Back More
Salem Press

Table of Contents

See Also

Art movements

Demuth, Charles

Marin, John

O’Keeffe, Georgia

Photography

The 1920s in America

Stieglitz, Alfred

by Clyde S. McConnell

Identification: American photographer and art promoter

Born: January 1, 1864, Hoboken, New Jersey

Died: July 13, 1946, New York, New York

In the 1920s, Alfred Stieglitz reprised his familiar dual role as innovative photographer and advocate for modern art, especially American art, roles he had been playing since the turn of the century. Although he was in his sixth decade, the quality and originality of Stieglitz’s new photographic work was the basis for his continued authority as an advocate for the art of his younger contemporaries.

When the decade began, Stieglitz had been living in New York City with the painter Georgia O’Keeffe for nearly three years; they would marry in 1924, following Stieglitz’s divorce from his first wife, Emmeline. Stieglitz had gained energy and artistic inspiration from his relationship with O’Keeffe following the 1917 closing of his famed Manhattan gallery, 291. Among his best-known works is what he called a “collective portrait” of O’Keeffe, which had grown to comprise more than forty photographs by the time of its first public exhibition, at New York’s Anderson Galleries. The February 1921 exhibition also included an extensive selection of Stieglitz’s other photographs, some dating from as early as 1886.

Among the photographs of O’Keeffe were nudes, some remarkably intimate for the era, which created considerable public interest in both Stieglitz and O’Keeffe, whose identity as the subject was widely known despite the fact that none of the pictures on display revealed her face. Apart from the arguable sensationalism of Stieglitz’s gesture in publicly displaying the O’Keeffe images, the exhibition firmly established the collaborative nature of their relationship, and the publicity generated by this collective portrait helped to promote O’Keeffe’s emergence in the next few years as a leading American painter.

Lake George and Photographs of Clouds

In the early 1920s, Stieglitz began a series of photographs of clouds and skies, which he took using a handheld reflex camera. Most if not all of these were taken during the months of the year that he spent at Lake George, a family gathering place in upstate New York near Saratoga Springs. Lake George was also a significant nexus for Stieglitz’s extended contacts in the world of the arts and would rival Manhattan in his affections for more than four decades.

The inspiration for Stieglitz’s sky photographs is uncertain, but one notion that he advanced was that they were in response to a friend, writer Waldo Frank, who felt that Stieglitz succeeded in the field of portraiture by mesmerizing his subjects. Since he could not be accused of similar influence over the atmosphere, he undertook to prove that the quality of his work transcended subject matter by aiming his camera upward. Another motivation for these photographs was Stieglitz’s ambition to create a kind of abstract visual music; he cited composer Ernest Bloch’s suggestion that he strive to evoke musical forms, and even specific instrumentation, by photographing clouds.

Stieglitz presented his sky images in 1922 and 1923 as two series: Music—A Sequence of Ten Cloud Photographs and Songs of the Sky—Secrets of the Skies as Revealed by My Camera. He called his later works of the same kind Equivalents, a term that has since come to stand for this body of work as a whole. Stieglitz’s Equivalents are widely regarded as among the earliest examples of truly abstract photography, a genre that intentionally divorces the subject matter of the image from any literal or objective interpretation, and one whose modern expression has been largely shaped by Stieglitz’s work.

Impact

Stieglitz’s ongoing work with O’Keeffe and his Equivalents photographs both served to confirm the vitality of his creative vision. After he and O’Keeffe moved to the Shelton Hotel in 1925, he embarked on a distinguished series of photographs of New York buildings. Also in 1925, he renewed his commitment to recognizing and promoting artistic talent by creating a new exhibition space, which he called The Intimate Gallery. This was superseded in December 1929 by An American Place, where he principally showed the work of the artists who had been closest to him over the years, including O’Keeffe, John Marin, and Charles Demuth.

Further Reading

1 

Bochner, Jay. An American Lens: Scenes from Alfred Stieglitz’s New York Secession. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2005. Emphasizes Stieglitz’s half century as a player in the development of modernism in American art.

2 

Greenough, Sarah, and Juan Hamilton. Alfred Stieglitz: Photographs and Writings. Washington, D.C.: National Gallery of Art, 1983. Offers documentary materials, a selection photographs, and an essay by Greenough, senior curator of photographs at the National Gallery.

3 

Greenough, Sarah, ed. Modern Art and America: Alfred Stieglitz and His New York Galleries. Washington, D.C.: National Gallery of Art, 2000. Presents the art that Stieglitz exhibited and fostered over four decades, alongside essays on the individual artists.

4 

Hoffman, Katherine. Stieglitz: A Beginning Light. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2004. Offers perceptive, though sometimes impressionistic, connections between the earlier and later phases of Stieglitz’s career.

5 

Lowe, Sue Davidson. Stieglitz: A Memoir/Biography. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1983. A comprehensive biography of Stieglitz, written by his grandniece.

6 

Whelan, Richard. Alfred Stieglitz: A Biography. Boston: Little, Brown, 1995. An exceptionally detailed study of Stieglitz’s life.

Citation Types

Type
Format
MLA 9th
McConnell, Clyde S. "Stieglitz, Alfred." The 1920s in America, edited by Carl Rollyson, Salem Press, 2012. Salem Online, online.salempress.com/articleDetails.do?articleName=1920_0588.
APA 7th
McConnell, C. S. (2012). Stieglitz, Alfred. In C. Rollyson (Ed.), The 1920s in America. Salem Press. online.salempress.com.
CMOS 17th
McConnell, Clyde S. "Stieglitz, Alfred." Edited by Carl Rollyson. The 1920s in America. Hackensack: Salem Press, 2012. Accessed December 14, 2025. online.salempress.com.