Masters of Photography - Alfred Stieglitz

Alfred Stieglitz (1864 --1946) was an American photographer who was instrumental over his fifty-year career in making photography an acceptable art form alongside painting and sculpture. Many of his photographs are known for appearing like those other art forms, and he is also known for his marriage to painter Georgia O’Keeffe, most famous for her large-scale paintings of flowers. Stieglitz was born the eldest of six children in Hoboken, New Jersey and raised in a brownstone on Manhattan’s Upper East Side. His father moved with his family to Germany in 1881. The next year, Stieglitz began studying mechanical engineering at the Technische Hochschule in Berlin and soon switched to photography. Traveling through the European countryside with his camera, he took many photographs of peasants working on the Dutch seacoast and undisturbed nature within Germany’s Black Forest and won prizes and attention throughout Europe in the 1880s Throughout his life, Stieglitz was infatuated with younger women. He married Emmeline Obermeyer in 1893. Big camera clubs that were the vogue in America at the time did not satisfy him; in 1902 he organized an invitation-only group, which he dubbed the Photo-Secession, to force the art world to recognize photography “as a distinctive medium of individual expression.“ Among its members were Edward Steichen, Gertrude Kasebier, Clarence White and Alvin Langdon Coburn. Photo-Secession held its own exhibitions and published Camera Work, a pre-eminent quarterly photographic journal, until 1917. Stieglitz divorced his wife Emmeline in 1918, soon after she threw him out of their house when she came home and found him photographing Georgia O’Keeffe, whom he moved in with shortly thereafter. The two married in 1924 and were both successful, he in photography (he would take hundreds of pictures of her throughout his life), she as an artist who had received notoriety from Stieglitz at 291 in 1916 and 1917. Stieglitz began in 1916 photograph