Alfred Stieglitz has racked up an impressive roster of achievements as an artist-photographer.
[“Winter, Fifth Avenue,” 1893]
At the turn of the 20th century, Stieglitz helped make photography a respected art form, staging a successful show at Gramercy Park’s National Arts Club in 1902. He experimented with different photo technology and processes, and he furthered the careers of early photographers like Edward Steichen.
Steichen, along with Stieglitz, was a founding member of the Photo-Secession movement, which took a “’painterly’ approach to photographic image-making,” according to Artspace.
[“The Terminal,” 1893]
But the achievement I’m most impressed with is as an early Gotham street photographer.
Born in Hoboken in 1864 to German Jewish immigrant parents, he found his way to New York City in 1890 after studying the new medium of photography in 1880s Germany. During the next decade, Stieglitz “made New York City his central subject,” per the National Gallery of Art (NGA).
“He walked the streets with a handheld camera, which allowed for more spontaneity than a large camera mounted on a tripod. He concentrated, as he had in Europe, mainly on working-class scenes of daily life, albeit now conveyed with a greater immediacy,” continued the NGA.
[“The Flatiron,” 1903]
To achieve the pictorial quality he strived for, he made a point of photographing city scenes in snow and rain—which lent an Impressionist effect to his images and bathed gritty streets in a glowy or misty softness, explains the Art Institute of Chicago.
“Stieglitz soon realized that technical challenges other photographers largely shied away from, such as rain, snow, and low light, could be a boon to his picture-making,” states the NGA. “Although such conditions were difficult to work in, they helped unify compositions, softened the unruly city, and tied it to nature.”
[“Winter, New York,” 1898]
But harsh weather conditions didn’t obscure the austerity of New York’s streets. Viewing “Winter, Fifth Avenue” showcases the raw, difficult conditions the carriage driver is facing as he struggles his way up the avenue.
Conditions were raw for Stieglitz as well, who wrote in 1897 that capturing this image of the carriage driver required that he stand for three hours with his “hand camera” awaiting “the proper moment” to shoot.
“An Icy Night in New York,” from 1898 (below), appears to be a benign nocturnal park scene. But the trees flanking the sidewalk can be interpreted as symbols of a menacing and mysterious city.
Throughout his life, Stieglitz continued to photograph New York City, with an increasing focus on the older New York of his young adult years subsumed into the modern skyscraper city.
He captured the Flatiron building, ringed by snow-topped trees, in 1903. Like most New Yorkers, the completion of this 20-plus story structure on 23rd Street made a big impression on him.
“I suddenly saw the Flat-Iron Building as I had never seen it before,” he said, per the Art Institute of Chicago. “It looked, from where I stood, as if it were moving toward me like the bow of a monster ocean steamer, a picture of the new America which was in the making.”
[Self-portrait, 1886]
The city was changing, and Stieglitz was determined to capture the shift.
“My New York is the New York of transition—The Old gradually passing into the New. . . . The Spirit of that something that endears New York to one who really loves it—not for its outer attractions—but for its deepest worth—& significance. —The universal thing in it,” he wrote in 1920, via the Art Institute of Chicago.
By this time, Stieglitz had earned a name for himself as one of the most accomplished photographers of the impending Modernist age.
[“From ‘Room 3003’ – The Shelton, New York, Looking Northeast, 1927]
As Modernism dawned in the early 1900s, Stieglitz would switch his style to “a more straightforward depiction of quotidian life,” states the Metropolitan Museum of Art, illustrated by this East Side snow-topped tenement panorama above.
[Top image: National Gallery of Art; second image: Victoria & Albert Museum; third image: Art Institute of Chicago; fourth image: Victoria & Albert Museum; fifth image: Art Institute of Chicago; sixth image: Wikipedia; seventh image: Art Institute of Chicago]
Tags: Alfred Stieglitz Flatiron Building, Alfred Stieglitz New York City Street Photos, Alfred Stieglitz Snow Street Scenes of NYC, New York City in Snow 1890s, NYC Photos 1890s, Photo-Secession Alfred Stieglitz
