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not to mix home life with business life; he preferred to
have his home fi lled discussions of the arts. As a result,
Alfred enjoyed a home environment full of discussions
of literature and the arts as well as meetings with well-
known artistic and literary fi gures.
Alfred grew up next to the Elysian Fields in Central
Park, home to the invention of modern baseball and
inspiration for a lifelong love of the game. Stieglitz
identifi ed with his subject, a notion that traced back to
his childhood experience of bringing food to an organ
grinder because Stieglitz identified with the organ
grinder. During the 1870s, Alfred saved money and
brought a sandwich to an Italian organ-grinder and his
monkey, who played outside Stieglitz’s house every
Saturday. Years later, Stieglitz confessed to his mother
that “I was the organ-grinder.” Stieglitz often affi rmed
that whenever he took a photograph he was photograph-
ing himself—regardless of its ostensible subject—so
that all his photographs were, in effect, self-portraits
that conveyed symbolic representations of his and the
symbolic representations of his feelings. Alfred would
cultivate intense jealousy of the twin boys.
For a good part of the beginning of his career,
Stieglitz believed in what is called “straight photog-
raphy,” as opposed to unusual visual effects achieved,
among other means, by the manipulation of negatives
and chemicals. This later proved seemingly ironic as
Stieglitz became one to rely heavily on manipulation
of photographic images. However, at the heart of his
photographic creations, Stieglitz never wavered from
sticking to the fundamental emulsion, lens, and camera
qualities. Throughout his career, Stieglitz photographed
primarily in the open air.
Lake George, near the Finger Lakes in upstate New
York, was a favorite haunt of both Stieglitz and his
family, where they often spent their summers, and also
the site of many of his photographic images. New York
City was an equally important focus of Stieglitz’s work.
Works such as “Winter on Fifth Avenue” (alternately
referred to as “Fifth Avenue, Winter”) and “Spring
Showers” captured the atmospheric environment of
the inner city in a way that previous mediums had
been (lacking)/wont to do/capture. Other works, such
as “Spiritual America,” depicting a gelded or castrated
horse captured the spiritual void being created by mod-
ern American commercialism and manifested in a crisis
in American masculinity. Stieglitz’s work, “The Steer-
age” (1907), on the other hand, dealt alternately with
geometric forms constructed in spatial planes within
a photographic frame and issues of social class and
gender differences.
In 1905, Stieglitz established the famous gallery 291
named for its location at 291 Fifth Avenue in New York
City. The gallery was designed to be a location for the
exhibition of photography as a fi ne art in America. Yet,
soon after opening, the gallery broadened its scope to
include the works of the modern French movement and
introduced to the United States the work of Cezanne, Pi-
casso, Braque, Brancusi, and many others. It also made
known the work of such American artists as John Marin,
Charles Demuth, Max Weber, and Geogia O’Keeffe,
whom Stieglitz married in 1924.
Stieglitz moved freely from these works into his
photographs of his second wife, painter Georgia
O’Keeffe. The nude photographs Stieglitz composed of
O’Keeffe’s hands, face, chest, and body were the content
of a one-man show at his 291 gallery. Ironically, these
photographs of O’Keeffe’s body, not her body of work,
are what brought her attention.
With the demolition of the building 291 occupied, the
Photo-Secession ended in 1917. However, the most of its
members had already effectively left the group either as
a result of personal confl icts with Stieglitz or new ideas
about where the movement should be headed.
Never one to tolerate a seeming imperfection in his
past, Stieglitz, who maintained a near-obsessive passion
for his body of photographic work, attempted to destroy
all of the material he produced for Camera Work. How-
ever, after Stieglitz happened to communicate with the
director of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the MET
decided to collect all of Stieglitz’s remaining works from
the Camera Work era. This collection would later be
incorporated into a separate library within the MET.
Retouching portraits had been common in the col-
lodion era, but after 1917, new art critics were calling
for a “straight photography.” Straight photography came
to refer to art critics desire for an art that relied on the
photographer’s eye, instinct, knowledge of composition
and inherent good taste as opposed to special effects
such as retouching. While retouching was necessary
procedure for the majority of daguerreotype images as
they were fragile, it was not a requisite for modern pho-
tography that could now be produced on sturdy papers
and could withstand less cautious handling.
Stieglitz sought to produce an art free from the pres-
sures of rampant commercialism. He felt that, unlike in
Walt Whitman’s era, the then-current day presented a
world where advertising and commercials took the place
of American imagination. Throughout his life, He tried
to spread the idea that art is not property and should be
accessible to all.
In 1922, Stieglitz began a series of abstract pho-
tographs entitled “Equivalents,” or abstract works
composed primarily of clouds, atmosphere, and light,
in which cloud formations create various moods and
textures. He referred to them as his attempt to “put down
my philosophy of life—to show that photographs were
not due to subject matter” (Newhall, 171). Stieglitz
always saw these photographs as a refl ection of himself
in some way.