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Alfred Stieglitz, photographed by Carl Van Vechten, April 17, 1935. (Image by Carl Van Vechten)

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Alfred Stieglitz

The Columbia Encyclopedia, Sixth Edition | Date: 2008

Alfred Stieglitz , 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).

Author not available, STIEGLITZ, ALFRED., The Columbia Encyclopedia, Sixth Edition 2008

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