11/19/2023 0 Comments Alfred stieglitz camera workHis father, a retired woolen merchant and Sunday painter, moved the family back to Germany in 1881. Small in stature, with unruly dark hair and a broad, crooked nose (broken in a childhood fall), Stieglitz had intense, deep-set eyes that give him a romantic, intimidating air in early portraits. The eldest of six children in a family of argumentative German-Americans, Alfred Stieglitz (pronounced Steeg-litz) was born in 1864 in Hoboken, New Jersey, and raised in a brownstone on Manhattan’s Upper East Side. “This is far and away the most comprehensive collection of Stieglitz’s photographs that exists anywhere,” Greenough says. “But many of his other photographs have not been seen or reproduced in the last 50 years.” The 100 prints in the new exhibition are drawn from the more than 1,600 photographs (all printed and mounted by Stieglitz himself) that O’- Keeffe bequeathed to the National Gallery in two gifts-the first in 1949, a few years after his death, and the second in 1980. Supported by the Eastman Kodak Company, the show-“Alfred Stieglitz: Known and Unknown”- is on view from June 2 through September 1 and is accompanied by a scholarly two-volume publication and an online exhibition at “Today Stieglitz is most known for his portraits of O’Keeffe and for his studies of New York City from around the turn of the 20th century,” says Sarah Greenough, the National Gallery curator who organized the exhibition. Although his legacy has been colored by his battles on behalf of other photographers, his role as the nation’s earliest champion of modernist painting and his marriage to painter Georgia O’- Keeffe, Stieglitz was himself a consummate photographer, as a new exhibition at Washington’s National Gallery of Art demonstrates. Brilliant, opinionated, and often tactless, he would do more than anyone in America to persuade the art world that photography deserved a place alongside painting and sculpture. “I wouldn’t do that if I were you,” the lad shot back. “Makes ’em look more natural,” the photographer replied. When the photographer bent over the finished tintypes to brush a bit of red pigment onto faces in the photographs, the boy asked why he did that. The youngster watched in fascination as faces slowly appeared on coated-metal plates submerged in developing trays. In the summer of 1875, a smalltown portrait photographer in upstate New York invited an 11-year-old boy to join him in his darkroom.
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