Alfred Stieglitz

Alfred Stieglitz at the George Eastman House

Alfred Stieglitz at The J. Paul Getty Museum

Alfred Stieglitz at The Lee Gallelry

Alfred Stieglitz at Luminous Lint for Collectors and Connoisseurs of Fine Photography

Alfred Stiegliltz at The Masters of Photography Gallery

"Equivalent," 1930



"Spring Showers, The Sweeper," 1902



"Georgia O'Keeffe," 1918

Untitled, Autochrome 

"Paul Strand," 1919

"The Steerage," 1907

Alfred Stieglitz Biography from Encyclopaedia Britannica (primary contributor:  John Szarkowski):

Alfred Stieglitz, (born January 1, 1864, Hoboken, New Jersey, U.S.—died July 13, 1946, New York, New York), art dealer, publisher, advocate for the Modernist movement in the arts, and, arguably, the most important photographer of his time.

Stieglitz was the son of Edward Stieglitz, a German Jew who came to the United States in 1849 and went on to make a comfortable fortune in the clothing business. In 1871 the elder Stieglitz moved his family from Hoboken, New Jersey, to Manhattan’s Upper East Side. Ten years later he sold his business in order to devote himself to the appreciation of the arts and to European travel.

In 1882 Alfred Stieglitz enrolled in Berlin’s Technische Hochschule to study engineering, but the subject apparently did not strike his fancy. He did, however, spend an undetermined amount of time studying with the great photochemist Hermann Vogel, and, during this same period, he committed himself to photography. It would seem that this commitment did not seriously interfere with his role as student prince, as he spent much of his time at the racetrack and in cafés, seeing operas by Wagner, and being entertained by young women of the less affluent classes. Nevertheless, by 1887 he was skilled enough to win both first and second prizes in the “Holiday Work” competition of the leading English journal Amateur Photographer.

In 1890, after eight years of footloose freedom, mostly in Germany, Stieglitz returned to the United States. He was convinced that photography should be considered a fine art—at least potentially the equal of painting and the traditional graphic arts—and he was accustomed to getting his way. He quickly became a leader of photography’s fine-art movement in the United States (part of an international phenomenon). In 1892 he became editor of Camera Notes, the publication of the Camera Club of New York, a position that allowed him to advance the photographers and policies he favoured. By 1902, however, resentment in the club had reached a point where Stieglitz was forced to resign. He was ready to move on and already had plans for his own organization and journal.

Early in 1902 Stieglitz announced the existence of a new organization called the Photo-Secession, a group dedicated to promoting photography as an art form. The name of the group suggested that it was designed to break away from stodgy and conventional ideas. In fact, all the Photo-Secessionist photographers were committed in greater or lesser degrees to what was called the Pictorialist style, meaning they favoured traditional genre subjects that had been sanctified by generations of conventional painters and techniques that tended to hide the intrinsic factuality of photography behind a softening mist. Members of the group were elected by Stieglitz, and eventually its roll included 17 fellows and almost twice as many associates. Founding members included Gertrude Käsebier, Edward Steichen, Clarence H. White, and Joseph Keiley.

It is difficult to describe the character of Stieglitz’s photography from this period without first identifying which selection of early work one is considering. As an active and talented publicist and publisher, Stieglitz was able regularly to revise his own early artistic achievement and to emphasize early work that in retrospect seemed more interesting than it had when new. For example, the negative for Paula was made in 1889, but the first confirmed exhibition of a print of it was in 1921, and the oldest extant print is dated 1916. If judged from the work that Stieglitz chose to reproduce while editor of Camera Notes, or from the 15 pictures selected by Stieglitz’s frequent collaborator Charles H. Caffin in his important 1901 book Photography as Fine Art, much of Stieglitz’s early work was sentimental, conventional, or both. Little of it compares in vitality—even within the narrow Pictorialist aesthetic—with the contemporary work of Käsebier, Steichen, or White. The exceptions in Stieglitz’s early work—those pictures that seem to respond to the photographer’s own life and place, such as Winter, Fifth Avenue or The Terminal (both 1892)—are almost always answers to difficult technical problems, which Stieglitz loved, and which often trumped his impulses to make photographs that were artistically correct.

To promote his goals (and, presumably, the goals of the Photo-Secession), Stieglitz introduced a quarterly publication called Camera Work; its first issue appeared in January 1903, and a total of 50 issues would be produced before it ceased publication in 1917. The magazine would largely define the artistic ambitions of amateur photographers in the first quarter of the 20th century. The quality of Camera Work’s production was extraordinary, and many of its gravure reproductions—often made directly from a photographer’s negative—are still valued by collectors. (When Stieglitz had returned to the United States in 1890, his father bought him an interest in the Heliochrome Company, a firm working in the then new technology of photoengraving. The business was a failure, perhaps because of Stieglitz’s antibusiness postures, but it is possible that he learned something about the craft of printing that served him well in his subsequent work as a publisher.)

Late in 1905, with the encouragement of his young protégé Steichen, Stieglitz opened the Little Galleries of the Photo-Secession, a name soon shortened to 291, the gallery’s address on lower Fifth Avenue in New York City. During the gallery’s first four years it most often functioned as an exhibition space for the Photo-Secession photographers. By the 1909 season, however, the gallery began to promote progressive art in a variety of media, and the work of painters, sculptors, and printmakers almost usurped the gallery space. These exhibitions (many of them arranged by Steichen) included the first shows in the United States of the work of Henri Matisse, Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, Paul Cézanne, and Pablo Picasso.

As a result of his varied activities, Stieglitz’s reputation in the art world grew quickly, and in 1910 the Albright Gallery of Buffalo, New York, a highly respected institution, offered him its entire gallery space to do an exhibition on the art of photography as he understood it. The exhibition contained about 600 photographs, including 27 by Frank Eugene and 16 by Anne Brigman, but not one by Carleton Watkins, William Henry Jackson, Edward Curtis, nor by Stieglitz’s fellow New Yorkers Jacob A. Riis and Lewis Wickes Hine—all of them alive, and none unknown. Stieglitz told friends that the Buffalo exhibition was the realization of his dream of a quarter century: “The full recognition of photography by an important art museum!” The exhibition was a political triumph, but not an artistic one, as it represented only a very limited conception— Stieglitz’s own—of what photography’s creative potential might be. In fact, the exhibit revealed that, while claiming to be progressive, the Photo-Secessionist ideals had in some ways become both authoritarian and deeply conservative, ignoring work that pursued anything other than an attenuated aestheticism.

After the Buffalo exhibition, Stieglitz made few photographs for five years. When he returned to creating his own photographs in 1915, his work seems to have become washed clean of the old artistic postures and darkroom manipulations and dedicated instead to the clear observation of fact. The change was perhaps due in part to his recognition that—for the most part—the work in the Buffalo exhibition represented a dead end and would lead only to progressively weaker repetition. In addition, it is impossible to believe that a person of Stieglitz’s artistic intelligence would not be changed by exposure to the work of Rodin, Matisse, Brancusi, Picasso, and Braque, which he had shown at 291 between 1908 and 1914. But perhaps the most direct cause of Stieglitz’s artistic renewal was seeing the first mature work of Paul Strand, which Stieglitz featured in 1917 in the final (double) issue of Camera Work. Stieglitz had always been quick to learn from his protégés, and he was unquestionably challenged by Strand’s work, which he characterized as “brutally direct, pure and devoid of trickery.”

Nevertheless, it must be said that part of what was new in Stieglitz’s work transcended Strand’s youthful bravura inventions and revealed (finally) the values of an adult artist. The first of the new pictures were portraits of the artists who were close to Stieglitz—Francis Picabia, Charles Demuth, Marsden Hartley—and they make his earlier portraits seem, in comparison, to be of characters out of fiction. In 1916 he created an astonishing series depicting Ellen Koeniger in her bathing suit—perhaps the most joyfully sexual pictures that photography has produced.

Stieglitz’s new views were incompatible with those of most amateur photographers, the core of Camera Work’s pool of subscribers, who tended to regard photography as a means not of exploring the world but of hiding from it. When Camera Work began it had about 650 paying subscribers; by the time it stopped being published in 1917 it had about 36. Many of its original subscribers were doubtless disaffected by the magazine’s apparent abandonment (parallel to Stieglitz’s own preferences) of Pictorialist photography in favour of avant-garde painting. With the outbreak of World War I, others were repelled by Stieglitz’s pro-German sentiments. In a larger sense, Camera Work may have died because Stieglitz had lost interest in the aims—promoting photography as a fine art along the lines of painting—that it was founded to advance. People closely associated with Stieglitz became alienated by his arrogance and manipulative strategies: one by one the most important of the Photo-Secession members—Käsebier, Steichen, White—all eventually broke with him, and by 1917 the 291 gallery closed.

Free at last of the duties of publisher, editor, and (for awhile) gallery proprietor, Stieglitz began, in his early 50s, the most original and productive period of his life as an artist. During the following 20 years, he produced the work that defines his stature as a modern artist. In 1917 he met the painter Georgia O’Keeffe, who would quickly become his lover and finally (in 1924) his wife, after Stieglitz gained a divorce from his first wife, the former Emmeline Obermeyer. His serial portrait of O’Keeffe, made over a period of 20 years, contains more than 300 individual pictures and remains unique and compelling in its ability to capture many facets of a single subject. Until he stopped photographing in
1937, Stieglitz also created series depicting the changing skyline of New York, cloud formations (“equivalents”), and the surroundings of his summer home at Lake George, New York. These later works remain remarkably vital and continue to inspire and challenge photographers and artists in other fields.

Stieglitz also continued his efforts to support and exhibit Modernist art. After closing 291, he opened two additional galleries: the Intimate Gallery, from 1925 to 1929, and An American Place, from 1929 until his death in 1946. These small galleries were dedicated almost exclusively to the exhibition of the American Modernist artists in whom Stieglitz believed most deeply: Demuth, Arthur G. Dove, Hartley, John Marin, and O’Keeffe. (To a lesser extent, he also showed the work of American photographers. In 1936 he showed the work of Ansel Adams, the first new photographer whom he had shown since Strand 20 years earlier. Two years later he showed the work of Eliot Porter.) Through such efforts Stieglitz helped increase the public’s respect for American art.

Alfred Stieglitz’s contributions to the cultural life of his country were thus many and protean, but the judgment made by Steichen in 1963 seems just: “Stieglitz’s greatest legacy to the world is his photographs, and the greatest of these are the things he began doing toward the end of the 291 days.”

Milton Rogovin

Milton Robovin:  Social Documentary Photographer

Milton Rogovin:  Center for Creative Photography at The University of Arizona Libraries

Milton Rogovin at The J. Paul Getty Museum

Milton Rogovin:  "The Making of a Social Documentary Photographer" at Amazon.com

Milton Rogovin:  Overview to Photographs and Photo Series

Milton Rogovin on The Picture Show on National Public Radio

Milton Rogovin in the Prints & Photographs Reading Room of The Library of Congress

Milton Rogovin:  A Teacher's Guide to his Work

"The Poetry of Photographer of Photographer Milton Rogovin" on You Tube

Untitled, Early Mexico Series, 1953-1961 (photo ID:  Early_Mexico_008)
Photograph (c) Milton Rogovin, 1952-2002
Courtesy Center for Creative Photography,
University of Arizona Foundation

Untitled, Store Front Church, 1958-1961 (photo ID:  sfc_005)
Photograph (c) Milton Rogovin, 1952-2002
Courtesy Center for Creative Photography,
University of Arizona Foundation

Untitled, Lower West Side Revisited, 1984-1986 (photo ID:  LWS_rev_262)
Photograph (c) Milton Rogovin, 1952-2002
Courtesy Center for Creative Photography,
University of Arizona Foundation

Untitled, Appalachia, 1962-1987 (photo ID:  Appalachia_064)
Photograph (c) Milton Rogovin, 1952-2002
Courtesy Center for Creative Photography,
University of Arizona Foundation

Milton Rogovin Obituary by Benjamin Genocchio, New York Times, January 18, 2011:

Milton Rogovin, an optometrist and persecuted leftist who took up photography as a way to champion the underprivileged and went on to become one of America’s most dedicated social documentarians, died on Tuesday at his home in Buffalo. He was 101.

He died of natural causes, his son, Mark Rogovin, said.

Mr. Rogovin chronicled the lives of the urban poor and working classes in Buffalo, Appalachia and elsewhere for more than 50 years. His direct photographic style in stark black and white evokes the socially minded work that Walker Evans, Dorothea Lange and Gordon Parks produced for the Farm Security Administration during the Depression. Today his entire archive resides in the Library of Congress.

Mr. Rogovin (pronounced ruh-GO-vin) came to wide notice in 1962 after documenting storefront church services on Buffalo’s poor and predominantly African-American East Side. The images were published in Aperture magazine with an introduction by W. E. B. Du Bois, who described them as “astonishingly human and appealing."

He went on to photograph Buffalo’s impoverished Lower West Side and American Indians on reservations in the Buffalo area. He traveled to West Virginia and Kentucky to photograph miners, returning to Appalachia each summer with his wife, Anne Rogovin, into the early 1970s. In the ’60s he went to Chile at the invitation of the poet Pablo Neruda to photograph the landscape and the people. The two collaborated on a book, “Windows That Open Inward: Images of Chile.”

In a 1976 review of a Rogovin show of photographs from Buffalo at the International Center of Photography in Manhattan, the critic Hilton Kramer wrote of Mr. Rogovin in The New York Times: “He sees something else in the life of this neighborhood — ordinary pleasures and pastimes, relaxation, warmth of feeling and the fundamentals of social connection. He takes his pictures from the inside, so to speak, concentrating on family life, neighborhood business, celebrations, romance, recreation and the particulars of individuals’ existence.”

Milton Rogovin was born on Dec. 30, 1909, in Brooklyn, the third of three sons of Jewish immigrant parents from Lithuania. His parents, Jacob Rogovin and the former Dora Shainhouse, operated a dry goods business, first in Manhattan on Park Avenue near 112th Street and later in the Bay Ridge section of Brooklyn. After attending Stuyvesant High School in Manhattan, the young Mr. Rogovin graduated from Columbia University in 1931 with a degree in optometry; four months later, after the family had lost the store and its home to bankruptcy during the Depression, his father died of a heart attack.

Working as an optometrist in Manhattan, Mr. Rogovin became increasingly distressed at the plight of the poor and unemployed — “the forgotten ones,” he called them — and increasingly involved in leftist political causes.

“I was a product of the Great Depression, and what I saw and experienced myself made me politically active,” he said in a 1994 interview with The New York Times.

He began attending classes sponsored by the Communist Party-run New York Workers School, began to read the Communist newspaper The Daily Worker and was introduced to the social-documentary photographs of Jacob Riis and Lewis Hine.

Mr. Rogovin moved to Buffalo in 1938 and opened his own optometric office on Chippewa Street the next year, providing service to union workers. In 1942 he married Anne Snetsky before volunteering for the Army and serving for three years in England, where he worked as an optometrist. Also in 1942, he bought a camera.

Returning to Buffalo after the war (his brother Sam, also an optometrist, managed the practice in his absence), Mr. Rogovin joined the local chapter of the Optical Workers Union and served as librarian for the Buffalo branch of the Communist Party.

In 1957, with cold war anti-Communism rife in the United States, he was called before the House Un-American Activities Committee but refused to testify. Soon afterward, The Buffalo Evening News labeled him “Buffalo’s Number One Red,” and he and his family were ostracized. With his business all but ruined by the publicity, he began to fill time by taking pictures, focusing on Buffalo’s poor and dispossessed in the neighborhood around his practice while living on his wife’s salary as a teacher and being mentored by the photographer Minor White.

His wife, a special education teacher, was a collaborator throughout his career and helped him organize his photographs until her death, in 2003.

Mr. Rogovin’s photographs were typically naturalistic portraits of people he met on the street. “The first six months were very difficult,” he recalled in a 2003 interview, “because they thought I was from the police department or the F.B.I.”

But he gradually built trust, giving away prints of portraits in exchange for sittings. He never told his subjects what to do, allowing them to pose in settings and clothing of their own choosing.

“These aren’t cool sociological renderings but intensely personal evocations of a world whose faces are often missing in a culture that celebrates the beautiful and the powerful,” Julie Salamon wrote in The Times in 2003 on the occasion of a Rogovin exhibition at the New-York Historical Society.

Mr. Rogovin began his Storefront Church series in 1961 at the invitation of a friend, William Tallmadge, a professor of music at State University College at Buffalo who was making recordings at a black church on the city’s East Side. The success of the series encouraged Mr. Rogovin to devote more and more time to photography and persuaded him that photography could be an instrument of social change.

In 1972 he earned a Master of Arts in American studies from the University at Buffalo, where he taught documentary photography from 1972 to 1974. The next year he held his first major exhibition, at the Albright-Knox Art Gallery in Buffalo.

In the next years his photographs were published in several books and widely exhibited; a show of his work is currently on view at the Gage Gallery in Chicago. Many are in the collections of museums, including the Bibliothèque Nationale in Paris, the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the J. Paul Getty Museum in Los Angeles and the Victoria and Albert Museum in London. The Library of Congress acquired his archive in 1999.

In addition to his son, of Forest Park, Ill., Mr. Rogovin is survived by two daughters, Ellen Rogovin Hart of Melrose Park, Pa., and Paula Rogovin of Teaneck, N.J.; five grandchildren; and four great-grandchildren.

In his later years, as his health declined, Mr. Rogovin used a wheelchair and no longer took photographs. In 2009 he was nominated for a National Medal of Arts but was not selected.
His activism, however, was undimmed — he attended political rallies and antiwar protests into his final years — and his social conscience remained acute.

“All my life I’ve focused on the poor,” he said in 2003. “The rich ones have their own photographers.”

This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:

Correction: January 20, 2011

Because of an editing error, an obituary on Wednesday about the photographer Milton Rogovin misidentified the academic affiliation of William Tallmadge, who invited Mr. Rogovin to begin his Storefront Church series of photographs. Mr. Tallmadge taught at the State University College at Buffalo (now Buffalo State College, State University of New York), not at the State University of New York at Buffalo.

Edward Steichen

"Every ten years a man should give himself a good kick in the pants."

"Once you really commence to see things, then you really commence to feel things."

"Photography records the gamut of feelings written on the human face, the beauty of the earth and skies that man has inherited, and the wealth and confusion man has created. It is a major force in explaining man to man."

Edward Steichen at The Lee Gallery

Edward Steichen at Masters of Photography.com

Edward Steichen at The Staley Wise Gallery

Flat Iron Building, New York City

Loretta Young

Gloria Swanson

Edward Steichen Biography based on the catalogue from the Whitney Museum of American Art retrospective curated by Barbara Haskell (quoted from Cosmopolis Magazine):

Since Edward Steichen's (1879-1973) death, prohibitions against reproducing his works have discouraged scholars from undertaking a broad-based analysis of his career and work. The exhibition by curator Barbara Haskell at the Whitney Museum of American Art is the first comprehensive survey since 1961. By permission of Joanna Steichen, sixteen photographs of her late husband could be reproduced in the exhibition catalogue.

Edward Steichen is considered one of the outstanding photographers of the 20th century. He was born in Luxembourg in 1879 to Marie Kemp and Jean-Pierre Steichen. A year later, his father sailed to America and settled in Chicago. When he stopped writing home, Marie followed him with Eduard - his name was later anglicized to Edward. She found her husband in poor health and nearly penniless. In 1881, the family moved to Hancock, Michigan, where Jean-Pierre worked in the copper mines and Marie opened a shop. Two years later, Edward's sister Lillian, later known as Paula, was born. In 1888, Edward boarded at Pio Nonno College and Catholic Normal School near Milwaukee. The following year, the family moved to the city of Milwaukee. In 1894, Edward graduated from eighth grade in Milwaukee's public school.

The same year, he began a four-year apprenticeship at the American Fine Art Company, a Milwaukee lithographic firm. In 1895, he obtained his first camera and supplemented his wages by taking photographic portraits. In 1896, he organized the Milwaukee Art Student's league and became its president. Edward studied painting and drawing under Robert Schade and Richard Lorenz. A year later, he exhibited his paintings at Gimbel's department store in Milwaukee. In 1899, he had three photographs in a juried exhibition at the Second Philadelphia Salon. In 1900, with another three photographs, he participated at the first Chicago Photographic Salon. He received mention in several reviews.

By 1899, Steichen had become a Pictorialist photographer who created soft focus, dreamlike, mysterious and evocative images. Until the First World War, he favored mystery over precision and reverie over reason. This spiritual and intuitive approach responded to the turn of the century taste with its warnings against the dangers of materialism and rationality.

In spring 1900, he resigned from the American Fine Art Company and, on the way to Paris to study art, stopped in New York City where he met Alfred Stieglitz, who purchased three photographs. In July, he sailed to Paris with artist friend Carl Björncrantz. In autumn, he exhibited 21 photographs at The Royal Photographic Society in London. In 1901, a version of the exhibition with 35 Steichen photographs opened in Paris.

In 1901, Edward exhibited his painting Portrait of F. Holland Day in the annual juried Salon des Champs de Mars. In the autumn, he began to attend the Saturday gatherings of the sculptor Auguste Rodin in the Paris suburb of Meudon. In November, some of Edward's landscape photographs featured in Charles Caffin's book Photography as a Fine Art.

In 1902, Steichen helped to establish the Photo-Secession, a group of photographers led by Alfred Stieglitz committed to advancing photography's status as a fine art. Edward designed the cover and typography of Camera Work, a new quarterly photography magazine edited by Stieglitz. In March, the jury of the Salon the Champs de Mars removed ten photographs by Steichen from the exhibition when they discovered that they were not engravings as declared by Edward.

In the summer, Steichen returned to New York where he opened a commercial photography studio on Fifth Avenue. In 1903, Camera Work dedicated its second issue to Steichen's photographs. In October, Edward married Clara E. Smith. In 1904, their first daughter, Marry, was born. The same year, Steichen experimented with color photography. In 1905, he had a successful exhibition of paintings at Eugene Glaenzer and Co. Galleries in New York. At the end of the year, he designed the galleries and installation of The Little Galleries of the Photo-Secession at 291 Fifth Avenue, soon known as "291".

Steichen was a master of female nudes lost in innocent reverie and portraits of the era's eminent men of arts and letters. He worked with unmanipulated and manipulated printing techniques. He introduced color in his finished prints to intensify, thin out, shade or remove portions of the image with a brush or scraping tool. It lent his works the appearance of drawings or lithographs. Together with his soft and mysterious touch, it made Steichen the enfant terrible for purists among photographers and critics.

Between the the outbreak of the First World War in 1914 and his commission as a first lieutenant in the Army Signal Corps in July, Edward abandoned the Pictorialist style and technique in favor of strong light-dark contrasts and sharply focused effects. When he resumed photography after the war, he pursued this new direction. He began to create monumental images and photographed organic, natural forms; only occasionally did he turn to architectural forms of the city.

In 1922, Steichen divorced from Clara and returned from France to New York where, in 1923, he married Dana Desboro Glover. Steichen became the chief photographer for Condé Nast (1923-38). He produced monthly celebrity portraits for Vanity Fair and fashion spreads for Vogue. Edward was considered the most glamorous name in photography - and the best paid. But his merger of commerce and high art made him a controversial figure. His celebrity images. . .are unsurpassed. By 1927, he relied on artificial illumination for dramatic oppositions of light and dark. It lent them a look of modernity and elegance, in accordance with Hollywood glamour and the streamlined art deco design aesthetic of the late 1920s and 1930s. At Vogue, Steichen redefined fashion photography and proposed a new prototype of the confident, bold and independent female beauty. He refused to distinguish between commercial and high art. Therefore, many colleagues, including Alfred Stieglitz, chastised him for forsaking the ideals of art for money. In 1930, he published, together with his daughter Mary, The First Picture Book: Everyday Things for Babies.

In the last decades of his career, Steichen shifted his aesthetic preference again as he came to consider photography as a force not of commerce, but of social awareness. During the Second World War he implemented this belief in socially responsive art as commander of the Naval Aviation Photographic Unit. After the war, he created a new form of photographic exhibition intended to transform public consciousness through words and sequenced pictures. 1955's exhibition The Family of Men was the most celebrated one, a photographic argument for the oneness of humanity and the universality of everyday experience. The 503 photographs by 273 artists from 68 countries was arranged around 37 themes, such as marriage, childbirth, work, religion and death. The exhibition drew record crowds and circulated around the United States and to 84 foreign venues over the next decade.

In 1947, Steichen was appointed Director of the Department of Photography at The Museum of Modern Art in New York City. Only after 1955 did he commit himself again to photography, working exclusively with color film. His only subject was a shadblow tree which he could see from the windows of his home in West Redding. Steichen photographed it in all seasons and hours of the day in order to evoke life's cycles of change and growth. In 1959, he began filming the shadblow tree with a movie camera. Two years later, ill health forced him to abandon the project. In 1957, his second wife Dana died. In 1960, he married Joanna Taub. Two years later, he retired form the MoMA, where, in 1964, he opened the Edward Steichen Photography Center. In 1973, Steichen died at the age of 94.

Gertrude Kasebier

"My children and their children have been my closest thought, but from the first days of dawning individuality, I have longed unceasingly to make pictures of people...to make likenesses that are biographies, to bring out in each photograph the essential personality." --Gertrude Käsebier

Gertrude Kasebier on Google Images

Gertrude Kasebier on LuminousLint.com

Gertrude Kasebier Masters of Photography on You Tube

Gertrude Kasebier on Science & Society Picture Library

Gertrude Kasebier on Smithonian Images

Gertrude Käsebier's portrait of Miss Minnie Ashley was one of a set of six photogravures published by Alfred Stieglitz in the magazine, Camera Work in 1905. Stieglitz praised Käsebier as 'the leading portrait photographer' in America and marvelled the artistic feeling and harmony of her broad pictures. He even went as far as saying that 'their strength never betrays a woman'. (From The National Galleries of Scotland collection.)

Sioux Male by Gertrude Kasebier from Smithsonian Images

Portrait of Evelyn Nesbit

Ater the photographer F. Holland Day introduced Käsebier to Francis Watts Lee, an amateur Boston photographer and printer, Käsebier made this portrait of Lee's wife Agnes and their daughter Peggy, almost certainly at their stylish Boston home. An exquisite description of the Victorian ideals of femininity and motherhood, reinforced by the biblical title and the print of the Annunciation on the wall behind the figures, the photograph also evokes the idyllic domesticity of the Arts and Crafts movement. Stieglitz published the photograph in Camera Notes (July 1900) and also in the first issue of Camera Work (January 1903). In 1906, he included this print in an exhibition of the work of Käsebier and Clarence White at his Little Galleries of the Photo-Secession, which had opened the previous year. (From The Metropolitan Museum of Art Collection Date Base.)

Gertrude Kasebier Biography from Wikipedia.org:

Gertrude Käsebier (1852–1934) was one of the most influential American photographers of the early 20th century. She was known for her evocative images of motherhood, her powerful portraits of Native Americans and her promotion of photography as a career for women.

Käsebier was born Gertrude Stanton on 18 May 1852 in Fort Des Moines (now Des Moines, Iowa). Her father, John W. Stanton, transported a saw mill to Golden, Colorado at the start of the Pike's Peak Gold Rush of 1859, and he prospered from the building boom that followed. In 1860 eight-year-old Stanton traveled with her mother and younger brother to join her father in Colorado. That same year her father was elected the first mayor of Golden, which was then the capital of the Colorado Territory.[1]

After the sudden death of her father in 1864, the family moved to Brooklyn, New York, where her mother, Muncy Boone Stanton, opened a boarding house to support the family.[2] From 1866-70 Stanton lived in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania with her maternal grandmother and attended the Bethlehem Female Seminary (later called Moravian College). Little else is known about her early years.

On her twenty-second birthday, in 1874, she married twenty-eight year old Eduard Käsebier, a financially comfortable and socially well-placed businessman in Brooklyn.[1]The couple soon had three children, Frederick William (1875-?), Gertrude Elizabeth (1878-?) and Hermine Mathilde (1880-?). In 1884 they moved to a farm in New Durham, New Jersey, in order to provide a healthier place to raise their children.

Käsebier later wrote that she was miserable throughout most of her marriage. She said, "If my husband has gone to Heaven, I want to go to Hell. He was terrible…Nothing was ever good enough for him.”[1] At that time divorce was considered scandalous, and the two remained married while living separate lives after 1880. This unhappy situation would later serve as an inspiration for one of her most strikingly titled photographs – two constrained oxen, entitled Yoked and Muzzled – Marriage (c1915).

In spite of their differences, her husband supported her financially when she began to attend art school at the age of thirty-seven, a time when most women of her day were well-settled in their social positions. Käsebier never indicated what motivated her to study art, but she devoted herself to it wholeheartedly. Over the objections of her husband in 1889 she moved the family back to Brooklyn in order to attend the newly established Pratt Institute of Art and Design full-time. One of her teachers there was Arthur Wesley Dow, a highly influential artist and art educator. He would later help promote her career by writing about her work and by introducing her to other photographers and patrons.

She formally studied drawing and painting, but she quickly became obsessed with photography. Like many art students of that time, Käsebier decided to travel to Europe in order to further her education. She began 1894 by spending several weeks studying the chemistry of photography in Germany, where she was also able to leave her daughters with in-laws in Wiesbaden. She spent the rest of the year in France, studying with American painter Frank DuMond.[1]

In 1895 she returned to Brooklyn. In part because her husband was now quite ill and her family's finances were strained, she determined to become a professional photographer. A year later she became an assistant to Brooklyn portrait photographer Samuel H. Lifshey, where she learned how to run a studio and expand her knowledge of printing techniques. It is clear, however, that by this time she already had an extensive mastery of photography. Just one year later she exhibited 150 photographs, an enormous number for an individual artist at that time, at the Boston Camera Club. These same photos were shown in February 1897 at the Pratt Institute.[1]

The success of these shows led to another at the Photographic Society of Philadelphia in 1897. She also lectured on her work there and encouraged other women to take up photography as a career, saying, "I earnestly advise women of artistic tastes to train for the unworked field of modern photography. It seems to be especially adapted to them, and the few who have entered it are meeting a gratifying and profitable success."[1]

In the late 1890s Käsebier heard about a theatrical performance of cowboys, Indians and other American West characters called Buffalo Bill's Wild West". The show was performing in New York and had temporarily set up an "Indian village" in Brooklyn. Recalling her early days in Colorado, Käsebier went to the show and became enthralled with the faces of the Native Americans. She began taking portraits of them and soon became sympathetic to their plight. Over the next decade she would take dozens of photographs of the Indians in the show, some of which would become her most famous images.

Unlike her contemporary Edward Curtis, Käsebier focused more on the expression and individuality of the person than the costumes and customs. While Curtis is known to have added elements to his photographs to emphasize his personal vision, Käsebier did the opposite, sometimes removing genuine ceremonial articles from a sitter in order to concentrate on the face or stature of the person.^[1]

In July 1899 Alfred Stieglitz published five of Käsebier's photographs in Camera Notes, declaring her “beyond dispute, the leading artistic portrait photographer of the day.”^[3] Her rapid rise to fame was noted by photographer and critic Joseph Keiley, who wrote "a year ago Käsebier's name was practically unknown in the photographic world...Today that names stands first and unrivaled...".^[4] That same year her print of "The Manger" sold for $100, the most ever paid for a photograph at that time.^[5]

In 1900 Käsebier continued to gather accolades and professional praise. In the catalog for the Newark (Ohio) Photography Salon, she was called "the foremost professional photographer in the United States."^[5] In recognition of her artistic accomplishments and her stature, later that year Käsebier was one of the first two women elected to Britain's Linked Ring (the other was British pictorialist Carine Cadby).

The next year Charles H. Caffin published his landmark book Photography as a Fine Art and devoted an entire chapter to the work of Käsebier ("Gertrude Käsebier and the Artistic Commercial Portrait").^[6] Due to demand for her artistic opinions in Europe, Käsebier spent most of the year in Britain and France visiting with F. Holland Day and Edward Steichen.

In 1902 Stieglitz included Käsebier as a founding member of the Photo-Secession. The following year Stieglitz published six of her images in the first issue of Camera Work, along with highly complementary articles by Charles Caffin and Frances Benjamin Johnston.^[7] In 1905 six more of her images were published in Camera Work, and the following year Stieglitz gave her an exhibition (along with Clarence H. White) at his Little Galleries of the Photo-Secession.

The strain of balancing her professional life with her personal one began to take a toll on Käsebier about this time. The stress was exacerbated by her husband's decision to move to Oceanside, Long Island, which had the effect of distancing her from the New York's artistic center. To counter his action, she returned to Europe, where, through Steichen's connections, she was able to photograph the reclusive Auguste Rodin.

When Käsebier came back to New York, she found herself in an unexpected personality clash with Stieglitz. Käsebier's strong interests in the commercial side of photography, driven by her need to support her husband and family, were directly at odds with Stieglitz's idealistic and anti-materialistic nature. The more Käsebier enjoyed commercial success, the more Stieglitz felt she was a going against what he felt a true artist should emulate.^[1] In May 1906 Käsebier joined the Professional Photographers of New York, a newly formed organization that Stieglitz saw as standing for everything he disliked – commercialism and selling photographs for money rather than love of the art. After this he began distancing himself from Käsebier, and their relationship never regained its previous status of mutual artistic admiration.

Eduard Käsebier died in 1910, finally leaving his wife free to pursue her interests as she saw fit. She continued to take a separate course from Stieglitz by helping to establish the Women's Professional Photographers Association of America. In turn, Stieglitz began to publicly speak against her work, although he still thought enough of her earlier images to include twenty-two of them in the landmark exhibition of pictorialists at the Albright-Knox Art Gallery later that year.

The next year Käsebier was shocked by a highly critical attack by her former admirer Joseph T. Keiley, published in Stieglitz's Camera Work. It's unknown why Keiley suddenly changed his opinion of her, but Käsebier suspected that Stieglitz had put him up to it.^[1]

Part of Käsebier's alienation from Stieglitz was due to his stubborn resistance to the idea of gaining financial success from artistic photography. He often sold original prints by Käsebier and others at far less than their market value if he felt a buyer truly appreciated the art, and when he did sell prints he took many months to finally pay the photographer in question. After several years of protesting these practices, in 1912 Käsebier became the first member to resign from the Photo-Secession.

In 1916 Käsebier helped Clarence H. White found the group Pictorial Photographers of America,^[8] which was seen by Stieglitz as a direct challenge to his artistic leadership. By this time, Stieglitz's tactics had offended many of his former friends, including White and Robert Demachy, and a year later he was forced to disband the Photo-Secession.

During this time many young women starting out in photography sought out Käsebier, both for her photography artistry and inspiration as an independent woman. Among those who were inspired by Käsebier and who went on to have successful careers of their own were Clara Sipprell, Consuelo Kanaga and Laura Gilpin.

Throughout the late 1910s and most of the 1920s Käsebier continued to expand her portrait business, taking photos of many important people of the time including Robert Henri, John Sloan, William Glackens, Arthur B. Davies, Mabel Dodge and Stanford White. In 1924 her daughter Hermine Turner joined her in her portrait business.

In 1929 Käsebier gave up photography altogether and liquidated the contents of her studio. That same year she was given a major one-person exhibition at the Booklyn Institute of Arts and Sciences.

Käsebier died on 12 October 1934 at the home of her daughter, Hermione Turner.

A major collection of her work is held by the University of Delaware.

Arthur Tress

Arthur Tress Documentary Part 1 on You Tube

Arthur Tress Documentary Part 2 on You Tube

Arthur Tress -- Dreams, Visions and Voyages on IPhotoCentral.com

Arthur Tress -- Skate Park on PhotoEye.com

Arthur Tress Biography from IPhotoCentral.com:

Arthur Tress was born and raised in Brooklyn, NY on November 24, 1940. He took his first photographs while still in elementary school in 1952.

He attended Bard College where he studied art and art history, world culture and philosophy under Heinrich Bluecher. While studying, he continued to photograph and began making short films. He graduated in 1962 with a B.F.A.

After graduation from Bard, Tress moved to Paris to attend film school, but soon left. After traveling through Europe, Egypt, Japan, India and Mexico, he settled in Stockholm, Sweden and worked as a photographer at the Stockholm Ethnographic Museum.

In 1968 he moved back to New York with a commitment to becoming a professional photographer. He had his first one-person exhibition that year, "Appalachia--People and Places", which was held at the Smithsonian Institute and the Sierra Gallery (New York City). He then worked as a documentary photographer for V.I.S.T.A. from 1969-1970.

Arthur Tress was one of the first artists in the 1970s to break way from street photography and develop a more personal vision, which included manipulating that realty in front of him instead of being just a passive observer.

As writer/curator Richard Lorenz has written, "Arthur Tress distills multiple viewpoints in his unique and ever evolving style of photography. The cultural and historical inquiry of the ethnographer, the psycho-social guidance and thought-seeding of the stage director, and the calculating, sometimes improvisational, imagination and creativity of the artist all coalesce in Tress the photographer. He is one of America's most prodigious and diversified photographers, one whose documentary reportage can be so subjective or fabricated that it subverts the genre, whose manufacture of visual Eros can present seemingly incongruous dualities of beauty and violence, and whose creation of an individual mythology in a universe of kitsch can make sense of the meaning of life, death, and the hereafter."

Tress exhibited his series "Open Space in the Inner City" at the same Sierra Gallery in 1970 and received a New York State Council on the Arts grant for the series the next year. In 1972 he got a National Endowment for the Arts grant for his "Dream Collector" series. In 1976 he received a second New York State Council on the Arts grant for his "Theater of the Mind" series.

In 1980 he published a book on the male nude called, "Arthur Tress: Facing Up, A 12-Year Survey", which also was exhibited the Robert Samuel Gallery in New York. The same year he began to create his "Teapot Opera" photographs.

His major retrospective "Talisman" traveled from 1986-1988, opening at the Photography Gallery in London and then moving to the Museum of Modern Art, Oxford, U.K., Frankfurter Kunstverein, Frankfort, Germany and the Musee de la Photographie, Charleroi, Belgium.

In 1992 Tress moved to Cambria, CA.

In 1995 the Center for Creative Photography exhibited " Arthur Tress: The Wurlitzer Trilogy", which in early 2002 traveled to the College of Santa Fe.

He has been published numerous times, including in the monographs, "Arthur Tress: The Dream Collector", "Shadow: A Novel in Photographs", "Theatre of the Mind", "Reeves" and "Arthur Tress: Fantastic Voyage: Photographs 1956-2000".
His work is in the collection of numerous museums and institutions, including the New York Museum of Modern Art, the New York Metropolitan Museum, the George Eastman House, the Bibliotheque Nationale, the Centre Georges Pompidou, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the San Francisco Museum of Art, the Houston Museum of Fine Art, the Whitney Museum of Art, the Stedelijk Museum, the High Museum of Art, the Chicago Center for Contemporary Art, the Cincinnati Art Museum, the Art Institute of Chicago and the Milwaukee Art Museum.

In 2001, the Corcoran Gallery of Art featured a retrospective of his work entitled "Arthur Tress: Fantastic Voyage: Photographs 1956-2000" which took an intimate look at his long and varied career.

He is listed in the 1982, 1988 and 1995 editions of "Contemporary Photographers", in the International Center of Photography Encyclopedia of Photography, and in the Macmillan Biographical Encyclopedia of Photographic Artists & Innovators. He is listed in the Auer & Auer and George Eastman House databases.