| Artist: | Stieglitz, Alfred |
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|---|---|---|
| Title of Work: | The Steerage | |
| Date of Work: | 1907 | |
| Nationality: | American | |
| Context: | Pre-WWI | |
| Movement: | Stieglitz Circle | |
| Medium: | Photography | |
| Subject: Stieglitz here photographs a ship's steerage class, which was the lower class deck. Here he focuses less on the social implications of class, however, than on the formal aspects of composition, especially the light and dark contrasts and the compositional structure. These formal elements are his true subject. Having looked at a lot of Cubism, he organized this scene according to a grid-like structure. The scene may be a slice of real life, but it is composed according to abstract formal principles. This was his camera vision, the way in which he conceived of photography as 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 repetition of forms. He does not choose a picturesque subject, but one that deals with the realties of modern life, 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. 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. | ||
