Word: stieglitz
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Exactly a century ago, a young American studying engineering in Berlin paid $7.50 for his first camera. His name was Alfred Stieglitz, and the centennial of that impulsive purchase is worth celebrating. For in the intervening years, Stieglitz did more than anyone else to elevate photography from a curiosity or hobby to a respectable member of the visual arts. He did so both by example (his pictures were instantly recognized as transcendent) and by precept (he lectured, hectored and lobbied constantly on behalf of his crusade for the camera). He also established and ran galleries and magazines, and took...
...current flurry of commemoration attests to his success. An exhibit of Stieglitz photographs is now on display at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, B.C., and will travel later this year to New York City and Chicago. Those who cannot go to Stieglitz can bring Stieglitz to them. Two new books, one mostly words and the other chiefly pictures, offer a rounded portrait of an irascible, eccentric and authentic American genius...
...Stieglitz was born (1864) a year before Lincoln was assassinated and died (1946) a year after Hiroshima. The author of Stieglitz: A Memoir/Biography knew him only during the last 20 years of his life. But Sue Davidson Lowe is his grandniece and thus was privy, as she grew up, to glimpses of an artist that outsiders seldom saw. He was Uncle Al to her, an old gent who liked chocolate ice cream cones and miniature golf, and who used summers at the Stieglitz family compound in Lake George, N.Y., to relax and flirt innocently with young female relatives. She knew...
Luckily, knowledge of his fame did not erase Lowe's impressions of the person. Stieglitz is as scholarly a production as anyone could wish, crammed with facts and trailing informative appendixes. It is also a loving and occasionally exasperated look at a contentious relative and the intimate circumstances that formed him. Stieglitz spent his life surrounded by family. When he was born, in Hoboken, N.J., he had already accumulated 32 first cousins. His parents, German immigrants grown wealthy in America, gave him five younger siblings, some of whom spent their lives wondering when Alfred would ever grow up. From...
...theorizing, the proof of Stieglitz's triumph still rests in his photographs. Alfred Stieglitz: Photographs & Writings offers 73 plates culled from the 1,600 works that O'Keeffe donated to the National Gallery of Art after Stieglitz's death. The reproductions are exquisite. The old master, who sometimes developed scores of prints from a single negative to produce one that he liked, could not fault the painstaking care devoted to this book. It contains The Steerage (1907), of course, and also Winter, Fifth Avenue (1893), an early work that helped make Stieglitz famous. Yet every page turns...