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As a leader of the Photo-Secession movement, Alfred
Stieglitz searched for beauty through the craftsmanlike
creation of photographs, held pioneering exhibitions of his
contemporaries, published their works and sought to have
the still nascent art form taken as seriously as painting. But
as modernism seeped into the cultural ferment in the early
20th century, Stieglitz became mesmerized by the grow-
ing cacophony of society, of rising skyscrapers and soaring
airplanes, and strove to create what he termed “straight
photography,” offering truthful takes on the real world. In
1907 he was sailing to Europe, 4x5 Speed Graflex in tow,
when he set off from the first-class deck and came upon the
huddled masses in the ship’s steerage. There, the shawled
and swathed were crammed together on the compact lower
deck, the skewed geometry of the ship emphasizing their
claustrophobic accommodations and visually segregating
them from those on the upper deck. “A round straw hat;
the funnel leaning left, the stairway leaning right; the white
drawbridge, its railings made of chain,” Stieglitz later wrote.
“I stood spellbound for a while. I saw shapes related to one
another—a picture of shapes, and underlying it, a new vi-
sion that held me.” Despite its momentary impact, Stieglitz’s
photo, with its clear, unapologetic take on life, lay unnoticed
for four years. But when he published it on the cover of his
magazine Camera Work, The Steerage presented a radical way
of thinking about photography, not as a momentary mimic
of painting but a wholly formed and unique type of art. Ap-
pearing at the time of a seismic revolution in the arts, with
the emergence of such seminal figures as the composer Igor
Stravinsky and the architect Walter Gropius, this, one of the
first “modernist” pictures, helped photography to be seen on
a par with these other innovative forms of art. None other
than the painter Pablo Picasso admired The Steerage’s cubistic
sense and wrote that both he and Stieglitz were “working in
the same spirit.”