HISTORY OF PHOTOGRAPHY:
TWENTIETH-CENTURY
DEVELOPMENTS
By the end of the nineteenth century, a myriad of
technical advances had placed cameras and photo-
graphs in the hands of millions. George Eastman had
successfully mass-marketed Kodak cameras and
ingeniously provided for efficient developing. The
half-tone process had at last enabled photographs
to be published along side of text. Artistically-minded
photographers were challenging moribund photo-
graphic societies and gathering together to pursue
the artistic side of the medium. In the United States,
Alfred Stieglitz broke with the Camera Club of New
York. Members of this ‘‘Photo-Secession,’’ (founded
in 1902) included, among others, Gertrude Ka ̈sebier,
Clarence White, Alvin Langdon Coburn, George
Seeley, and Stieglitz’s ally, Edward Steichen. The
fifty issues of the quarterlyCamera Workmagazine,
published by Stieglitz between 1903 and 1917, multi-
ple printing documented the pictures and convictions
of the Photo-Secession. Considered among the most
sumptuous art magazines ever produced, it contained
superb reproductions of photographs. In addition to
Camera Work, the Photo-Secessionists showed work
at gallery 291, named from its street number on Fifth
Avenue, New York City, also known as the Little
Galleries of the Photo-Secession. Stieglitz showed not
only photographs there but also, from 1906 on,
avant-garde modern art, some of which was selected
in Paris by Steichen.
Straight Photography
After 1900, the notion of style was contested among
aesthetically minded photographers. The dominant
style of much twentieth century photography was
called ‘‘straight,’’ to distinguish it from the blurred,
vague look of Pictorialism, which had held sway in
the last half of the nineteenth century. Stieglitz’s
own style of the 1890s—less vague and less osten-
sibly ‘‘artistic’’—pointed the way to the ‘‘straight.’’
The new photography was crisp and looked more
purely a product of the camera. There was less
darkroom manipulation to the negative, and many
photographers used an approach called ‘‘previsual-
ization,’’ where the finished picture is composed in
the viewfinder. Some of those who had begun as
Pictorialists converted to this new approach, most
notably Edward Weston, whose trip to Ohio in
1923 and his encounter with the Armco Steel plant
marked a decisive shift towards a sober, brittle
style. Edward Steichen, too, one of the most roman-
ticizing Pictorialists up to about 1920, made a soul-
searching effort to learn and adapt to straighter
approaches. In the early 1920s, Stieglitz made a
series of cloud pictures entitledEquivalents, which,
despite their everyday subject, were intended to
convey the artist’s deepest feelings.
Stieglitz championed straight photographers such
as Paul Strand whose works were featured exclu-
sively in the last two issues ofCamera Workin 1916
and 1917.His candid pictures of street people taken
with a modified camera and his close-ups of machin-
ery and architecture demonstrated how the straight
style could produce documents filled with ideas and
feelings. Strand settled in France in 1950, thereafter
traveling extensively—to the Hebrides, Italy,
Ghana, and Egypt—and produced several books
of photographs. Stieglitz continued to be a dynamic
force for artistic photography in the 1920s and was
the proprietor of the Intimate Gallery, and another
gallery called An American Place—the title of which
reiterated his faith in the expressive aspirations of a
distinctly American creative spirit—until his death
in 1946. Many aspiring photographers—several of
whom would become famous—made the pilgrimage
to visit Stieglitz and ask for his advice. After his
death, his long-time partner, the painter Georgia
O’Keeffe, saw to it that his collection and his own
photographs entered important museum collections.
Group f/64, named for one of the aperture’s smal-
ler settings, which produced the maximum depth of
field with the greatest overall sharpness, was founded
in 1932 as an informal collection of like-minded
straight photographers. These included Edward
Weston, Imogen Cunningham, Sonya Noskowiak,HISTORY OF PHOTOGRAPHY: TWENTIETH-CENTURY DEVELOPMENTS