Alfred Stieglitz's apples

Abstract

I have long been astonished by the silliness of Stieglitz's photographs of women with apples, despite the desperate attempts to suggest that somehow they prove him as American as apple pie. Coming across Erika and Fritz Kempe's Die Kunst der Camera im Jugendstil (Frankfurt: Umschau 1986), an excellent piece of pictorialist sourcehunting, I suddenly realized from Theodor and Oskar Hofmeister's ‘Apfelemte’ (1897) that Stieglitz was drawing upon a stock subject from German genre painting (see pl. 129). The inanities of O'Keeffe with a basket of apples next to her head and Engelhard awkwardly clutching apples to her body are just two attempts by Stieglitz to submit the two Georgias to generic fantasy.     

Georgia and Ida O'Keeffe

Abstract

In 1918 Alfred Stieglitz made his first portrait of Georgia O'Keeffe. By the spring of 1922, two years before their marriage, Stieglitz had produced more than 100 studies of her. Soon after, he turned his camera on others, and sometimes included O'Keeffe in the frame. The location for many of these later images was the Hill, the retreat at Lake George, New York, which was shared with Stieglitz's immediate family and coterie of admirers, colleagues and friends.     

Dorothy Norman: Love and Muse

Abstract

Stieglitz once said he made love through his camera. He felt it in his beginning years with O'Keeffe. He expressed it with Norman. Lovers from 1929 until he died in 1946, Stieglitz and Norman often spoke to each other in metaphors, moving into each other's mind, heart and troubles. They wrote to each other daily, often two or three times a day; and each summer, separated from the other, wrote detailed, often long, usually involved letters, as if, like lovers everywhere, they will yet get to the root of their uncontrollable passion.     

Alfred Stieglitz

Abstract

Several recent projects devoted to Alfred Stieglitz (1864–1946) reveal current trends in scholarship regarding this key figure in twentiethcentury cultural history. Two new publications focus primarily upon the myriad significant contributions he made to the ali and culture of the United States. For the historian of photography, these works offer useful insights conceming the intellectual and altistic climate that informed Stieglitz, md which can be productively applied to discussions of his photographic oeuvre. Venturing off the printed page, a documentary film revisits the Stieglitz biography and lauds his photography as one of the major artistic achievements of the twentieth century. Those looking for a comprehensive assessment of Alfred Stieglitz's endeavours as a photographer, however, will have to wait a little longer. The National Gallery of Art in Washington intends to publish a major catalogue, Stieglitz, in 2002, in conjunction with an exhibition featuring a selection of Stieglitz's photographs drawn from their collection. I await this publication with great anticipation. Meanwhile, the National Gallery has developed an innovative website that previews their undertaking.     

Two Stieglitz Autochromes: Katherina and Käti Raab

Abstract

In the course of preparatory research for the exhibition ‘Frank Eugene — The Dream of Beauty’, several boxes of autochromes privately owned by a Munich industrialist came to light. These autochromes were taken by the American art photographers Frank Eugene and Alfred Stieglitz, probably between 1907 and 1909 in Tutzing. In the meantime, the colour photographs taken by Eugene have been reproduced in the catalogue of the above-mentioned exhibition (Ulrich Pohlmann, ed., Frank Eugene — The Dream of Beauty, Munich: Nazraeli 1995, 176-79).     

Arnold Rönnebeck and Alfred Stieglitz: Remembering the hill

Abstract

Arnold R.onnebeck visited Stieglitz and O'Keeffe for a week at Lake George in October 1924. While there, he took a series of snapshots which record Stieglitz taking photographs of O'Keeffe, images which are unique since no other photographs document Stieglitz actually in the process of expanding what is arguably the most famous portrait of the twentieth century, an ongoing work of thematic and temporal depth. Other photographs in which Stieglitz is shown holding a camera (figure 1), perhaps even pausing in his work, appear self-consciously posed, and with the artist separated from his subjects. Rönnebeck's pictures are remarkable for the vivid image they convey of an artist thoroughly absorbed in his work.     

F. Holland Day's ‘Nubians’

Abstract

In the October 1897 issue of his newly-founded journal, Camera Notes, Alfred Stieglitz began to publish a remarkable series of ‘Nubian’ portraits. They were by F. Holland Day, the Boston photographer whose innovative and dramatic images of young women had already established his reputation internationally. Greatly admired by Stieglitz, Day's ‘Nubian’ series was afforded the most painstaking attention, and reproduced in the expensive process of photogravure.     

Alfred Stieglitz and New Yark Dada

Abstract

In February of 1921 the photographer and entrepreneur Alfred Stieglitz mounted the fIrst public exhibition of his work since the closing of his pioneering art gallery, ‘291’, nearly four years earlier.1 An exhibition of 146 of Stieglitz's photographs was held at the Anderson Galleries in New York during February of 1921. This show was instrumental in helping Stieglitz ultimately to reassert his prominence in the New York art world and re-establish his status as an important American artist. Curiously, however, the manner in which Stieglitz and his associates chose to promote the photographer was somewhat unusual. They repeatedly described the camera as an extension of Stieglitz's own body, and his photographs as an extension of his spirit. As a result, they claimed that Stieglitz had achieved a profound physical and spiritual union both with his machinery and with the subjects he photographed.     

Eduard Steichen and Maurice Maeterlinck

Abstract

Eduard Steichen (1879-1973) met the Belgian Symbolist writer Maurice Maeterlinck in 1901, when Steichen was in Europe. Steichen's goal there was to photograph painters and writers whom he personally admired,¹ including Maeterlinck whom Steichen photographed in 1901. Maeterlinck attended Steichen's first one-man exhibition at Maison des Artistes in 1902 and looked favourably on the young artist's work. Maeterlinck and Steichen discussed photography at the time. Steichen thought that Maeterlinck's comments were ‘more considered than any [he] had heard before’ and ‘wondered whether he would put down some of his thoughts’² to be included with reproductions of Steichen's photographs in Camera Work. Steichen felt emphatically that his best photographs should be reproduced with Maeterlinck's statement, and he told Alfred Stieglitz as much.³ The connection between Maeterlinck and Steichen has not gone unnoticed     

How Stieglitz came to photograph cityscapes

Abstract

Beginning in 1927, at the age of 63, Alfred Stieglitz began photographing the views of Manhattan outside the windows at the Intimate Gallery, his third-floor exhibition space on East 59th Street, and at the thirtieth-floor apartment at the Shelton Hotel, at 49th Street and Lexington Avenue, where he lived with Georgia O'Keeffe. In concerted bursts over the next four years, and then intermittently until ill-health forced the end of his picture-making in 1937, Stieglitz produced about 90 cityscapes, most of them depicting the changing views from .the Shelton and from his seventeenthfloor gallery An American Place, at 53rd Street and Madison Avenue, where he moved operations just after the stockmarket crash of 1929.1 The key set of Stieglitz's photographs in the National Gallery, Washington, DC, deposited there by Georgia O'Keeffe in 1949, includes 80 New York cityscapes from 1927 and after. The collection of the Philadelphia Museum of Art has, among its late cityscapes, a handful that are not present in Washington, being variants in either negative, cropping, or photographic paper. These have been donated in stages over the years by Dorothy Norman. Further examples of variations from the images in Washington are unknown at present. These hard-edged yet lush gelatine silver prints vividly document a building boom of the late 1920s and early Depression years which transformed the refined, residential ‘uptown’ that Stieglitz had known all his life into a skyscraper-ridden ‘midtown’, a centre for office rentals, luxury apartment hotels and the fme art trade (figure 1).     

Alfonso: Spain's premier photojournalist

Abstract

The founder of the Alfonso dynasty, Alfonso Sánchez García, was born in Ciudad Real in 1881, the son of an unsuccessful theatre and opera impresario.¹ After a brief experimentation with sculpture and drawing, he was admitted as an apprentice to the successful Madrid photographer, Amador. He was an eager assistant, determined to learn his craft thoroughly. Soon he became an accomplished maker of ambulancias, photographs of important social gatherings, political dinners, and meetings of learned societies taken on location rather than in the photographer's gallery. By now a skilled studio photographer with considerable on-location experience, he left Amador to work in the studio of Manuel Company, at the time (1897) the most important in Madrid, where he soon became the primer operador de galería (chief studio photographer) and received the highest salary. By this time, he was alternating studio work with an increasing journalistic/press involvement. In 1904, still in his early twenties and now the father of ‘Alfonsito’ (Alfonso Sánchez Portela), Alfonso left Company to join the staff of El Gráfico. It was during El Gráfico's brief existence that the photo credit, FOTO ALFONSO, was born. When the paper suspended publication a short time later, he was offered a position with El Heraldo de Madrid, Madrid's leading evening newspaper.     

Arthur Conan Doyle and psychic photographs

Abstract

The issue of Punch for 12 May 1926 featured a cartoon which depicted an elderly and oversized Arthur Conan Doyle sitting on a stool (see figure 1). Clouds are gathered around his uplifted, preoccupied head. Holding a chain which shackles Doyle's legs is a miniature Sherlock Holmes, brooding and thoughtful. The cartoon's immediate context is satirical: Doyle's warm reception of the Cottingley Fairy photographs, then a matter of ongoing notoriety due to the publication of his The Coming of the Fairies in 1922, had prompted a degree of ridicule. In 1920 he had become involved in an investigation of what purported to be photographs of actual fairies taken by two teenage girls. The matter which commenced as an investigation had, by 1928, with the publication of the study's second edition, developed into a whole-hearted endorsement of the photographs. For Doyle and his colleague, the theosophist Edward Gardner, this event was the ultimate proof that fairies actually existed. Nor was the intervention Doyle's only encounter with paranormal photography. A committed spiritualist by the 1920s, Doyle had previously championed the cause of spirit photography, a process where supposed materializations of the dead appeared in photographs. For the spiritualists, this possibility was an important concept, as it endorsed their central tenet: that the living could communicate with the dead. Relatedly, Doyle's The Case for Spirit Photography (1923) defended William Hope, who had been accused of using fraudulent methods to attain his materializations.     

Photographic Miscarriage

Abstract

Henrique Fleiuss (born 1823 in Cologne, died 1882 in Rio de Janeiro) studied literature in Cologne and natural sciences as well as music in Munich. He went to Brazil in 1858 at the suggestion of von Martius, the famous botanist. There, in 1859, he founded the ‘Instituto Artistico’ in partnership with his brother Carlos Fleiuss and the artist Carlos Linde.     

Roland G. Rood

Abstract

Roland G. Rood (1863–1927) is an enigmatic, yet fascinating, figure in the history of American art criticism. Very little about his education and career is known. His published writings as well as unpublished drafts for essays on aesthetics, however, provide a comprehensive framework for his ideas. Dating or referring to the period 1904–1907, this body of work indexes a significant direction of change in the relationship of art to science. Featured in Alfred Stieglitz's avant-garde journal Camera Work, Rood's criticism also illuminates the probing, psychological, and intertextural nature of Stieglitz's modernism.     

Book reviews

Abstract

In 1934, a group of ardent admirers published America &; Alfred Stieglitz, a eulogy of such Whitmanesque hyperbole that it is almost embarrassing to recall that Alfred Stieglitz (1864–1946) was still very much alive, and would, indeed, live on for another decade, well nourished by such loving encomiums. By contrast, the fate of his contemporary Lewis Hine (1874–1940), a documentarian of genius and human compassion matched only by David Octavius Hill, John Thomson, Thomas Annan, or Jacob Riis, was a study in cruel neglect. America &; Lewis Hine, mimicking the title of the Stieglitz book even to the ampersand, and perhaps selected as a duplicating title in angry and justifiable reproach, seems a tragically belated effort to elevate Hine to the highest pantheon of the demigods of photography.     

A scene in a library

Abstract

This essay concerns one photograph: the eighth plate in The Pencil of Nature, called A Scene in a Library, which originally appeared in the second installment of Talbot's inaugural book on photography (figure 1). I have already written extensively about A Scene in a Library — and given its title to a book on illustrated books.¹ But it is a photograph that, together with the text that accompanies it, has never ceased to intrigue me. I continue to wonder what Talbot's intentions were when he chose this photograph for his book. Why did he choose it over similar photographs that he had made and could possibly just as well have used? Why did he title it the way he did — A Scene in a Library — when we know that it was not actually taken in his library? Why and when did it occur to him to write the piece of text that accompanies the plate — which speaks of experimentation with the invisible end of the light spectrum? And what did he have in mind when he put the plate, the caption and the accompanying text together? For A Scene in a Library is remarkable — and exceptional — for the unaccountable way in which it puts text together with image. Almost all the other plates have text that bears on them fairly straightforwardly, either explaining how and where they were made or indicating possible uses for the photograph in question. Not so A Scene in a Library, which functions, rather, as a kind of clef de roman, and which has, as I hope to show, an emblematic status in The Pencil of Nature precisely because it is an exception.     

Gertrude Käsebier's ‘Indian’ Photographs

Abstract

Gertrude Käsebier made portraits of Zitkala-Sa (Red Bird)/ Gertrude Simmons (Bonnin) just four years before Zitkala-Sa's article ‘Why I Am a Pagan’ appeared in the Atlantic Monthly.¹ In some pictures, she is Red Bird, with her somewhat tangled hair down, wearing a simple cloth version of a buckskin dress, an old willow basket held to her chest. In others, she is Zitkala-Sa, stage lecturer and performer, star of the ladies' reform dub lecture circuit, wearing the beaded bandolier and chokered beads of a ‘Princess’, hand to head, looking afar in the cliched Indian pose, a darker Native Drama Queen. In some, she is Gertrude Simmons, a Rossetti-esque, post-Victorian girl, just one step away from holding roses on the fainting couch. Posed in Käsebier's srudio against a flowered wallpaper background, wearing a good girl's long dress, she holds a book or her beloved violin (figure 1), the instrument she studied at the New England Conservatory of Music. Kasebier got all three personae of this complex Yankton Sioux woman in her portraits of 1898, personae we shall not recognize when we see her again, photographed in Washington, around 1930, as ‘Gertrude Simmons Bonnin’, an influential Native politico in a dark suit.     

Landscape photography

Abstract

My first exposure to Eliot Porter was when as a young college student I discovered Eliot Porter's photographic portrait of the Great Smoky Mountains National Park in E.P. Dutton's Appalachian Wilderness: The Great Smoky Mountains (1970). I felt I'd found someone else who could see the landscape through the same childlike sense of wonder I'd felt growing up in East Tennessee. The pictures were not of the grandest views or best-known waterfalls in the park; instead, Eliot's photographs recorded the rather common features and patterns that give the Appalachians their peculiar identity and rich character. Here were deep patterns of green in a mountain pool, a tapestry of yellow and orange on an autumn hillside, the rich variety of greens as spring marches up a mountainside.     

Mayall's life-size portrait of George Peabody

Abstract

The miniature painter's occupation is nearly gone, and we may perhaps see the second-rate portrait painter also superseded, and the same negative made to print pictures for the walls of town-hall or mansion, or for the album in the lady's boudoir.