Stieglitz — Selected Works

Stieglitz Family at Oaklawn, Lake George

Alfred Stieglitz — 1888

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Sun Rays—Paula, Berlin

Alfred Stieglitz — 1889

Although Stieglitz made this photograph of his lover Paula early in his career, he did not exhibit or publish it until 1921 at the earliest; shown frequently thereafter, it became one of his best-known works. In contrast to the more atmospheric, seemingly timeless images he was making at the time, such as The Net Mender , Sun Rays is sharp and crisp, as well as modern in its subject matter—the photographs on the wall include a small studio portrait of Stieglitz himself. Only later in his career, after his conversion to “straight” photography, did Stieglitz recognize the modernist impulses at play in this photograph and connect it to his more recent work. For more on the Alfred Stieglitz collection at the Art Institute, along with in-depth object information, please visit the website: The Alfred Stieglitz Collection . Text: Art Institute of Chicago, CC BY 4.0

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Reflection-Venice, from the portfolio "American Pictorial Photography, Series I" (1899); edition 146/150

Alfred Stieglitz — 1892

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The Terminal

Alfred Stieglitz — 1893

Stieglitz took this photograph in front of the Old Post Office in New York, where the Third Avenue railway system and the Madison Avenue streetcar system had their terminals. He reflected on his creation of the work 45 years later: “Naturally there was snow on the ground. A driver in a rubber coat was watering his steaming horses. There seemed to be something related to my deepest feeling in what I saw, and I decided to photograph what was within me.” For Stieglitz, who had returned from Europe to find that everyday use of the Kodak camera had supplanted serious photography, The Terminal represented new possibilities for photography and the hope for “an America in which I could breathe as a free man.” For more on the Alfred Stieglitz collection at the Art Institute, along with in-depth object information, please visit the website: The Alfred Stieglitz Collection . Text: Art Institute of Chicago, CC BY 4.0

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The Net Mender

Alfred Stieglitz — 1894

In an 1899 article, Stieglitz singled out The Net Mender as his favorite of his own photographs: “It expresses the life of a young Dutch woman: every stitch in the mending of the fishing net, the very rudiment of her existence, brings forth a torrent of poetic thoughts in those who watch her sit there on the vast and seemingly endless dunes, toiling with that seriousness and peacefulness which is so characteristic of these sturdy people.” He noted that the exhibition prints were printed at the scale seen here because “the subject needs size to fully express it.” For more on the Alfred Stieglitz collection at the Art Institute, along with in-depth object information, please visit the website: The Alfred Stieglitz Collection . Text: Art Institute of Chicago, CC BY 4.0

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A Wet Day on the Boulevard, Paris

Alfred Stieglitz — 1894

Collection: The Art Institute of Chicago · CC0 · Source image ↗

The Hand of Man

Alfred Stieglitz — 1902

Alfred Stieglitz worked tirelessly to elevate photography to a medium of art. He edited two journals, Camera Notes and Camera Work ; ran a series of galleries where he promoted photography alongside modern painting and sculpture; and made groundbreaking photographs of his own. Stieglitz took this photograph from the back of a moving train as it pulled out of the train yard in Long Island City, New York, and the image was published in the first issue of Camera Work in January 1903. The elegance of the composition belies its rough, industrial subject and emphasizes artistic intent over the technical skills required to make a photograph. The title, too, affirms the artist's role in a mechanical process of urban transformation. For more on the Alfred Stieglitz collection at the Art Institute, along with in-depth object information, please visit the website: The Alfred Stieglitz Collection . Text: Art Institute of Chicago, CC BY 4.0

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Aileen Flannery

Alfred Stieglitz — 1902

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The Flatiron

Alfred Stieglitz — 1903

In an article in 1946, Stieglitz recalled photographing the newly erected Flatiron Building on the day of a great snowstorm. “I suddenly saw the Flat-Iron Building as I had never seen it before. 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.” For more on the Alfred Stieglitz collection at the Art Institute, along with in-depth object information, please visit the website: The Alfred Stieglitz Collection . Text: Art Institute of Chicago, CC BY 4.0

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The Steerage

Alfred Stieglitz — 1907

Alfred Stieglitz shot this photograph in 1907, during a voyage by ocean liner to Europe; it was years, however, before he and others in his circle came to recognize it as a defining work of modernism, showing that photography could transcend its ostensible subject to depict deeper emotions. He later described the moment when, desperate to escape the stuffy upper classes, he looked down to the steerage level: “I saw shapes related to each other. I saw a picture of shapes and underlying that the feeling I had about life.” For more on the Alfred Stieglitz collection at the Art Institute, along with in-depth object information, please visit the website: The Alfred Stieglitz Collection . Text: Art Institute of Chicago, CC BY 4.0

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John Marin

Alfred Stieglitz — 1910

Along with fellow Photo-Secessionists and avant-garde European artists, Stieglitz also began to promote the work of a new generation of American painters at his gallery. He made portraits of many of them as well, as seen here in the images of John Marin, Arthur Dove, and Marsden Hartley. While utterly modern in approach, these photographs hearken back to the work of both David Octavius Hill and Julia Margaret Cameron—whom Stieglitz had discovered only a few years earlier—with figures emerging from massed, shadowy backgrounds. For more on the Alfred Stieglitz collection at the Art Institute, along with in-depth object information, please visit the website: The Alfred Stieglitz Collection . Text: Art Institute of Chicago, CC BY 4.0

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Georgia O'Keeffe

Alfred Stieglitz — 1918

For more on the Alfred Stieglitz collection at the Art Institute, along with in-depth object information, please visit the website: The Alfred Stieglitz Collection . Text: Art Institute of Chicago, CC BY 4.0

Collection: The Art Institute of Chicago · CC0 · Source image ↗

Georgia O'Keeffe—Hands and Thimble

Alfred Stieglitz — 1919

Alfred Stieglitz campaigned throughout the first half of the twentieth century to legitimize photography and modern art. He founded an exhibiting organization, the Photo-Secession, then the periodical Camera Work , and finally a series of galleries. The most influential of these, the gallery known simply as 291, operating from 1908 until 1917, introduced the work of such leaders of the European avant-garde as Paul Cézanne, Henri Matisse, and Pablo Picasso. Georgia O’Keeffe, who became Stieglitz’s wife in 1924, was among the progressive American artists whose work he also exhibited at 291. In a search for objective truth and pure form, the innovative photographer took some five hundred photographs of O’Keeffe between 1917 and 1937. The essence of O’Keeffe, he felt, was not confined to her head and face alone; equally expressive were her torso, feet, and especially her hands, as seen here. What resulted is a “composite portrait” of the painter, in which each photograph, revealing her intrinsic nature at a particular moment, can stand alone as an independently expressive form. When these serial images are viewed as a whole, they portray the essence of O’Keeffe’s many different “selves.” For more on the Alfred Stieglitz collection at the Art Institute, along with in-depth object information, please visit the website: The Alfred Stieglitz Collection . Text: Art Institute of Chicago, CC BY 4.0

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Arthur G. Dove

Alfred Stieglitz — 1923

A trailblazing photographer who championed photography as a fine art, Alfred Stieglitz also played a key role in the development of modern art in the United States in the first half of the twentieth century. His renowned New York galleries showed photography, painting, prints, and sculpture, focusing on an important group of American painters that included Georgia O’Keeffe, John Marin, and Arthur Dove. Stieglitz made close-up, sober yet affectionate portraits of these artists. As Daniel Catton Rich, then director of the Art Institute of Chicago, put it in 1949, Stieglitz’s portraits of his fellow artists “came through a tremendous personal understanding; they are like records of deep friendships or a series of love affairs.” For more on the Alfred Stieglitz collection at the Art Institute, along with in-depth object information, please visit the website: The Alfred Stieglitz Collection . Text: Art Institute of Chicago, CC BY 4.0

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From My Window at An American Place, North

Alfred Stieglitz — 1930

“My first memory of Alfred Stieglitz,” recalled the photographer’s wife, the painter Georgia O’Keeffe, “was on a day in 1908 when . . . I went with two or three other students to see the Rodin drawings at ‘291.’ . . . where a new kind of art was shown—and it was the only place in New York you could see anything like it.” O’Keeffe’s reminiscence suggests the influential character of the work Stieglitz promoted, and of his gallery itself. The photographer operated galleries throughout his life, using them as a platform to present his vision of modern art in America; he also treated his last gallery, An American Place, as a site for artistic creativity in its own right. The Art Institute was one of several major museums to receive gifts from Stieglitz’s collection—via O’Keeffe, his executor—in 1949; these donations often marked (as here) the institutions’ first acquisition of photographs as art. For more on the Alfred Stieglitz collection at the Art Institute, along with in-depth object information, please visit the website: The Alfred Stieglitz Collection . Text: Art Institute of Chicago, CC BY 4.0

Collection: The Art Institute of Chicago · CC0 · Source image ↗