Alfred Stieglitz

Alfred Stieglitz was born January 1, 1864, in Hoboken, New Jersey, the eldest son of a German Jewish wool merchant who retired young and moved the family to Europe for schooling. At seventeen he enrolled to study mechanical engineering at Berlin's Technische Hochschule, but a chemistry course under Hermann Wilhelm Vogel pulled him toward the photographic plate instead. He bought a camera, wandered the German and Italian countryside photographing peasants and canals, and won his first competition prize in 1887. He came home to New York in 1890 already convinced photography could be more than a mechanical record, and in 1893 married Emmeline Obermeyer, his business partner's sister, in a match he later admitted he entered without love.

Back in New York, Stieglitz turned amateur photography clubs into a campaign. He rebuilt the Camera Club's newsletter into Camera Notes, then broke from the club in 1902 to found Camera Work, a quarterly whose hand-pulled photogravures set a print quality no rival matched. In 1905 he opened the Little Galleries of the Photo-Secession at 291 Fifth Avenue, hanging his own photographs beside Matisse, Picasso, and Rodin until museums stopped treating the camera as a lesser medium. He photographed New York's harbors and skyscrapers, made The Steerage in 1907, and later turned his lens on clouds for a series he called Equivalents. In 1929 he opened An American Place, where he showed Georgia O'Keeffe, Arthur Dove, and John Marin every year until his death. Photography's claim to a museum wall runs through one gallerist's decades of insisting it belonged there.

The professional promotion and the personal life ran through the same relationship, and not cleanly. Stieglitz first exhibited Georgia O'Keeffe's drawings in 1916 without asking her, then began photographing her in 1918, the year she moved to New York and he left his wife for her. Over the next seven years he made more than 350 mounted prints of O'Keeffe, dozens of them nude studies, and hung 46 of them, unlabeled, in a 1921 show that turned her into a public sensation on his terms before her own painting had a public reputation of its own. She married him in 1924 but spent much of the marriage in New Mexico while he stayed in New York, where he photographed and mentored a much younger protegee, Dorothy Norman, an arrangement O'Keeffe knew about and tolerated rather than confronted.

Stieglitz suffered a fatal stroke in the summer of 1946 and died on July 13 with O'Keeffe at his bedside. Two years later she began giving his 1,317 mounted photographs to the National Gallery of Art, the first time a major American museum had accepted photography into its permanent collection on the same terms as painting, the argument he had spent five decades making. The irony has held since: when his prints reach auction, eight of the nine highest prices ever paid for a Stieglitz photograph are images of O'Keeffe, the woman whose own art he is now sometimes accused of having overshadowed by making her his most famous subject.

Alfred Stieglitz's life against the full span of the corpus.

• Camera Work other
  Quarterly journal, published until 1917, pioneering hand-pulled photogravure printing 1902
• Little Galleries of the Photo-Secession (291) company
  The gallery at 291 Fifth Avenue that put photography beside Matisse and Picasso 1905
• The Steerage artwork
  Widely reproduced as a defining image of early modernist photography 1907
• Equivalents artwork
  A cloud-photograph series exploring pure form, made over more than a decade 1922
• An American Place company
  His third and largest gallery, operated until his death in 1946 1929

• January 1, 1864 aged 0 Born in Hoboken, New Jersey
• November 16, 1893 aged 29 Marries Emmeline Obermeyer
• 1902 aged ~38 Founds Camera Work
• November 25, 1905 aged 41 Opens the Little Galleries of the Photo-Secession at 291 Fifth Avenue
• 1907 aged ~43 Makes The Steerage
• January 1916 aged 52 Exhibits Georgia O'Keeffe's drawings without her permission
• 1924 aged ~60 Marries Georgia O'Keeffe
• December 15, 1929 aged 65 Opens An American Place
• July 13, 1946 aged 82 Dies in New York City

• Georgia O'Keeffe 1887–1986
  Modernist painter known for her enlarged flowers, New York skyscrapers, and New Mexico landscapes. married to
• Ansel Adams 1902–1984
  Landscape photographer whose Western images and zone system shaped American photographic practice. gave one of his first New York shows