That same year, he joined the Society of Amateur Photographers and convinced them to hold an exhibition in New York, where his print was awarded a medal.
In 1889, George Eastman invented the portable box camera—the Kodak—and advertised it with the slogan, “You press the button, we do the rest.” Alfred Stieglitz was unimpressed by the gadget and despised its popularity. In 1892 he wrote an article in the annual Photographic Mosaics calling for standards to be raised in creating “a photograph of artistic value—in other words, a picture.” Paintings were referred to as “pictures” and Stieglitz argued that photographs could be “pictures” if they were of similar quality. Thus, he coined the term “pictorial photography,” which called for soft-focus and romantic images that emulated paintings in theme and composition. The article began his crusade for the creation and exhibition of photographs with the integrity of fine art.
Stieglitz was named editor of The American Amateur Photographer in 1892, and he refused to draw a salary to avoid the appearance, if not the fact, of bias. He wrote most of the magazine himself, penning dozens of articles and reviews, many of which encouraged the numerous women in the field. Photography had not yet achieved the status of fine art, nor fallen under the control of the male establishment, and so women had found it an easier entrée. It was also socially acceptable. Queen Victoria was an avid amateur photographer and had installed a dark room at Windsor Castle.
While in Germany, Alfred’s twin brothers had fallen in love with two sisters, the Stieffels. In 1891, Julius married Anny Stieffel and Lee married her sister Elizabeth three years later. In 1892, Alfred’s youngest sister Selma married his friend Lou Schubart. With all of his siblings and friends planning marriage, the family felt that it was time for Alfred, at twenty-nine, to consider his future.
One sunny afternoon Alfred went with Obermeyer and his twenty-year-old sister Emmeline on a sailing excursion along the Hudson River, stopping for an afternoon picnic at Nyack. On the way home, Emmy, as she was known, rested her head on Alfred’s shoulder and invited him to call. She thought the photographer very dashing, though he found her rather plump and plain. Still, he visited her a couple of nights later and found himself left unchaperoned. Her parents were deceased and Obermeyer, her guardian, was upstairs. Alfred must have taken certain liberties because Obermeyer later told him that he considered them engaged. Alfred protested but his friend insisted that Emmy’s integrity had been compromised. When Alfred resisted, Obermeyer went to a higher authority, Edward Stieglitz, who forced an agreement on his son.
It appears that economic as well as moral issues were involved. The stock market had fallen and the country entered a depression in June of 1893. After heavy losses in the market, Edward Stieglitz had returned to work in an effort to preserve his fortune. Emmy Obermeyer was heir to a brewing fortune founded by her father, David Obermeyer: Obermeyer and Liebmann, Brewers, Maltsters and Bottlers. Her sizable inheritance would help support Alfred since it was becoming clear that he was never going to make money on his own.
Emmy’s shares in her family’s company produced an ample annual income of some three thousand dollars and Edward Stieglitz agreed to match the sum as an income for his son. The couple agreed to split expenses: she would pay for her luxurious life style and the upbringing of any children; he was supposed to pay the expenses incurred by his photography, though Emmy often subsidized these ventures as well.
The engagement of Emmeline Obermeyer and Alfred Stieglitz was announced in June, and they were married on November 16, 1893, at Sherry’s restaurant on Fifth Avenue. Taking his mother’s advice, Stieglitz burned many volumes of the diary that he had kept since the age of nine.
From the outset, the marriage proved unsuitable.3 Emmy presumed that after the wedding she could manipulate her husband into accepting his upper-middle-class responsibilities, but he was openly contemptuous of these bourgeois yearnings. Emmy reacted by refusing to let him touch her. The couple finally left for their honeymoon on May 5, 1894, but traveling together in Europe for five months only amplified their differences. In Milan, Stieglitz left Emmy in a hotel while he went to see his prints at a photography exhibition. In Venice and Paris, he took photographs and met colleagues, again spending almost no time with his querulous bride. In London, he met members of the Linked Ring, a group of photographers who also believed in the artistic potential of the medium. The high point of this honeymoon seems to be the fact that he was one of the first Americans asked to join this respected organization.
The Stieglitzes sailed back to America in September with their marriage still unconsummated. In January 1895, more than a year after the wedding, Stieglitz contracted a severe case of pneumonia. A frightened Emmy repented and promised him sex if he survived. He made a miraculous recovery, and at a resort in Rockledge, Florida, Alfred Stieglitz finally deflowered his wife.
In the spring of 1896, Stieglitz was one of the principals who negotiated the merger of the Society of Amateur Photographers and the Camera Club of New York to create one of the largest and wealthiest club memberships in the country. Located at 3-7 West Twenty-ninth Street, the camera club had a library, darkrooms, and equipment. In 1897, Stieglitz began publishing a quarterly for members called Camera Notes illustrated with photogravures and half-tones. He insisted upon “a picture rather than a photograph, though photography must be the method of graphic representation.”4 During its run, Stieglitz published eight of his own pictures, more than by any other photographer. As was the case at The American Amateur Photographer, Stieglitz accepted no salary and he covered debts with his own money.
The following year, Stieglitz was an obvious choice as juror for America’s first photographic salon, organized by the Pennsylvania Academy of Arts and the Photographic Society of Philadelphia. Only one hundred and ninety of the fifteen hundred submissions were accepted, and the show opened with ten photographs by Stieglitz and ten each by Gertrude Kasebier and Clarence H. White, who also worked in the pictorialist manner. White had been influenced by Japanese art, while Kasebier had studied with Arthur Wesley Dow, who incorporated the Japanese aesthetic into his theories on art and design. Their misty, suggestive prints reflected the popular Orientalist painting of James McNeil Whistler.
Although the marriage was never to be a happy one, the couple were apparently moved to conjugal relations on more than a single occasion: their daughter, Katherine, was born on September 27, 1898. At Emmy’s insistence, they moved to a large apartment at 1111 Madison Avenue, where they employed a chambermaid, governess, and cook. The jubilant father began “The Photographic Journey of a Baby,” documenting his daughter, nicknamed Kitty, as a baby being held by her mother. He saw his daughter’s birth as an opportunity to substantiate his view that a true portrait would begin with pictures taken at birth and continue throughout a subject’s life. The Kitty chronicle was halted after four years by Emmy, who felt the girl was becoming self-conscious. Since Stieglitz demonstrated his fond feelings for people by taking their picture, this forced withdrawal meant less interaction with his daughter. Thereafter, feeling wounded and misunderstood, Stieglitz took only the occasional photograph of Kitty or Emmy.
The Stieglitzes lived in the style of the period and of their parents, with a living room crowded with dark Victorian furniture. Symbolist prints by Munich Secession painter Franz von Stuck, such as the dramatic Sin, portraying a naked Eve with a large snake, shared the walls with Stieglitz’s photographs. In any case, he felt that his real home was in the rooms of the Camera Club.
By 1899, Stieglitz’s photographic achievements rated a profile by Theodore Dreiser in Success magazine. He was photographing New York City buildings as they were erected or demolished and always tackling new technical challenges, such as photographing at night or in the falling rain. His efforts were complicated by the use of cumbersome equipment, untried materials, and the fact that each exposure required several minutes. After he spent countless hours in the darkroom, these pictures broke technical as well as aest
hetic ground. Spring Showers, printed in 1900, features a thin tree and a crouched, wet figure shrouded by mist, cropped in a long, vertical format indebted to Japanese ink paintings.
That May, Stieglitz was at the Camera Club when he was approached by a lanky, handsome, twenty-one-year-old, Edward Steichen. Clarence White had provided the introduction, calling Stieglitz “the leader in the struggle for the recognition of pictorial photography as art.” An avid reader of Camera Notes, Steichen was in New York before traveling to Paris and had brought his portfolio of gum bichromate photographs to show Stieglitz.
Steichen, like Stieglitz, was the son of European immigrants. Born in Luxembourg in 1879, he was brought to the little mining town of Hancock, Michigan, at age two by his parents. The family moved to Milwaukee when he was ten, so that he and his sister Lilian would have better opportunities. After completing school at fifteen, he apprenticed to a lithography studio, American Fine Art Company, and soon was promoted to designer and lithographer. Always fascinated by technology, he bought his first camera in 1895 and immediately grasped its potential. He convinced the firm’s lithography designers to work from photographs so he could develop his technical expertise while on the job. Meanwhile, he pursued his painting at night by going to classes at the Milwaukee Art Students League.
After five years at the firm, he had saved enough money to pursue his studies as a painter at the Academie Julian. Although he loved photography, he was distressed about its lowly status when compared with painting. Steichen decided, while passing through New York, to seek out Stieglitz’s advice. The older photographer praised Steichen’s efforts and, more gratifyingly, bought three of his prints for five dollars each and made certain that they were shown in the Philadelphia Photographic Salon that fall.
During the next two years, in a studio on the Boulevard du Montparnasse, Steichen pursued his ethereal landscape paintings as well as his photographs, which American photographer F. Holland Day included in The New American School of Photography, held that fall in London.5
Steichen included Day in his portfolio of photographs of “Great Men,” along with the writer Maurice Maeterlinck, the artist George Frederick Watts, and Auguste Rodin. The aging sculptor especially enjoyed Steichen’s company and soon Steichen, fluent in French, was invited to visit the studio every Sunday. After a year, he felt sufficiently well acquainted to make the photograph Rodin—Le Penseur, his legendary picture of the artist posed with his luminous bronze statue of The Thinker.
From Paris, Steichen conducted a torrential correspondence with Stieglitz, who saw the young artist’s simultaneous success as painter and photographer as validation of his belief that the art lies in the message, not the medium. In Camera Notes, Stieglitz publicized Steichen’s inclusion in the Champs de Mars salon and other triumphs.
The photographs published by Stieglitz and his friends met with little approval from conservative members of the Camera Club. In February 1902, Stieglitz broke away to form his own group, the Photo-Secession, named after the Munich Secession of 1892, a group of painters who rebelled against the dominance of academic painting. Although he initially described the Photo-Secession as “the most radical and exclusive body of photographers” and a “protest,” Stieglitz and other members maintained their relationship with the Camera Club in order to use its darkrooms.6
Steichen returned to New York in time to lend his impetuous nature to the Photo-Secession, convincing Stieglitz to be director and to start a new magazine. The members of the Photo-Secession soon numbered one hundred and twenty, one-third of whom were women. Their dues helped pay for exhibitions and the publication Camera Work, designed by Steichen, edited by Stieglitz and his friend, the photographer Joseph T. Keiley, and soon to become one of the most influential arts journals in America.
At a cost of five dollars per year, there were six hundred and forty-seven subscriptions to Camera Work in its first year, 1903. Printed by Stieglitz’s Photochrome Engraving Company, the photogravures were hand-mounted into each copy of the magazine by the editor and his friends. After his company went out of business, Stieglitz insisted the magazine be printed in Germany at great additional expense. During its fifteen-year run, three hundred and fifty-seven of the four hundred and seventy-three photographs published in Camera Work would be by fourteen photographers, mostly by Stieglitz and Steichen. It published the most astute criticism of the era, with articles by photographer and critic Sadakichi Hartmann and Charles H. Caffin, the British art critic for the New York American, who in 1901 published one of the first validations of pictorialism, Photography as a Fine Art: The Achievements and Possibilities of Photographic Art in America. Within a few years, the magazine included articles about the development of modern art in Europe along with some of the first reproductions of paintings.
Stieglitz was so unstinting in his dedication to Camera Work that, after two years, Emmy felt the only way to spend time with him was on a European vacation. Upon arriving in Germany in May 1904, Stieglitz collapsed of nervous exhaustion and was taken to a clinic in Berlin. After a month of recuperation, he joined Emmy, Kitty, and Kitty’s governess on their tour of the continent, and in September, he attended his first Photographic Salon, held by the Linked Ring in London.
Back in New York, Stieglitz and Steichen decided to stage their own salon. Unable to afford rent for an official venue, they decided to hold the shows in Steichen’s former studio, next door to his new and larger one in the building at 291 Fifth Avenue. Steichen designed the interior in the Viennese Secessionist style, with gray-green burlap wall coverings and deep brown woodwork. A scrim hung over the skylight to provide diffuse illumination of the photographs, which were framed in dark wood. A large hammered brass bowl filled with tree branches stood on a table in the center of the gallery.
The Little Galleries of the Photo-Secession opened on November 25, 1905, with one hundred photographs by photographers associated with the movement. A 15 percent commission on any sales went to the gallery fund. In March 1906, the twenty-six-year-old Steichen was given a retrospective of sixty-one photographs, including his lyrical portraits and landscapes.
The gallery was in a fashionable part of town and, according to Stieglitz, some fifteen thousand curious viewers came during the first season. Steichen’s wife, Clara, opened the gallery whenever Stieglitz and her husband were not around. About sixty prints were sold for an average of forty-five dollars each, many to Stieglitz, who hoped to establish a photography museum in the future. Stieglitz hosted a daily lunch for photographers, artists, critics, and patrons at the swanky restaurant of the Holland House hotel at Fifth Avenue and Thirtieth Street, picking up the tab with the allowance provided by his wife.
The Stieglitz family adopted the charming, ambitious Steichen. Edward Stieglitz bought his paintings and arranged the commission for the photographer’s famously imperious portrait of financier J. P. Morgan. Lee Stieglitz became the Steichen family physician. Despite this cozy arrangement, Steichen felt that he needed to return to Paris, and in 1906 he moved there with Clara and his two daughters, Mary and Kate.
After Steichen left, Emmy told Alfred that she was thrilled he would be giving up all that gallery nonsense. Although he was growing tired of the incessant needs of various photographers, the idea of mollifying Emmy fueled his resolve and he renewed the two-year lease.
After two decades, Stieglitz was winning the battle to improve the status of photography as an art form. To strengthen their position, Stieglitz and Steichen determined to present photographs alongside other works of modern art. Steichen was to scout Paris for artists for future shows. After the 1906 exhibition of the Photo-Secessionists, however, Stieglitz decided to show the drawings and watercolors of a twenty-eight-year-old American who had been living in London, Pamela Colman Smith.
Smith had studied with Arthur Wesley Dow in New York and in London befriended the poets William Butler Yeats and Arthur Symons. Stieglitz found her to be as spirited and attractive as her Symbolist-derived work. The Sym
bolists adhered to the idea of the spiritual and the unconcious as the crucial motivators of their art, tying it to a strain of German romanticism that informed Stieglitz’s most intuitive responses. Although the show enjoyed critical and financial success, it enraged Steichen, who already had promised that first show to Rodin. He was furious, too, that the idea of exhibiting nonphotographic work at 291 then appeared to have come from Stieglitz alone.
In June 1907, Stieglitz, his wife, daughter, and governess returned to Europe. On the outbound voyage, he took one of his most celebrated photographs—The Steerage. He saw the crowds of passengers leaning over the railings above and below deck and ran back to his cabin to get his 4 × 5 Graflex to take the picture. He developed the plate when he got to Paris and carried it with him for four months until he could get home and print it. It has been mistakenly analyzed as a provocative picture of poor immigrants coming to America and representative of the division between the upper and lower classes. Instead, all the subjects on upper as well as lower decks are in steerage: they are workers returning to Europe from America with their saved wages.7
When Stieglitz arrived in Paris, he found that his friend had outdistanced him with regard to modern art connoiseurship. Steichen was a regular at the salons of the wealthy expatriate Stein family, two brothers and a sister from San Francisco. Leo Stein lived at 27 rue de Fleurus, off the Boulevard Raspail, with his sister, Gertrude Stein, who had not yet discovered her abilities as a writer. Leo and Gertrude Stein collected Picasso, whom Steichen had met. At the home of Michael Stein and his wife, Sarah, Steichen was introduced to Matisse, whose work they collected.
Stieglitz was frankly unsophisticated. When taken to the Bernheim Jeune Gallery to see the watercolors of Cézanne, who had died just two years before, Stieglitz was told that the drawings cost one thousand francs each. He snorted, “You mean a dozen. . . . Why there’s nothing there but empty paper with a few splashes of color here and there.” Later, he tried to cover by saying, “To be truthful, my remarks resulted from having been flabbergasted by the pictures.”8
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