| Artist: | Stieglitz, Alfred |
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|---|---|---|
| Title of Work: | The Terminal | |
| Date of Work: | 1893 | |
| Nationality: | American | |
| Context: | Pre-WWI | |
| Movement: | Stieglitz Circle | |
| Medium: | Photography | |
| Subject: we are once again back in the city streets, this time New York, photographed by Stieglitz in weather so bad that the new technology of photography was truly being tested. Most thought the "mechanical" medium too limited and unsubtle to capture such conditions owing to the poor lighting, but Stieglitz not only had the technical skill to pull it off; he also had a camera vision, which believed photography could indeed be an art in its own right. Style: Stieglitz works against Pictorialism, a photographic movement in which the photographer would manipulate the negative and print in many ways to make the image look more painterly and picturesque, and thus more like art. Stieglitz instead promotes the doctrine of "straight photography," which rejects such manipulations and searches instead for an aesthetic based on what is intrinsic to the photographic medium itself. Here he goes for the straight image that acquires its interest through the play of light and dark contrasts, the compositional structure, and the clarity of detail. He does not choose a picturesque subject, but one that deals with the realties of the modern city, but for Stieglitz it is not the subject that makes the picture so much as the way the image is composed, a lesson he had learned from looking at modern European abstract art. This image took incredible skill since the exposure was made in such difficult weather conditions. Stieglitz had the two things that mattered for advancing photography: technical skill and aesthetic vision. Context: Stieglitz would become the most progressive figure in early 20th c. American art. Significantly, it is a photographer who heads the avant-garde in America. The new country was quick to embrace the new technology of this "machine art." Stieglitz would not only advance photography as an art, he would also be the key promoter of abstraction in America. Prior to the Armory Show of 1913, Stieglitz's New York gallery--251--was the only place to see abstract art, African art, and the European avant-garde (he was the first to give Picasso a one man show in America and the first to translate Kandinsky's "Concerning the Spiritual in Art"). If Robert Henri's group, The Eight, carried on the American Realism tradition of Eakins, then Stieglitz and his circle of artists follows more in the line of Whistler in that they turn to the European avant-garde as their model and promote a doctrine of abstraction. | ||
