Alfred Stieglitz

Alfred Stieglitz (1864-1946) was one of the most consequential figures in the history of photography, whose contributions extended far beyond his own photographic practice, which he began as a student in Germany in 1883. He influenced generations of photographers, painters, and sculptors both directly and indirectly, and he did more than perhaps any other single figure to establish photography as a serious artistic medium in the United States. In 1905, together with Edward Steichen, he founded the Little Galleries of the Photo-Secession at 291 Fifth Avenue in New York, which later became known simply as 291. Through the numerous pioneering exhibitions he organized there, he elevated photography's status to the level of painting and sculpture, and he also introduced American audiences to major European modernists including Cézanne, Matisse, Picasso, and Rodin.

Stieglitz was a founder of the Photo-Secessionist and Pictorialist photography movements in the United States, and he promoted them in Camera Notes and Camera Work, the influential journals he founded and edited. Camera Work in particular remains one of the finest photographic publications ever produced, and it did essential work in defining what serious art photography could aspire to accomplish. His early photographs were Pictorialist in style, marked by soft focus, atmospheric printing, and painterly composition.

Stieglitz's late work focused in depth on a few sustained subjects, including New York City, which he photographed obsessively across the decades of its dramatic transformation, the cloud studies he called Equivalents, and a remarkable extended portrait series of his wife, the painter Georgia O'Keeffe. This body of images taken over many years constitutes one of the most sustained photographic portraits of any single subject in the history of the medium.

Stieglitz continued his gallery work through later ventures including the Intimate Gallery and An American Place, championing the American modernist painters he had gathered around him, including Georgia O'Keeffe, John Marin, Arthur Dove, Marsden Hartley, and Paul Strand. Working tirelessly as photographer, collector, curator, writer, and publisher, he secured photography's role as a legitimate medium of fine art for all the generations that followed.