems good advice, but difficult to rec ‘oncile with the historical method. As an experi ment, one might decide to admit as evidence only those of Stieglita’s words that speak in the presen tense. Under this rule we would have, for ‘example, nothing from Stieglitz about the mak ing of The Steerage of 1907 (fg. 5), on which he after the negative was made. What we do have. however, is of dubious value: Stieglitz later re membered that he had seen, “4 round straw hat, the funinel leaning left, the stairway leaning right, the white draw-bridge with its railing: made of cireular chains—white suspenderscrossing on the back of a below, round shapes of iron machinery, a mast wan in the steerage «into the sky, making a triangular shape. nd underlying that the feeling I had about life.” This seems vyery much like the description of a picture, not [saw a picture of shapes the memory of the experience out of which the picrure came. What Stieglitz called a funnel isin fact a mast, a confusion that would hardly be credible if one were recalling the experience.” ed above might such The evidentiary rule sugge help resolve nagging historical difficultie tz’s position toward the idea of 1 photography.” In Beaumont Newhall’s formulation, straight photography was “the esthetic use of the functional properties of the photographic technique.” Newhall went on Alfred Stieglitz consistently applied this approach to his work. Although he had frequently championed photographers whose prints often resembled paintings and drawings, fand although he occasionally made gum prints himself and experim live processes, he preferred all his life to stick closely to the basie properties of camera, lens and emulsion.” In 1978 Weston Naef found, in contrast, that during the decade before 1907 Stieglitz was ddeoply committed to manipulative proct would seen "le that he made no clear public state ment on the superiority of “straight photogra- phy” until the comments he made as a juror for the John Wanamaker exhibition of 1013. He said then: “Photographers must lean not to be ashamed to have their photographs look like "This seems unambiguous, but in hat competition Stieglite awarded First Prize to Anne Brigman for her picture Finis (fg demonstrat : ae ‘adops photographs. rating that although Stieglitz may have | a new theoretical position, he was not yer clear about what it might mean in prac- tice, From a mechanical standpoint Brigman's Picture might indeed be “straight”: from an anistie standpoint it surely epitomizes—or caricawures—the sodden symbolist posturing that modernism most emphatically rejected. In 980 Joe! Snyder asked Newhall about the apparent contradiction between his descrip- tion of Stieglita’s position and the evidence of the photographs themselves: JS: In The History of Photography, you say that Stieglit saw into the heart of the photographic dlileruna by the late 1880s, and claim that what distinguished his work from the photographs of _most other serious photographers ofthe time was Stieglitz’: commitment to straight photography: BN: That’ what I say... JS; But then if you turn to Stioglit=’s photographs from this period —including the ones in your book—your narrative runs into some trouble. What makes you say that these pictures are straight photographs? BN: Well Stioglits told me they were and I believed him. Even Beaumont Newhall, « scholar of fastidious intellectual discipline, was capable of being hypnotized by the great American 6. Anne Brigman, Fins. 116 The Metropolitan Museum of Art New York AlfedStegtity Colleton7. Bidward Steichen, Moonrite— Mamaroneck, New Fork 904 The Muceun of Modern At, New ork. Gift ofthe photographer. 16 Gurdjieff. But Newhall’s credulity seems less remarkable than Stieglta’s sangfroide his will- ingness to turn, without a backward away from work and opinions that he had once held so dear. In 1902 he wrote: “It has been argued that the productions of the modern pho- tographer are in the main not photography. Ww the scientis’s point of view, itis a matter with le, strictly speaking, this may be true from which the artist does not concern himself." A 1968 letter from Steichen to Stieglitz documents the distance that separated his own practice fig. 7) from “straight photography” at the time. Strapped for money (as usual during his early years in France), he confessed to Stieglitz that he had avoided paying duty on the photographs that he had sent by declaring them with the fac tual, hut obfuscatory, lahel gum-bichromac prints, He doubted that anyone would recogniz them as photographs.” What is at issue here is not the value of on philosophy of photographic technique in com: parison to another. The painterly photographi styles of the Edwardian years produced pictures of rich Kithn, Gertrude Kisebier, and most notab as Hein sting virme by photographers suck Steichen. The motives that produced these pie tures are now not easily apprehended, but th prints themselves are at best things of quality ‘and sometimes of a genuine, if exquisite, beauty The seriousness with which the hest of the makers took these works is expressed eloquent!and unintentionally by Steichen in another 1 Stieglitz, in which he deseribes the ve of Constantin B beauty of surfa ncusi's mar: bles in comparison with easts of the same works: He i just as finicky about quality and finish as wwe are about prints. The problems chese pictures addressed were problesas involving not so much the conventional sentiments that were their nominal subject mat- ter but the control, in vitro, of photographic ily challen ‘and by the time of the Great War it was 1 sary to increase the difficulty of the problem by requiring not only that the photograph be elegant dot that it seem tohave been made from real life, » repeat, what is at issue here is not a phil d ophical but an historical question: What of trust should we invest in Stieglitz as wgrapher? The answer would appear to be that we should treat his testimony, and that attributed to him, with greater skepticism than we have in the pas If itis not easy 10 understand Stieglitz, one reason may be that he did not cultivate under- standing. If the monument by which he rep a litle incoherent, itis not for that reason a bad likeness. In consider: resented to the worl mntradictions in his testimony, itis useful to remember that Stieglitz was unique {nthe annals of art, [hink, in being a major and original dealer. 1 rou the other, but one might suppose that t of their o gure both as an artist and as an art not believe that either of these © higher moral standard than tions prompts them truth from rather different perspectives, and that holding both jobs simultaneously could be and his egocentric and deeply ahis- torical definition of the world can be chilling. But what he s, artist of massive solf- 4 should not be permitted 10 ‘obscure what he did, which is greater than his explanations of it The new Stieglitz began to appear around 10915 What might be called a new taste for facwsality soon first in the earliest of the great series of Konrad Cramer portraits, beginning with (1914?), Francis Picabia and Charles Demuth (both 1915), and Marsden Hartley (1915 oF 1916) In rote, in his Self Portrait ([ig. 8), Stieglitz was still content to repeat the standard, broad-brush formula of the portrait studio: a disembodied head floats in an undifferentiated sea of gloom. thought to be evocative of Rembrandt. By 1915 in the splendid Francis Picabia (fig. 9). we see 5. Aled Seg. 5 The Museum of Modern Are, New York Extended Loan frm Doro9 Aled Seite, Princ Plein, 045 Na Wes Colleton, 18 val Gallery of At nD. Alfred Seite the product of a very different, and an enor- maously more demanding, standard, Now every square inch of the print must do its equal part to create the sense of a seamless and vital real- ity: the easy softness of the jacket and the plas- tic completeness of the space (by extension, even the space between Picabia’s back and the beck of the chair) and the half-anxious poise of his hands, and the tunnel of shirsleeve from which his right arm projects—these must be described as precisely as the beauty of his face, not perhaps because they are of great importance in them selves, but because they are essential to the suc cess of the illusion, which must be without holes ‘The portraits of the mid-teens mark the be- ginning ofa formidable ereative effort that con- tinued for more than twenty years, until Stieglitz finally put down his camera, Mention should also be made of the installation photographs that Steglite made of the exhibitions at “ao Surely these ae properly looked at frst ofall documents se 1 Fanetion nevertheless in the early war years St lit be gan to make these photographs not in a per functory and dutiful way, as though to record only the gross, approximate facts, but with new precision and elegance, hoping to make hi pictures describe the quality of light and th continuity of the space, and the texture of each object within the frame, and the way in which all of the objects within the frame play against each other to make a satisfactory pattern—a pattern that does not quite contradict, but exists in a temporary truce with the claims of deep space The record picture of the Picasso-Braque eshi bition of 1015 (Lig. 10) is one of the most sats factory of these, and it might have helped persuade Stieglitz that one could make art out anything one valued. There are several readily available expla nations, none of them mutually exclusive, fo the renewed vitality and the new character of Stioglit’s work “toward the end of the 209 days,” to use Steichen’s dating, The most obvi ous of these explanations is that Stieglitz finally had time to return to what was perhaps after a king photographs—since his larger political ambitions had failed or were fail ing. The Photo-Secession had heen effectively dead since the Buffalo show. (It had not bes his first love—n necessary to call a meeting of the board to dls solve the elubs it was only necessary for Si 10 stop thinking about it.) Stiegitz’s great qu terly magazine Camera Work was also dying. It has been pointed out often enough that his orig inal udience of pictorialist photographers dropped their subscriptions when confronted with Picasso, Matisse, and Gertrude Stein; it should also be noted that no altemnative audlien picked up the slack. The magazine's circulationdropped from over 1,cc0 in 1904 to thirty-six in 1917, And Stiegli’s gallery was also in trou- ble, especially after the 1913 Armory Show. After often threatening to do so, Stieglitz finally closed the doo of that extraordinary place in Tune 1017. Stieglitz hed certainly not finished his life as a promoter, dealer, and exhorter for ‘modern art, but after this point it seems that he managed to maintain a more effective bal lance between his life as an artist and his life as The second plausible reason for Stieglita’s leap to « new level of invention is that he had been educated by much of the mode ited work ically by the and ideas of Picasso. It is surely true that Stieglite’s evolving concept of the » his gallery, most spec sential na- ture of photography was, by about 1015, framed nce to his own conception of modem painting, Stieglitz called the new painting “anti photography.” and thus declared a theoretical ‘opposite against which his own new intuition of photography could define itself. twas clearly a false dichotomy, but not for that reason less use- ful. The source of this philosophic ‘would seem to have been not Picass L position but Mar- ins De Zayas, a caricaturist and perhaps chief aesthetician of the Stieglitz group. In 1915, in the short-lived journal 297, De Zayas wrote a brief essay to accompany a lange gravure reprodue- tion of Stieglitz’s photograph The Steerage. He explained that Stieglitz had surpassed Art and. hhad helped free us from that outmoded concept. Now modem painting would help us comprehend se, Alfred Stiegl. Pewsso Braque Echbition at 99115. The Museum, of Modern Art, New York, Gift of (Charles Sheler 1”the inner world, and photography the object y of the outer world. He added that the com- prehension of pure objectivity in photography would be possible only if the photographer al- lowed the eamera “full power of expression," but he did not suggest how that might be done. We are concerned here, however, not with Stieglita asa systematic thinker about art, but as ‘an artist: a person who will be forgiven almost any philosophical error if he or she makes won derful things. A man of Stieglite’s artistic intelligence ‘could not but be deeply affected by the experi- ‘ence of living as intimately as he did with the works of the great modern pioneers that he exhibited at “291.” Nevertheless, appreciation of the extraordinary achievements of one art not automatically (or even often) translated into great ereative strides in another. Stieglit’s knowledge of modern painting was real but vicarious: his knowledge of photography was visceral, and it seems not to have readily ab- sorbed lessons learned by the intellect. If it was Picasso’ work that revised Stieg! 5 its effect was curiously slow-acting. Stieglitz had ‘mounted a large show of Picasso's drawings and watercolors in spring 1911, and other varieties of early modemist art had been seen in the gallery earlier: Matisse in 1908: Alfred Maurer, Fohn Marin, and Marsden Hartley in 1909; and Arthur Dove and Max Weber in 1010. But it is difficult to detect any direct transfer of ideas from their work to Stieglitz’, either then or later." Without doubt, Sticglita’s new pictures after the mid-teens are in some general way informed by a knowledge of the vocabulary of modem painting: they exhibit (with restraint) a hei ned awareness of the meaning of the fragmen- tary and of the elliptical view. And the frequent climination in his compositions ofthe stage floor —the ground—produces a greater tension be- ‘ween the picture plane and the described space These are of course qualities endemic to mod~ cmnisim; Stieglitz might have learned them from ‘many sources: Tt seems most likely, however, that he earned them from the work of Paul Strand who, earlier than Stieglitz, had internalized the ‘more obvious lessons of eubism and who (rather briefly) made pictures that were unmistakably —in the parochial, high-art sense—modern. In these terms, the pictures that Strand showed Stieglitz in 1915 were more advanced (fg. 11) than anything that Stieglitz had done.” Stieglitz himself tells us as much. His praise of the early work of Strand is surely the most extravagant in his long history as a commentator on photogra~ phy: “In the history of photography there are bout few photographers who, from the point of view of expression, have really done work of any importance. ... The... photogravures in ¢his ‘number represent the real Strand. The man who has actually done something from within, The photographer who has added something to what has gone before." ‘The fact that Strand assimilated (or atleast appropriated) cubist tactics earlier and more thoroughly than Stieglitz does not of course ‘mean that he was Stieglit’s equel as an arti Such a claim would perhaps not be insuppor' able, but it could surety not be supported on such mechanistic grounds. The question of who first made photographs that consciously made use of cubist solutions is of limited interest— comparable, perhaps, to the question of which modern painter frst paid close attention to the accidental double images (two-headed dogs) in early photographs. Surely it has long since been clear that modern painting cannot be defined «= “anti-photography,.” although che influence of photography on painting has surely been sub- stantial. Conversely, modem photography carunot be defined in terms of the use that photoz raphers have made of precedents established in painting. Painting and photography are parts of a larger visual tradition; their concerns andpowentials overlap, At times their paths closely parallel each other, but itis also true that each medium es ei gencies and imperatives that bubble up from pressures formed within. Thus it is possible to say that Paul Strand’s modem than that of Lewis Hine, work isn for example, only if one defines the word mod- em carefully and narrowly, so that it is clear that one is using the word in a limited art-world context, not a broader cultural one, But even without careful definitions, it is obvious that Sirs are phycaly more beaut mor filly considered, more exalted Phorngrphy was bora modem. Is prob- lan nel othe weld high reas not and it was to th : rather servile goal that Stieglitz dicated the best of his energies for more than twenty years, But around the age of fifty he seems to have been rescued, partly by the ex- ample of Strands new work and perhaps partly by disillusion, and he was freed to redirect his rnergies toward a new conception of an art of photography The pictures that came out of this new con- ception seem in fact 10 have little to do with cubism, except perhaps in the sense that the revolution in painting discarded the models that Stieglite and his friends had been emulat- ing, Stieglitz would not be fooled twice; certainly he would not respond to cubism as the largely talented but intellectually disadvantaged Coburn did—by photographing through a kind af kaleidoscope. 1 Paul Strand, Wall tors The Museu of Me York Given ancnymonsy a2 Surely the Lake George place itself played role in the change that came to after the Great War. Stieglit’s father Edward hhad died in 1909, but Oaklawn, his ambitious shingled “cottage” on the lake, was not sold un: til 1919, the year that Stieglitz and O'Keeffe spent their first summer in the more modest farmhouse on the Lake George property, The was white and spare and out of the trees, up on the hill where the air moved freely and more of the sky was visible, On the bill farmhoy the shapes and textures of man made things were plain and elemental; character was not the product of a designer's art, but was (in Horatio Greenough’s phrase) the record of funetion. The qualities of Stioglitz’s late work are consonant with the qualities of the place, and it is tempting to believe that the place was ‘one of the photographer's teachers, In his life at Lake Georg comforted by family and servants and depend- lite was able friends, and was insulated from the emo. tional risks that attended the competitivenes: life in the city. We might guess that at Lake George not every word, or even every exposur need be a statement ex cathedra, and Stieglitz could unbend a little, take chances, experiment with the idea of what an art of photography might be. He had for years produced the stlte: group portraits that recorded which members of the extensive Stieglitz clan were in reside: at Oaklawn during one summer ar another (fig. 2), but like the early installation views of -291” exhibitions, he would hardly have con ered these obligatory family documents works of art. By 1016, however, he was able to regard th: casual life of the place as material that could serve his serious artistic ambitions. One day that summer he made at least six extraordinary pi tures of Ellen Koeniger finishing her swim in the Jake (four of which are reproduced on page 45)- In their freedom from pictorial contrivan these seem unprecedented in Stieglitz’s works in earlier pictures the kinetic element represented one variable note in an otherwise secure and conventional chord. Wh Stieglitz wrote in 1897 about photography with the hand-held camera he outlined his procedure very clearly Tt is well to choose your subject, egardl figures, and eareflly study the lines and light ing. After having detern the passing figures and await the moment in which everything is in balances that is, satis your eye. This often means hours of patien waiting, My picture, ‘Fifth Avenue, Winter.” is ned upon these watch the result ofa three hours” stand during a fievoe snowstorm on February 22d, 1893, awaitin the proper moment.”® This formula would not help him make the Ellen Koeniger pictur there is here no pattern of “lines and lighti independent of the image of the swimmer. 10 to which the active architectural context ment can be neatly inserted, The entire subject is in constant flux, and each moment proposes &new problem. A few years later Stieglitz began tophotozraph clouds in motion, a variation on the new game which will be considered later. ‘The porisaits that Stieglitz made with the Tange camera are deliberate, magisterial, rock- solid; Poul Rosenfeld wondered if Stieglitz did ‘pot have hypnotie power over his siters, and the comment seems poetically just. In contrast, some of the best of the snapshots made with the smaller hand-held Graflex eamera are cheer- fully centsifugal—only provisionally stable. Sometimes they are blessed with wit, as with ‘the hilarious portrait of Georgia O'Keeffe and Donald Davison (page 52), in which they seem to have been half transformed by an erratic home-made time machine into Quixote and Daleinea, he with his armor and lance stolen from tho potting shed, she with her conspirato- rial smile suggesting that she knows the good Knight is slightly off his rocking horse ‘The Lake Geonge farm gave Stieglitz a place of freedom and respite, and it gave him also a panoramic reprise of the span of his life. There at the same table were his mother and her nineteenth-century haute-bourgenise friends, his Edwardian siblings and cousins, his liberated, Postwar modernist friends, and the bone-wise, country-bumpkin servants, with their own un stated opinions of the goings-on. “The old horse of 37 was being kopt alive by the 70-year-old oachman,”” Stiegliv said, and next to the old ‘busgy was his wife's new Ford, a shiny symbol of her independence and his growing isolation. Its clear that Stieglit’s new life as a pho Aographer had begun before he frst met Georgia O'Keeffe in May 1016 and well before the two became lovers, whether that was in 9x7 or in 4918. Neverthcles, the rejuvenation of Stieglitz that attended the discovery and exploration of this fat and paionate love ffir may have contributed to his artistic energy during the fol- loving rare Some might even argue that, if selfs presence contributed to Stieglita’s success during the years when they spent their creative summer months together at Lake George, s0 also her habitual migration to New Mexico, from the early thirties onward, made possible che lonely elegies that Stieglitz produced during his last working years. zlit’s Portsait of O'Keeffe—a series of ‘more than three hundred photographs—was ‘made over a period of two decades, but most of the individual pictures were made in the frst ‘years of their affair, when the besotted, insa~ tiable Stieglitz seemed compelled to photograph his lover inch by inch and moment by moment, and across the spectrum of her emotional life. ‘The characteristic pictures of O'Keeffe during to18 and 1919 comprise a kind of artistic ravish- ‘ment. There is about them a humid, clandestine, interior quality; often the character of the light suggests that they were made in a tent, perhaps the tent of a barbarian chief, In fact, most of them were made on East Fifty-ninth Sereet, in the vacant studio of Stieglit’s niece Elizabeth, where O'Keeffe had heen temporarily billeted in theoretical propriety cis generally, but not always, possible to know whether a given picture ofthe series was fein New York or in the country, nor can all of the pictures be dated with reasonable confi dence, Nevertheless, Benita Eisler is probably correct in estimating that over half of the pictures of the Portrait were made in rox8 and 1910—during O'Keeffe's first two years with Stieglitz.” OF the selection of fifty-one pictures reproduced in Georgia O'Keeffe: A Portrait by Alfred Stieglits(1978)® twenty-eight were made before 1926. Tis also clear that only a small minority of the early pictures of the Portrait series were made at Lake George, and that even in 1918 these had a character distinet from that of the Fifty-ninth Steet picnures. The latter, no matter hhow intimate, seem in the philosophical sense ideal representations, pictures that describe asEy woman as artist, woman as fertility goddess, woman as child, woman as man, woman as Jover, woman as sacrificial offering, ete. rather than Georgia O'Keoffe of Sun Prairie in various moods and circumstances. In this sense, the carly O'Keeffe pictures, in spite of their physi- cal beauty and new formal power, retain a dis- ‘tant but recognizable kinship with the old symbolist female stereotypes of the Photo- Secessionist days. It is perhaps true that the Portrait never rids itself entirely of this mythic overlay, but in the Lake George pictures, even from the beginning, we see the gradual emer- gence ofa subject who serves no ietions but het own, In the late, great pictures of O'Keeffe in her ear—tiberated, ready to drive off, safe in her machine from his fumbling, ierelevane intima cies, able wo look at him now with a kind of dis- imerested fondness and even with pity think we see no syntheti, operatic sent but che truth. These seem pictures made by a photographer who had finally and painfully earned bravery Writing of the O'Keeffe Portrait, Paul Rosenfeld seems almost terrified by the atavis tic force the pictures embody and the enormity of the demand they express, While acknowledg- ing playful and joyous moments in the work, he emphasizes—rightly, it seoms to me—its dark and tormented side, noting the sitters “irra- tional hungey demandful eyes. ... A baliled woeful face... A lioness threatened, proud anger poising on eyes, lips, nostrils: ready 10 spring.”* Rosenfeld was writing before Werner Heisenberg enunciated the uncertainty prin- ciple, which stated that the act of measuring a subatomie event changed the nature of the event. Photographers know, to their dismay, that cameras also change the nature of the events they describe. It is not inconceivable that the “bafiled woeful face. ..” was in part the expres- sion of a sense of desperation at being unable to escape the constant intrusion of Stieglit’s cam. era, Her lover's photographic attentions were doubtless flattering up wa point and few of us are wholly bored by pictures of ourselves, even ‘though most of them show us as less comely than we are in truth, Nevertheless, there is 4 limit 10 the amount of time that most of us would wish 1 spend with # large camera staring at our eyes or navel, especially ifwe were expected to maintain difficult, u natural poses —sometimes for a minute or more—without moving. From 1919 to 1927 Stieglitz and O'Keeffe spent long summers—often five months or more —together at Lake George, but after 1922 (on- til the end of the decade) additions to the Portrait slowed to a trickle, while Stieglitz con- centrated on photographing clouds. Irmiight also be noted that after about 1920 the pictures of the Portrait no longer seem to concern sexual appetite. In the next two or three years this motif contimees in pictures of other women: Rebecca Strand, the mysterious Margaret Tiead- well, Ida O'Keeffe, Stieglitz’s niece Georgia Engelhard, and others, and then subsides until 1930, when Stieglitz begins to photograph Dorothy Norman, As Stieglitz grew older his photographs described an increasingly personal world, In 1910 he still roamed New York in search of photographs, but when in 1915 he again began to photograph with seriousness he required the subject to come to him. After ro1e he seems rot to haye made a photograph in New York from sidewalk level, and from that date also he seems not to have photographed a stranger. Ac thirty-two, Stieglitz said (was quoted as say- ing): “Nothing charms me so much as walking among the lower classes, them eare= fully and making mental notes.” ju in fuer his photography had never confronted at close range the life of the lower classes. (He had pethaps not confronted the life of any clus, evenin 19¢7, he phote the interior of his father's overstuffed cottage at Lake George: see fig. 13.) He had however ex plorec dle di But after sto he photographed a New York empty of people, from his windows above the street: from “29r” and from his apart- ment at the Shelton Hotel and from his last gallery An American Place. Even at Lake aphed only his life: his fam- George, he pho ity and staff and friends, his house and barns, and the sky as it his trees and hi could be seen from his hill In 1922 Stiezlitz be aph clouds. fand this subject became a major preoccupation gan 10 photogi that lasted through the rest of the decade and (with diminishing intensity) into the early thir- ties, In 1923 he wrote an article for the London magazine The Amateur Photographer and Pho- tography i. which be stated his motive, or rather his several motives, in making these pictun He made them (1) because he was annoyed at Waldo Fran having said that his suceess as a photo was due to his hypnotic power over his si because he was annoyed at his brother-in-law for having suggested that be had abandoned his interest in musi {3) because he was interested in the relationship Hetween clouds and the world, (4) because he ‘wap interested in clouds for them: ves, (5) be- cause clouds represented an unusually chal lenging technical problem, (6) because he wanted to see how much he had le photo eel in forty years (peape »reva due resumption of ‘project begun much earlier, and (8) hecause he wanted by photographing d photographing clouds to put dawn his philosophy of life Stieglite p mance: one notion after anther is thrown at the question, in the hope that one Toward the end of his article Stieglitz in- 1, Alfred Stiga. Late 6 able. gt. National Calley of Are, Washington, D.C. Aled Stiga Callin, cluded the following passage Tinew exactly what [was after [had told Miss O'Keeffe I wanted a series of photographs which when seen by Ernest Block (the great composer Ihe would exclaim: Music! musie! Man, why that is music! How did you ever do that? And he would point to violin, and flutes, and oboes, and brass, full of enthusiasm, and would say he'd have to write a symphony called *Clouds.” Not like Debussy’s but much, much more And when finally had my series often photographs printed, and Bloch seu them— what [said I iwanted to happen happened verbatim." ‘Those who can accept without misgivis this claim of miraculous foresight are unlikely motives are altogether compatible. In any case14 FBlleman. Cire (plamen. Seen at Moun. Hilson, California. Published fn WJ. Humphreys, igs and Clouds crities have generally resolved Stieglita’s ambivalence by paying litle attention to his seven explanations and concentrating oa the eighth, which fits most neatly within the general perception that modern art is concerned with litle but personal expression. The idea that a photograph of the sky might be the container, so to speak, of the photographer's spiritual essence —like the powdered bones in a martyr's reli- quary—has proven irresistible to otherwise hhard-headed critics mn 1924 oF 1935 Stieglitz began to call his sky pictures Equivalents; they were to be seen as the “equiealents of my most profound life experi ‘ence, my basie philosophy of life."* The expla- nation is deeply unsatisfactory, not only because it is unverifiable, but hecause of its circularity Stieglitz does not explicitly say that his most profound life experience should be of special in- terest to those outside of his immediate f but the claim does seem implicit. A century ily after the rise of Romanticism, we may have its purest and most innocent expression: an artist is of inter not because of what he or she has made, but because of what he or she is. In its pop-modern form the proposition says that we are interested in Stieglitz not because he gave us the pictures, but the converse: we are interested in the pictures hecause they give us Stieglitz, In this formulation, the idea that Stieglitz deserves ur interest is a given, a self-evident truth, hut self-evident truths have short life expectancies ‘The sky was not a new artistic issue, In the early nineteenth century, before the divorce of art and science, painters had detached it from the ground and from traditional landscape stories and sentiments, and had tried to master its every mood and aspect. By 183 the Ex chemist Luke Howard —born in 1772, four years before John Constable—had divided clouds into four visual types, and given them Latin names; cirrus, stratus, cumulus, and nimbus, which, wodifiers, they still retain, Clouds were a difficult problem for nineteenth-century pho- tographers, because of the limitation graphic chemistry. But by the early twentioch ‘of photo: P century the development of new ‘emulsions made it possible to separate more ef- fectively the cloud from its blue or blue-zvay ground, and the sky became a favorite subject, By the twentios photographs of the sky were a standard component of meteorological 4 primitive antecedent of television’s nightly satellite weather map. Figures 14 and 15 reproduee sky phovo- ‘graphs made in 1926 or earlier by P. Elle and W. J. Humphreys, and included by the latter in his book Fogs and Clouds. Humphsevs ‘vasa professional meteorologist, but he was also ‘an amateur of clouds and a collector (2s well as ‘a maker) of cloud photographs. In the preface to his book he invites his readers to send him photographs of cloud types that he did not in clude, or better pictures of the types that he did, assuring them that he will be great'y appreciative, and put their pictures to goodse. Stieglitz is not known to have responded, We will doubtless assume that Humphreys ‘and his contributors were interested primarity in clouds for themselves and less in clouds as equivalents of {theie] most profound life expe rience.” but peshaps the issue is less clear than wwe think. Humphreys says: “From delights we fondly cherish to dreads we fain would forget fog in all its moods and circumstances plays compellingly upon the whole gamut of human emotions.“ One way in which Stieglit’s sky pictures ‘were almost surely different than those of W. J. Humphreys and his contributors is that Stieglitz’s were realized to a much higher level of craft. Much of Stiealite’s best work as a younger man had hegun with his fascination with a dif- ficult technical problem,” and in a less obvious sky pictures also represented this sort of challenge. The pictures he chose to make almost always represented extreme problems of tonal rendition, On one hand were those subjects where the brightness of the clouds and the sky ‘were very nearly the same: on the other (more Aiffieult) hand were the subjects that included the most extreme range of brightness, even i ‘eluding the disk of the sun, The technical prob: Jem might be compared to the problem of Scoring a passage of music to secure a clear and Appropriate relationship between heavy and del- fcate sounds. (Stieglitz called his frst series of sky pictures Musie—A Sequence of Ten Cloud Photographs, pechaps in part because he felt the Dhotographic gray scale analogous to the musi- ‘eal scale.) Just as in music there is often more ‘than one soft sound (futes and violas, say) that Must be distinguished from each other as well 4 from the sharp-voiced oboes and violins, so Photography therw are eases (subjects) that demand that the photographer find a way to Aistinguish between very subtle differences at the light end of the scale, and sismultaneou Between equally subtle differences at the dark be end." The best way to describe such a subject literally would be in a transparency, such as a stained-glass window or a color slide, since these ‘methods allow, in theory, a virtually infinite scale of brightness. A photographie print, on the other hand, has @ very narrow range of reflected brightness; in Stieglit’s sky pictures it is un- likely that the lightest tones are more than twenty times brighter than the darkest tones. Within that narrow range of grays (in a print smaller than a man’s hand) the object, one right say. was to make a picture that would suggest the immensities of celestial light and space. Failure was of course the rule When Stieglitz spoke to the world at lange he spoke with the confidence of Napoleon, and admitted no grounds for doubt. When he spoke to artists whom he trusted and admired he sometimes sounded more like a soldier of the levters to Marin and Dove, especially «try to coneeal what they already know that art is hard, that high success is a gift thet may be given once and then. withheld for years, or perhaps forever, and that there are no trust- worthy formulas. The best of these letters are 15. WJ. Humphreys, Alto-cumulua oblished in W. J. Humphreys, ge ‘and Clouds (192).not Teutonic tirades about art and truth but ‘commentaries on the difficulty—and the occa- sional excitement—of making a thing well. In 1935, in the middle of the sky picture series, he ‘wrote to Dove: “So far the summer has been un- productive. True, [have a print or two—rather annusing & [haven't the slightest idea what they express! ... The prints are beautiful neverthe- less. So 'm at the game once more—ehronio— incurable.” (Two years earlier he had written about the cloud pictures for a popular magazine, and had known precisely what they expressed, Stieglitz is in fact consistently a more sympa- thetic and believable figure when he speaks 10 ‘hose artists in whom he most deeply believes.) In fall 1925 he wrote to Dove again, now in full stride and jubilant: “ve been going great guns & finally feel fit to enjoy activity—lots of it And so F'm putting in 18 hours daily— destroying hundreds of prints after making them—keeping few. Eastman isa fiend—& Fm ‘not always Master.” Ic was habitual for Stieglite to rail against what he considered the outrageous inadequacy of Eastman Kodak materials, although he con~ tinued to use them, What is uncharacteristic is the admission that his technique was not always perfect, a confession thathe could perhaps make ‘only to am artist whom he considered his equal." The outpouring of sky pictures beginning in 199g relates to a basie change in technique In 1022 the cloud pictures were made with a view camera, which meant that Stieglite could not accurately frame his picture if the clouds ‘were moving. (In a view camera one frames the picture on the ground glass, then closes the Jens, inserts the filin-holder, and removes the dark slide that had proteeted the film from the light. Then one makes the exposure. During the two seconds that have elapsed the clouds have moved.) Stieglita’s 922 cloud pictures are relatively static, and show for the most part clouds near the horizon, which appear to move less rapidly than those overhead (moving gt right-angles to the picture plane). From 1923 on Stieglitz did most of his sky pictures with the Graflex—a single-lens-reflex camera in which the image on the ground glass remains visible until ehe shutter is tripped, (Gig. 16), With this camera he could frame pre- cisely the clouds as they scuttled across the sky, and he could also point the camera up toward ‘the zenith, an extremely cumbersome and une natural posture for a view camera, Ifthe cam- ra is pointed straight up, the resulting piccure has no natural top or bottom, and can be ori- ented in any direction. As the camera is lowered toward the horizon, the picture if rotated away from its natural axis, will acquiee subtle ten- sions with the picture plane, introduced chiefly by the strangeness of the lighting. Stieglitz often did this with his eloud pictures, thus tweaking our aboriginal expectations, and introducing quietly exhilarating or threatening overtones into the picture, Sometimes the device becomes obvious, and therefore a trick.” ‘The disadvantage of the Graflex was that its picture was small—only a quarter the size ofthe one made by the eight-by-ten view camera— but its advantages were enormous for pictures that could not be studied but must be seized on the wing, without deliberation. Not included among Stieglitz’ eight reasons for photograph ing clouds was the fact that it was fun —sinilae to, but better than, shooting elay pigeons, since in that game one scores a simple yes or no (the clay saucer is either broken or not): whereas in photographing clouds the result falls on «on and open-ended seale reaching from tedious to electrifying, Bur it wos not Stiglita’s style 1 admit in publie that there was a connection between art and play, even though he lnad the authority of the great Friedrich Schiller, who said that man was only wholly man when he ‘vas playing.” Eventually Stieglitz claimed thot al of his