As a photographer, Stieglitz is a giant. In today's market; his works
easily bring in three hundred thousand dollars - when they come to market
at all, that is. His ceuvre is discussed in practically every history of
the meŽdium. And yet, his photographic creations still stand under the
shadow of the artists that he publicized and fostered as his proteges:
Edward Steichen, Edward Weston, Paul Strand, to name only three. Stieglitz
does not appear in the 'pantheon' of the thirty most important
photographers of the twentieth century established in 1992 by Klaus Honnef,
who characterizes Stieglitz's work as "commercial photography - though of
a high degree": a surprizing evaluation, insofar as Stieglitz succeeded in
establishing pictorialism in the USA while he was almost simultaneously
anticipating Straight Photography in works like Winter, Fifth Avenue
(1893), From the Back-Window, 291 (1915), or - precisely - The Steerage.
In other words, at least twice Stieglitz was the leading figure in the
artistic Avant-garde. Furthermore, it was he who raised the metropolis,
modern civilization itself, to an object for art, introducing it into
polite company, as it were. Skyscrapers, city canyons, rail and ship
traffic all appear as motifs on an equal basis with classical themes such
as landscape, genre, and nude photography. Stieglitz's ceuvre even
comprises examples of conceptual photography, if one considers his
portraits of Georgia O'Keeffe, one of his later lovers, shot over a period
of years, or his cloud studies, his so-called Equivalents, that he pursued
almost obsessively. Admittedly absent from Stieglitz's photographs is the
radicalism that his contem-poraries such as Evans or Strand brought to
their work. In a sense, Stieglitz remained a pictorialist, above all
interested in adapting the classical rules of art to photography and to
creating an elegant print. All of this applies specifically to The
Steerage, a work at once ambivalently radical and affirmative. Stieglitz
published the picture for the first time in 1911 in his magazine Camera
Work; years later he designated it among his most important works. "If all
my photographs were lost, and I were to be remembered only for The
Steerage'," he once said, "I would be satisfied." In the spring of 1907
Alfred Stieglitz was forty-three years old. We can picture the artist, of
whom so many portraits exist, as a respectable middleaged gentleman with
thick hair and a dark mustache, wire-rimmed glasses, and the skeptical
gaze of the restrained misanthrope who has not yet given up the struggle
against ignorance and poor taste. Although born in the USA, Stieglitz was
strongly influenced by spending a number of school and university years in
Germany. In particular, the lectures by Hermann Wilhelm Vogel, the
inventor of orthochromatic film, greatly furthered his interest in
photography. Stieglitz's first experiments with the camera stem from his
Berlin period beginning 1882. He began to submit his work to photography
contests and to write knowledgeable essays on the subject for
international magazines. Upon his return to the USA, initially as editor
of the journal American Amateur Photographer and later of Camera Notes, he
became the apologist of an 'autonomous' photography, free from the service
to any particular goals. His association with Camera Work (beginning 1903)
and the Little Galleries at 291 Fifth Avenue (beginning 1905) provided him
with influential forums for broadcasting his ideals. By 1907, he had also
opened his doors to the fine arts, in particular to the work of artists
like Rodin, Toulouse-Lautrec, Matisse, and Picasso. In the same year,
Stieglitz himself undertook a voyage to Europe. In early June, acceding to
the wishes of his wife, Emmy, he boarded the Kaiser Wilhelm II, the
luxurious flagship of the Norddeutsche Lloyd lines. Along with his wife,
daughter Kitty, and a governess, he brought along a Graflex for 4 x 5-inch
glass negatives, and a single unexposed plate with which he was later to
capture his famous 'tween-decks picture. For photographers to speak about
their individual creations is more the exception than the rule.
Nonetheless, in 1942 - four years before his death - Stieglitz provided
The Steerage with a longish commentary, which Wilfried Wiegand once with
justice termed "the most precise description...ever offered on the
creation of a masterpiece." Stieglitz begins his discussion with a
description of the atmosphere in the First Class, which he hated: faces
that "would cause a cold shudder to run down the spine," led him to spend
the first few days at sea in a lounge chair on deck with his eyes closed.
"On the third day," he continued, "I couldn't take any more. I had to get
away from this society."
The artist moved "as far forward as the deck allowed." The sea was
calm, the sky clear with a sharp wind blowing. "Reaching the end of the
deck, I found myself alone, and looked down. In the steerage were men,
women and children. A narrow stairway led up to a small 'tween-deck above,
directly over the prow of the ship. To the left was a slanted chimney, and
from the 'tween-deck, a gleaming, freshly painted gangway hung down."
Stieglitz noticed a young man with a round straw hat and the funnel
leaning left, the stairway leaning right, "the white drawbridge with its
railings made of circular chains - white suspenders crossing on the back
of a man in the steerage below, round shapes of iron machinery, a mast
cutting into the sky, making a triangular shape... For a while I stood
there as if rooted, looking and looking. Could I photograph what I was
feeling...?" Stieglitz hurried back to his cabin, grabbed his Craflex, and
hurried back "out of breath and afraid that the man in the straw hat might
have moved. If he had left his place, then I no longer had the
picture than I had imagined earlier. The relation between the forms that I
wanted to capture would have been destroyed, and the picture would have
been gone." But the man was still standing there. Furthermore, neither the
man wearing the suspenders nor the woman with her child on her lap had
altered their positions. "Apparently," claimed Stieglitz, "no one had
changed position. I had only one cassette with a single unexposed plate.
Would I be able to capture what I saw and felt? Finally I pressed the
button. My heart was pounding. I had never heard my heart beating before.
Had I gotten my picture? If the answer was yes, then I knew I had reached
a new mile-stone in photography, similar to Car Horses in 1892 or Hand of
Man in 1902, both of which had introduced a new epoch in photography and
perception."
Alfred Stieglitz
(1864 – 1946)
The Hand of Man, 1902
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In comparison with the euphoria that he later expressed, Stieglitz
seems not to have been so certain in the beginning about the quality of
the picture. How else can one explain the fact that the work that he
designated as a milestone of photographic art appeared neither in the art
photography exhibit in Dresden in 1909, nor in the Albright Gallery in
Buffalo a year later. The Steerage was published for the first time only
in 1911 in the form of a 7 3/4 x 6 1/4-inch photogravure in Number 36 of
the legendary magazine Camera Work that Stieglitz edited. Earlier, the
photographer thought he recalled showing the photograph to his friend and
colleague Joseph Keily. "'But Stieglitz,' he protested, 'you took
two pictures, one above and one below.'... It became clear to me that he
did not rightly see the picture that I had taken." Even today, the
photograph is regularly misunderstood as a visual witness to the masses of
immigrants that were streaming to the USA around the turn of the twentieth
century. In fact, however, the ship is cruising in the opposite direction,
and the people traveling in steerage were in fact 'migratory birds' -
manual workers and craftspeople who, as Richard Whelan writes, "made the
crossing between Europe and the New World in two-year cycles." Stieglitz
himself did not comment on them - just as he did not seem interested in
the entire social aspect of his photography. He placed forms and structure
above any possible human implications - at any rate, the latter were not
the subject of his reflections. Thus, on the eve of the First World War,
'pure' art was able to celebrate itself once more. Afterwards, it would be
forced to redefine its role in a new age and a new world.
