The Steerage.
1907 (printed between 1911 and 1915).
The Steerage began its life as a masterpiece four years after its creation, with Stieglitz's publication of it in a 1911 issue of Camera Work devoted exclusively to his photographs in the 'new' style, together with a Cubist drawing by Picasso. Stieglitz loved to recount how the great painter had praised the collage-like dispersal of forms and shifting depths of The Steerage. Canonised retroactively, the photograph allowed Stieglitz to put his chosen medium on par with the experimental European painting and sculpture he imported and exhibited at his gallery.
Alfred Stieglitz (1864-1946) was a major force in the promotion and elevation of photography as a fine art in America in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The Steerage is considered Stieglitz's signature work, and was proclaimed by the artist and illustrated in histories of the medium as his first 'modernist' photograph. It marks Stieglitz's transition away from painterly prints of Symbolist subjects to a more straightforward depiction of quotidian life.
Small format photogravure on Japanese tissue paper, (192 x 152 mm), mounted (size with mount 367 x 299 mm).
Stieglitz, Camera Work 36.
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