Alfred Stieglitz (Hoboken, New York State, 1864 - New York, 1946) remains celebrated in his own country, and was internationally famous in his time. He was the founder of Photo-Secession and the editor of Camera Work magazine, which championed photography as a fine art. Later, he mounted pioneering exhibitions of European avant-garde art, from Cezanne to Picasso, in his gallery at 291 Fifth Avenue, New York. This book's publication coincides with a major Stieglitz retrospective at the Musee d'Orsay, accompanied by an exhibition of the Stieglitz prints in its own collection. It includes images from his Pictorial period (1890-1910), particularly some strikingly impressionistic views of New York (gravures from Camera Work), capturing the city's phenomenal growth at the turn of the century. Stieglitz's later work is magnificently represented in prints recently donated by the Georgia O'Keefe Foundation. These sharply focused and highly descriptive works communicate the photographer's distinctive approach to reality, enriched by inner experience.
The admirable nude shots of the artist Georgia O'Keefe (later Stieglitz's wife) are highly original close-ups, charged with an eroticism that was startlingly new in American photography at the time. Stieglitz's cloud photographs (which he termed "equivalents") taken at the family property at Lake George after 1923, were meant to be viewed in negetive to heighten their abstract character. Towards the end of his life Stieglitz lovingly photographed the trees at Lake George, as symbols of nature's endurance. Although he worked with two very different approaches, his aim was always to express a personal vision through flawless technique. He never tried to use his photographs to further a political or social cause. They had an impact on photographers as varied as Paul Strand, Edward Weston and Harry Callahan, and testify to a resolutely personal, but deeply human, experience.
