Camera Work #I: Alfred Stieglitz
Date: Mar 23, 2010 | Category: Art and History
| Comments: [2] | 
While Camera Notes set the standard for photographic magazines in the United States, Stieglitz raised the bar even farther with the subsequent journal Camera Work. In 1903 he left the Camera Club of New York, established his own group of photographers (the Photo-Secession), and commenced Camera Work, over which he had total control as both editor and publisher. Issued quarterly until the outbreak of World War I, this periodical definitively proved that photography was, indeed, as potent a form of art as painting and sculpture.
Stieglitz achieved this largely through the photogravure plates that graced the 50 issues of Camera Work. He often asked photographers to supply original negatives for plate making and to approve proofs, and he demanded the highest quality from his printers. The gravures usually were printed on delicate Japanese tissue, mounted on textured papers, and individually tipped into the magazines. In each issue, the illustrations were segregated from the magazine’s text, creating discrete portfolios of images for quiet contemplation. Stieglitz believed the gravures were equivalents of original photographs, on equal standing with the photographers’ platinum or gum-bichromate prints. Prominent pictorialists such as Gertrude Kaesebier, Edward Steichen and Stieglitz himself were well represented in the pages of Camera Work. In 1917, Stieglitz published the last issue, featuring realistic and abstract images by Paul Strand that signaled the dawning of photographic modernism.
[From: Photogravure.com]
Comments
Jon Cone#
“The Steerage” by Alfred Stieglitz is one of my most favorite photographs. It is a complex study in composition with diagonals that both intersect and frame the image. There is a considerable amount of chaos and crowding suggested by the amount of immigrants in this tiny rectangle – but at one moment, perhaps in repose, a man tips his head to look towards steerage class and his hat catches the reflection of the Sun – and it becomes this focal point by which the entire composition now revolves.
It is for me one of the definitive moments of Photography in that Stieglitz both sees this subtle moment within a scene, and records it. That moment of the photographer’s consciousness recorded in sensitized silver for hopefully, ever more.
I make no suggestion whatsoever that I am in any way, shape or form in a category with Stieglitz…but I recorded my own version of this photograph – and I call mine “My The Steerage”. It was taken with a blackberry camera at an opportune moment of passing by a composition in which the sunlight caught the reflection of a bicycle seat. I was conscious of this Stieglitz photograph at the moment of seeing my opportunity. The diagonals were not the same. But the chaos of China Town and the noises from the city park where the young man was getting ready to chain his bike reminded me of the moment.
I’m just not a Stieglitz. Still, my photograph is here: http://www.piezography.com/PiezoPress/photographers/joncone/jon-cone-blackberry/jon-cone-img02566/
Stieglitz’s is masterful, contemplative and with a visual structure that is extraordinary – set up with a large format camera. Who knows how much time passed before the gentleman tipped his head. Mine is from passing second or two and with a cell phone of all things – certainly a part of our cultural visual vocabulary – and many generations past since Stieglitz’s moment.
regards,
Jon Cone
www.piezography.com
Term papers #
A great article indeed and a very detailed, realistic and superb analysis, of these books, very nice write up, Thanks.
wish#
Stieglitz achieved this largely through the photogravure plates that graced the 50 issues of Camera Work. i like it very much. the passage is useful.