(b Hoboken, NJ, 1 Jan 1864; d New York, 13 July 1946). American photographer, editor, publisher, patron and dealer. Internationally acclaimed as a pioneer of modern photography, he produced a rich and significant body of work between 1883 and 1937. He championed photography as a graphic medium equal in stature to high art and fostered the growth of the cultural vanguard in New York in the early 20th century.

See the Abbreviations for further details.

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Alfred Stieglitz (1864-1946), American photographer, editor, and art gallery director, was a leader in the battle to win recognition for photography as an art.

Alfred Stieglitz was born in Hoboken, N.J., on Jan. 1, 1864. In 1871 the family moved to New York City, where Stieglitz attended elementary schools and the College of the City of New York until 1881. He then studied at the Realgymnasium in Karlsruhe, Germany, and the Berlin Polytechnic Institute. He enrolled in the photographic courses of Hermann Wilhelm Vogel, an outstanding photographic scientist. As a student, he traveled extensively throughout Europe and, beginning in 1886, sent photographs to competitions. By 1890, when he returned to America, he was already famous.

In the United States, Stieglitz continued to photograph, using the newly invented hand camera and surprising his contemporaries with such a technical tour de force as "Winter on Fifth Avenue," taken in 1893 during a blizzard. He organized competitions and exhibitions in camera clubs and from 1890 to 1895 was in the photoengraving business. He was editor of the American Amateur Photographer (1893-1896), Camera Notes (1897-1902), which was the official organ of the Camera Club of New York, and Camera Works (1902-1917).

When the National Arts Club of New York invited Stieglitz to hold an exhibition in 1902, he showed the work of those American photographers in whom he believed. He described the exhibition as the work of the Photo-Secession. Thus an informal society was formed that dominated art photography in America for 15 years. His chief colleague was a young photographer and painter, Edward Steichen, who assisted him in the society's Little Galleries, which came to be known as "291" from the Fifth Avenue address.

In 1907 Stieglitz began to show works of art other than photography at "291." In 1908 he exhibited drawings by the sculptor Auguste Rodin and drawings, lithographs, etchings, and watercolors by Henri Matisse - the first American exhibition of this modern artist. "291" became the most progressive art gallery in the country, showing the work of Pablo Picasso, Constantin Brancusi, Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, and young Americans such as John Marin.

In 1910 Stieglitz organized a vast exhibition of pictorial photography in Buffalo, N.Y. He helped the Association of American Painters and Sculptors to organize the "International Exhibition of Modern Art" in 1913. During the exhibition he showed his own photographs at "291" as a demonstration of the esthetic differences between photography and other visual media.

The "Photo Secession" disbanded in 1917, "291" closed, and Camera Workceased publication, but Stieglitz continued to photograph and exhibit. He made penetrating portraits of his friends and associates. In answer to a challenge that his photographs' power was due to his hypnotic influence over his sitters, Stieglitz began to photograph clouds, to show, as he wrote in 1923, "that my photographs were not due to subject matter." He called these photographs "Equivalents," and they almost rivaled abstract art in their beauty of form and chiaroscuro.

In 1929 Stieglitz opened An American Place, a gallery where he showed paintings by contemporary Americans and, later, photographs. From the windows of this 17th-floor gallery and from his apartment he photographed New York City. He died on July 13, 1946.

Further Reading

Dorothy Norman, Alfred Stieglitz: Introduction to an American Seer (1960), whose text consists mainly of Stieglitz's recollections as told to the author, is handsomely illustrated; the detailed chronology is invaluable. Doris Bry, Alfred Stieglitz, Photographer (1965), reproduces, in original size, 62 photographs in the collection of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; the text is concerned with Stieglitz's photographic activity. America and Alfred Stieglitz: A Collective Portrait, edited by Waldo Frank and others (1934), contains many brilliant essays which illuminate Stieglitz's philosophy and the breadth of his concern for the arts in America. Herbert J. Seligmann, Alfred Stieglitz Talking (1966), is a vivid journal of the author's visits with Stieglitz from 1925 to 1931.

Additional Sources

Eisler, Benita, O'Keeffe and Stieglitz: an American romance, New York: Doubleday, 1991.

Kim, Yong-gwon, Alfred Stieglitz and his time: an intellectual portrait, Seoul, Korea: American Studies Institute, Seoul National University, 1978.

Lowe, Sue Davidson, Stieglitz: a memoir/biography, New York:Farrar Straus Giroux, 1983.

Norman, Dorothy, Alfred Stieglitz: an American seer, New York:Aperture, 1990.

Whelan, Richard, Alfred Stieglitz: a biography, Boston: Little, Brown, 1995.

For more information on Alfred Stieglitz, visit Britannica.com.

Stieglitz, Alfred (1864-1946), American photographer and writer, and a seminal figure in American art and culture in the early years of the 20th century. Born in Hoboken, New Jersey, he was the eldest son of successful German immigrants, Edward and Hedwig Stieglitz. After attending schools in New York, he was sent to Berlin in 1880 to study mechanical engineering. In 1884 he took a course with the renowned photo-chemist Hermann Wilhelm Vogel, and discovered a passionate calling that inspired him for the rest of his life. On his return to the USA in 1890 he dedicated himself to proving the artistic merit of the medium: by publishing articles, widely exhibiting his own photographs made in both Europe and New York, and founding and editing periodicals such as Camera Notes (1897-1902) and Camera Work. In 1902 Stieglitz founded an elite group of photographers called the Photo-Secession, including Edward Steichen, Clarence White, and others whose work he believed exemplified the highest accomplishments of the art of photography. In 1905, eager to have a place in New York to show their work, Stieglitz founded the Little Galleries of the Photo-Secession, which quickly became known as 291 from its address on Fifth Avenue. Because Stieglitz was fascinated with the relationship between photography and the other arts, he began to exhibit works by leading European and American modern artists, including Paul Cézanne, Henri Matisse, Pablo Picasso, Constantin Brancusi, as well as Marius de Zayas, Arthur Dove, Marsden Hartley, John Marin, and Georgia O'Keeffe, often giving them either their first shows in the USA or their first ever exhibitions. Gallery 291 quickly became the centre for avant-garde art in America, attracting not only painters, sculptors, and photographers, but also writers, poets, critics, and musicians. He actively engaged the art of these contemporary painters and sculptors in his own photographs, exploring issues of abstraction in both his portraits and studies of New York made at this time.

After 291 closed in 1917, a victim of both the war and Stieglitz's declining finances, he turned his attention to his own photographs, making one of his most celebrated bodies of work, his portraits of Georgia O'Keeffe, whom he married in 1924. In 1925 he opened the Intimate Gallery, where he exhibited work by Dove, Hartley, Marin, Charles Demuth, and Paul Strand, as well as O'Keeffe. In 1929, he opened his last gallery, An American Place, where, until his death, he continued to show these artists as well as such younger photographers as Ansel Adams and Eliot Porter. Throughout the 1920s and early 1930s Stieglitz made some of his most accomplished photographs, including a series of photographs of clouds, which he called Equivalents, as well as studies of New York and his family's summer home at Lake George, New York, which celebrate the camera's unique ability to capture a fragment of reality and infuse it with personal meaning. Ill health forced him to stop photographing in 1937.

— Sarah Greenough

Bibliography

• Frank, W., et al. (eds.), American and Alfred Stieglitz: A Collective Portrait (1934; rev. edn. 1979).
• Greenough, S., and Hamilton, J., Alfred Stieglitz: Photographs & Writings (1983).
• Whelan, R., Alfred Stieglitz: A Biography (1995)

(stēg'lĭts) , 1864–1946, American photographer, editor, and art exhibitor, b. Hoboken, N.J. The first art photographer in the United States, Stieglitz more than any other American compelled the recognition of photography as a fine art. In 1881 he went to Berlin to study engineering but soon devoted himself to photography. In 1890 he returned to the United States and for three years helped to direct the Heliochrome Engraving Company. He then edited a series of photography magazines, the American Amateur Photographer (1892–96), Camera Notes (1897–1902), and Camera Work (1902–17), the organ of the photo-secessionists, a group he led that was dedicated to the promotion of photography as a legitimate art form.

In 1905 he established the famous gallery “291” at 291 Fifth Ave., New York City, for the exhibition of photography as a fine art. Soon the gallery broadened its scope to include the works of the modern French art movement and introduced to the United States the work of Cézanne, Picasso, Braque, Brancusi, and many others. It also made known the work of such American artists as John Marin, Charles Demuth, Max Weber, and Georgia O'Keeffe whom Stieglitz married in 1924.

From 1917 to 1925 Stieglitz produced his major works: the extraordinary portraits of O'Keeffe, studies of New York, and the great cloud series through which he developed his concept of photographic “equivalents.” This concept greatly influenced photographic aesthetics. He then opened the Intimate Gallery (1925–30) and An American Place (1930–46), which continued the work of “291.” Through his own superb photographic work and his generous championship of others, he promoted the symbolic and spiritually significant in American art, as opposed to the merely technically proficient.

Bibliography

See America and Alfred Stieglitz (ed. by W. D. Frank et al., 1934); biographies by D. Bry (1965), D. Norman (1973), S. D. Lowe (1983), and R. Whelan (1995); W. I. Homer, Alfred Stieglitz and the Photo-Secession (1983); S. Greenough, Alfred Stieglitz: The Key Set (2002).

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