Alfred Stieglitz and Camera Work
Alfred Stieglitz and Camera Work - “A magazine for the more advanced photographer”.[1]
“The Time appearing ripe for the publication of an independent American photographic magazine devoted largely to the interests of pictorial photography, “Camera Work” makes its appearance as the logical outcome of the evolution of the photographic art. It is proposed to issue quarterly an illustrated publication which will appeal to the ever-increasing ranks of those who have faith in photography as a medium of individual expression, and, in addition, to make converts of many at present ignorant of its possibilities”.[2]
With such unpretentious words did Alfred Stieglitz (1864-1946) open his brief editorial in the first issue of Camera Work publishedin January 1903. Frequently described as one of the most beautiful and influential publications in American art, Camera Work, which ran to 50 numbers between 1903-1917, is Stieglitz’s visual and written love poem to photography.[3]
Stieglitz was the dominant force in American fine art photography for almost 30 years from 1892-1920. During that period, he was involved with every important development in creative photography’s struggle to be accepted as an interpretative art form in its own right rather than as a purely mimetic recording medium. He was the architect who designed a solid structure for photography giving it self-belief and ideas and ideals upon which to build. In the absence of anything like formal academic training for photographers, as existed for artists, photographers had to learn by self-teaching, by peer-guidance and mentorship (from someone influential like Peter Henry Emerson in the late nineteenth century or from Stieglitz in the early twentieth), by exhibiting, by discussion in photography clubs, salons and through the pages of the many photographic periodicals which proliferated from the 1880s onwards.
Stieglitz gave artistic photography a direction, a path to follow, especially in America where a national movement had been lacking. He wished to show that photography was an entity in its own right and that rather than try to emulate art of the past, photography should simply be the major art form of the twentieth century, and of the future beyond. And he bent all his formidable energies to achieving this end, using his own money, wasting his own health, arousing as much angry disagreement as ardent support whilst he occupied a series of influential positions in the photographic establishment to further this fixed purpose; a purpose from which he never deviated until he felt he had achieved his aims.
From 1893, he was the roving critic and co-editor of American Amateur Photographer. From 1897, vice president of the Camera Club (a merger of the Society of Amateur Photographers and the New York Camera Club) and subsequently, from July 1897 until July 1902, creator and editor of the Club’s new quarterly journal Camera Notes. After heated altercations with the Camera Club about differences in aesthetic directions, Stieglitz resigned his editorship and vice-presidency and set up his own quarterly publication, Camera Work which, between 1903-1917, changed the face of photographic periodical publishing and promoted the work of his own chosen band of pictorial photographers (by Stieglitz’s invitation only) who became formally known as the Photo-Secession. By November 1905, he opened The Little Galleries of the Photo-Secession at 291 Fifth Avenue. The Little Galleries became known only as 291 from 1908 when the emphasis of the exhibitions changed to include, and eventually concentrate on, modern art as well as photography, and all in a 5-metre square room. Between them, Camera Work and 291, whose agendas make them impossible to separate, provided a visual and literary manifesto, a shop window, an education facility and a meeting place for artistic photography and, latterly, for avant garde art from Europe and America.
291 was the first gallery to show paintings, drawings and sculpture by Rodin, Matisse, Picasso, Cezanne and Picabia in the USA and to explore Modernism, Futurism and Expressionism. Also the first to show work by nineteenth century British photographers, Julia Margaret Cameron and David Octavius Hill and (the unacknowledged) Robert Adamson in an attempt to give pictorial photography a back catalogue; a laudable past as well as a glorious future. Work by all the above was also featured in the pages of Camera Work. By 1917, Stieglitz was again photographing – after several years hiatus caused by the intensity of his commitment to the Photo Secession, Camera Work and 291 - and encouraging “straight” photography rather than the often over-manipulated, over-complicated and over-processed production that much pictorial photography had become. He had found photography pictorial, soft, rural and tinged with European Symbolism. He left it straight, hard, urban, American and modern, subverting his earlier subjective German, French and British influences into an objective style of photography better suited to the vitality and intensity of the American experience.
Stieglitz himself was of European descent but became the archetypal American. Born in Hoboken, New Jersey on 01 January, 1864, he was the eldest son of six children of German-Jewish immigrants. The family moved to New York in 1871 to live in a sizeable brownstone building on East 60th St. where Stieglitz’s father, a more than competent amateur artist, was a successful wool merchant. In 1881, he sold his business and the whole family moved to Germany so that Stieglitz, under-stretched by New York schooling and subsequently under-performing, could pursue his studies in a more rigorous German environment. From 1882-1890, he studied mechanical engineering at the Technische Hochscule in Berlin. The Stieglitz family returned to New York in 1884 but Stieglitz stayed on as, in 1883, he had learned photography from the chemist and photographic researcher Hermann Wilhelm Vogel and had finally found his calling.
He was earnestly mixing in German intellectual and artistic circles, absorbing centuries of sophisticated European art and culture, so different from the newer, brasher, noisier and commercially driven American culture. Photography became his life and he began to write articles for a variety of British and German photographic journals and to have his photographs published and exhibited. He was much influenced by the radical new soft-focus pictorialism of British photography derived from Peter Henry Emerson’s naturalistic photography, and the growing acceptance of photography as an art form in its own right, rejecting the sterility of photography that was technically accurate but emotionally dead.
In a later interview, he said: “I saw that what others [photographers] were doing was to make hard cold copies of hard cold subjects in hard cold light. I did not see why a photograph should not be a work of art, and I studied to learn to make it one”.[4]
Various secession groups were forming in the European art world, splitting from the mainstream, and pictorial photographers took their cue from these. In 1892 the Linked Ring Brotherhood in London split from the ultra conservative Royal Photographic Society and in 1894, the Photo-Club de Paris split from the Société Française de Photographie. These secession groups all had the same aims – to free photography from its past documentary and technological stranglehold (Stieglitz’s “hard cold copies of hard cold subjects” as above) and establish it as a more impressionistic and flexible tool, rather than a mere recording machine, to embody individual expression and personal values. All artists had tools - an artist had brushes, paint and canvas; a sculptor had marble, stone and chisels and the photographer had a camera, negatives, chemicals and paper. Success in all art depended on the individuality of the artist. Stieglitz wrote: “There is no such thing as progress or improvement in art. There is art or no art. There is nothing inbetween”.[5]
Stieglitz was reluctant to return to the gritty realism of New York in 1890 when recalled home by his father. American photography seemed to him to have only two faces – that of the soulless commercial professional studio churning out dreary indistinguishable work or the massed ranks of amateur Kodak “You press the button, we do the rest” “snapshotters”. But he did return home and set about instilling the tenets of European pictorial photography into America.
A variety of new manipulative processes were in use which enabled European photographers to give their photographs a more painterly quality and distinguish their work from that of the despised “snapshotters”. This was done by using special filtering and distorted lenses such as the soft-focus lenses produced by Dallmeyer-Bergheim in Europe and the semi-achromatic lens made by Pinkham and Smith in Boston,[6] and by the creative use of darkroom techniques such as burning, dodging and cropping. Alternative printing methods using platinum, gum-bichromate, gum-platinum and carbon processes all produced end results which looked more like pastel sketches or charcoal drawings but were laborious, time-consuming and expensive. The newly perfected photogravure process, however, whilst an equally meticulous and painstaking process in the initial preparation, enabled the rapid printing (or pulling) of multiple copies from one plate and gave exquisite results with exceptionally fine detail. Photographers like Emerson had begun to use photogravure rather than the beautiful but expensive platinum printing, to make runs of their work to be assembled as books or portfolios so that they could be produced more cheaply and thus be disseminated in greater numbers to a wider audience.
This may have been the thinking behind Stieglitz’s father buying his son a share in the Photochrome Engraving Company where Stieglitz gained a perfectionist’s knowledge of how to make the perfect gravures that would so elegantly illustrate the pages of Camera Work in years to come. He was now writing very regularly for American AmateurPhotographer and, in 1893 became the co-editor. His reputation as a photographer was also growing as he had largely come to terms with the inspirational subject matter offered by the energetic and confrontational New York streets and largely abandoned his rather more whimsical and subjective European style. His 1893 marriage to Emmeline Obermeyer, a brewery heiress, ensured his future financial independence if not much future marital happiness for either partner. The merger of the two moribund New York photographic societies into the homogenous Camera Club and Stieglitz’s appointment as vice-president in 1897 and editor of the Club's new quarterly journal Camera Notes, gave him the chance to try to wrench and mould the new club into New York’s very own fellowship of secession photographers based on European principles.
Camera Notes was a dry run for Camera Work a few years later. Stieglitz was largely unpaid for his Herculean efforts in this and practically every other job he had in his life and the total running costs of $18,000 for Camera Notes came mostly from advertising revenue or from his own pocket with very little being paid from the Camera Club’s coffers. It became the most influential photographic magazine in the world featuring provocative new American-based writers like Sadakichi Hartmann (aka Sidney Allan) and Charles Caffin as well as critical essays, exhibition reviews and articles reprinted from more established European publications.
Photographers likewise were a mix of international, like James Craig Annan, George Davison and Robert Demachy, as well as old and new home-grown. Stieglitz was already assembling around himself a band of like-minded followers, thrilled with the dynamism of his positive and determined leadership and who would shortly form the Photo-Secession. The photographers Gertrude Käsebier, Clarence White, Frank Eugene, Alvin Langdon Coburn and, most importantly, Edward Steichen were drawn into the Stieglitz circle. Reproduced in photogravure by Stieglitz’s own company, Photochrome Engraving (which he had subsequently left) and produced to Stieglitz’s exactingly perfectionist specifications, the quality of Camera Notes’ illustrations was superb. As Stieglitz’s reputation for both his inspired editorship as well as his own photography soared, it became the time to cement “the Cause” – the position of artistic photography in the USA, by holding a landmark exhibition of work by its best proponents.
Consequently, in March 1902, Stieglitz organised an exhibition at the National Arts Club in New York entitled American Pictorial Photography Arranged by The Photo-Secession. It featured work by some of the photographers from Camera Notes as well as newer work by photographers who would later feature in Camera Work and was a huge public success. Stieglitz stated the objectives of the Photo-Secession thus:
“The object of the Photo-Secession is: to advance photography as applied to pictorial expression; to draw together those Americans practicing or otherwise interested in the art, and to hold from time to time, at varying places, exhibitions not necessarily limited to the productions of the Photo-Secession or to American work.”[7]
The creation and exhibition of the Photo-Secession was the final breaking point with the Camera Club who saw the exhibition, quite rightly, as Stieglitz’s own secession from employment with them (albeit unpaid) and he resigned as editor of Camera Notes in July 1902. The revamped journal had never been the cosy in-house publication the Camera Club wanted, aimed as it was at a diverse international audience of appreciative art and photography lovers rather than at long-term Club members. After Stieglitz’s departure, it was discontinued after three issues. He had tried to change American photography from within one of its established institutions but had failed and the effort had cost him his mental health when he suffered the first of what was to be a series of lifelong physical and mental breakdowns.
So, the way was now clear to establish an independent magazine and an independent organisation with independent exhibitions shortly to be shown in their own independent gallery, working from outside the established system. A Stieglitz Photographic Society by any other name. Whilst Stieglitz was undoubtedly a catalyst, a charismatic leader and a visionary of enormously wide perspective - many initially saw him as some sort of Messianic figure for photography, and he did not disabuse them of that interpretation - he was also what would now be termed a “control freak”. Those he crossed in the next few years would use harsher terms like despot and dictator. But the launch of the first issue of Camera Work onto the market in January 1903 was received with all the approbation and lavish praise it truly merited.
In the latter days of Camera Notes, Stieglitz had brought in Joseph T Keiley, Dallett Fuguet and John Francis Strauss to act as associate editors and they now performed the same brief for Camera Work. But the most auspicious association, and that which had the greatest impact on Camera Work, was Stieglitz’s budding friendship with the photographer/artist Edward Steichen whom he had met in 1900 when the 21 year old Steichen was passing though New York prior to moving to Paris to further his art studies. Steichen became CameraWork and Stieglitz’s chief designer, European talent scout, writer, advertiser, inspiration and, over the 15 years of the magazine’s run, its most featured photographer.
He moved comfortably and expertly between photography and painting nor, with no comfortable family fortune behind him, did he have Stieglitz’s disdain for the commercial world. Camera Work’s spare and simple, yet elegant and tasteful, design was created by Steichen. It was through his contacts in the Parisian art world that Rodin, Matisse, Picasso, John Marin and many others were later featured in Camera Work’s pages as well as on the walls of 291. Steichen also introduced Stieglitz to the work of Cézanne, Van Gogh, Toulouse-Lautrec and Brancusi. It is ironic that the introduction of contemporary European art to an American audience was financed and organised through the efforts, enthusiasm and energy of two photographers.
Camera Work was, from the beginning, a non-profit making venture. Indeed it was a profit-losing venture although advertising by major photographic companies, Kodak, Bausch & Lomb, Graflex etc. was sought and then redesigned by Stieglitz to suit the controlling Camera Work aesthetic. The magazine became not only the illustrated mouthpiece of the Photo-Secession but also, when Stieglitz opened 291 Gallery in November 1905, eventually became the unofficial exhibition catalogue of shows held there. Its initial production run of 1000 had a much greater circulation as it was widely influential with the quality of its critical writing and reviewing. Over the years, commissioned writers included Edward Steichen, Charles H Caffin, Sadakichi Hartmann, Maurice Maeterlinck, George Bernard Shaw, Wassily Kandinsky, Gertrude Stein and Mabel Dodge.
However, its main achievement was the superb reproduction of photography and art.
Usually printed as hand-pulled photogravures preferably from the photographers’ own negatives and on exquisitely delicate Japanese tissue to achieve maximum tonal quality and texture these achieved a standard of excellence never previously realized, or even attempted, in photographic publishing. Camera Work was the first photographic journal to put so much emphasis on the visual, controlled in every detail at every stage by Stieglitz’s awesome overseeing eye. His involvement was so ubiquitous that he reckoned that he had personally wrapped and posted 35,000 issues of CameraWork throughout its 15 years of production.[8]