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Stieglitz’s circle, a group of artists who all had ex-
hibited at 291 before the gallery’s demolition, combined
the Whitmanian notion of nature as health-giving and
unifying with an aesthetic philosophy taken from the
socialism of William Morris and the Arts and Crafts
movement. Stieglitz’s determination for high-quality
art photography to reach an international audience was
proven in his correspondence with Lewis Mumford, the
editor of the international art journal with a socialist
slant, the Dial. Stieglitz desired to have photographs
entered into the Dial and thereby have well-produced
photographs reach an international audience.
From 1917 until approximately 1925, Stiegliz pro-
duced some of his best known works including the
extraordinary portraits of O’Keeffe, studies of New
York, and the “Equivalents,” or great cloud series.
From 1925 until 1930, he operated the Intimate Gallery
(1925–1930) and An American Place (1930–1946),
which both sought to further the conceptual advance
gained by the exhibitions that occurred with the photo
secessionists with 291.
Sarah B. Wheeler
See also: Art photography and aesthetics;
Daguerreotype; Frank, Eugene; Kasebier, Gertrude;
Photography as a profession; Portraiture; Printing
and contact printing; Sky and cloud photography;
Steichen, Edward J.
Biography
Alfred Stieglitz was born on 1 January 1864 in New
York City. He took up photography in the early 1880s
while living in Berlin, Germany. In 1901, he founded a
society of American pictorial photographers, the Photo-
Secession, based fi rmly in New York, and he created the
journal Camera Work in which to display the work of the
Photo-Secessionists. Stieglitz was one of the founders
of the pictorial movement and an advocate of straight
photography, or photography that strove not to alter
the photographic image after the image was captured.
Stieglitz, who fi rst displayed works of Brancusi, Braque,
Rodin, and Matisse in his 291 gallery, is credited with
awakening the American public and critics to modern
European movements in the visual arts. Often claiming
that truth was his obsession, Stieglitz sought not to alter
the image after it was captured by the camera. He began
a series of photographs of Georgia O’Keeffe, American
painter and feminist, who would later become his wife,
and launched a one-man show in his 29’ gallery entirely
of portraits of O’Keeffe. After the closing of 291 and
the termination of Camera Work, Stieglitz opened the
Intimate Gallery, consisting of rooms “at the Anderson
Galleries to promote the work of a circle of American
modernists in painting and photography that comprised,
besides himself, Arthur Dove, Marsden Hartley, John
Marin, O’Keeffe, and Strand” and ran the space from
1917 and 1925. Beginning in 1913, he made a series
of abstract photographs entitled “Equivalents,” the ma-
jority of which focused on clouds and atmosphere, to
illustrate what he felt were nature’s equivalents to his
philosophy of life. A number of these “Equivalents”
were photographed at Lake George—a site of interest to
the Hudson River School painters such as Thomas Cole,
Albert Bierstadt, Frederic Edwin Church, and Thomas
Moran—where Stieglitz summered. His work in this
later period includes portraits, hundreds of studies of
Georgia O’Keeffe, photographs of Lake George, clouds,
and New York City views. Stieglitz ran An American
Place, in which he exhibited principally painting, sculp-
ture, and graphic work, and occasionally photography,
from 1929 until his death on 13 July 1946.Further Reading
Connor, Celeste, Democratic Visions: Art and Theory of the
Stieglitz Circle, 1924–1934, Berkeley: University of California
Press, 2001.
Frank, Waldo (ed.), America and Alfred Stieglitz: A Collective
Portrait, New York: Octagon Books, 1975.
Greenough, Sarah, Modern Art and America: Alfred Stieglitz and
His New York Galleries, Washington: National Gallery of Art
and Boston: Bulfi nch Press, 2001.
Homer, William Innes, Alfred Stieglitz and the Photo-Secession,
Boston: Little, Brown, 1983
Kornhauser, Elizabeth Mankin, Stieglitz, O’Keeffe and American
Modernism, Catalog of an exhibition held at the Wadsworth
Atheneum, Hartford, Conn., 16 April–11 July 1999.
Newhall, Nancy Wynne, P. H. Emerson: The Fight for Photogra-
phy as a Pine Art, New York: Aperture, Inc., 1975.
Peterson, Christian. Alfred Stieglitz: Camera Notes. New York:
W. W. Norton and Company, 1993.
Phillips Collection, In the American Grain: Arthur Dove, Mars-
den Hartley, John Marian, Georgia O’Keeffe, and Alfred
Stieglitz: The Stieglitz Circle at the Phillips Collection,
Washington, D.C.: Counterpoint, 1995.
Stieglitz, Alfred, Camera Work: The Complete Illustrations
1903–1917, Köln and New York: Taschen, 1997.
Szarkowski, John, Alfred Stieglitz at Lake George, Catalog of an
exhibition held at the Museum of Modern Art, New York, 14
September 1995–2 January 1996; also shown at the Kunst- und
Ausstellungshalle der Bundesrepublik Deutschland, Bonn, 9
February–14 April 1996, and the San Francisco Museum of
Modern Art, 20 June–22 September 1966
Whelan, Richard, Stieglitz on Photography: His Selected Essays
and Notes, New York: Aperture, 2000STILL LIFES
Still life was a popular theme for photographers dur-
ing the nineteenth century for a number of reasons.
Technologically, the long exposure times required to
capture an image on a light-sensitive surface meant that
moving subjects were impossible to register until at least
the 1860s. Still lifes, however, allowed photographers
the greatest degree of control over their subject. In the