Alfred Stieglitz and His the Steerage - Essay Example

?Alfred Stieglitz and his the Steerage The 20-th century became critical both as for the social upheavals and for the art too. Naturally, there was atight interaction between them. Artists and litterateurs concentrated their attention on the searches of new methods for the description of reality, and, thereby, in the first decades of 20-th century the modernism appeared as the complex of artistic trends (futurism, expressionism, cubism, constructivism, surrealism, abstract art etc.), which were advancing till the Second World War. The essence of modernism lies exactly in the cultural search. Different trends were developing at the same time. The appearance of modernism became a new milestone in the progressing of artistic consciousness, though it wasn’t a new integral style with the articulated methods of expression, which are conducing to the creation of general steady art forms. The outstanding American photograph and cultural actor Alfred Stieglitz also appertains to the artists of this epoch .He was the first who acquainted famous by its conservative views American society with the works of such genius of that time as Picasso, Braque , Rodin , Brancusi, Matisse, Dyushan, Cezanne, Americans Max Lieberman and James McNeill. Alfred Stieglitz is one of the most renowned foremen of piktorializm, “the editor of Camera Notes , the journal of the Camera Club of New York , an association of amateur photography enthusiasts. But when within the group the division had started, and members of the Camera Club began to oppose his restrictive editorial policies, Stieglitz and several of his friends-photographers ruptured with the Club and established the Photo-Secession group” (Whelan, 1995). They involved photography from the commercial and routine profession to the grade of the separate self –sufficient kind of art. They weren’t interested in the effect of exact reproduction of the nature. The visual figuration, but not the substance, had become the main thing. It means that essential creator’s job is in the process of transformation of an ultimate snapshot. Properly, it was the job, practically not distinguishable from the veritable artist’s work. Various techniques of “noble printing” such as oleograph, flexography tinctured to the snapshots a rich color and picturesqueness, although Stieglitz said: “I do not object to retouching, dodging or accentuation as long as they do not interfere with the natural qualities of photographic technique” (cited in Whelan, 1995). This photo evolutional trend had been called “the pictorializm”. Snapshots, so much adored by the follower of this stream, were made by the hand camera or the fixed device, but in the only unrepeatable moment, and, as a result of a painstaking artistic work they were becoming the unique photo pictures, the art masterpieces. But this passion didn’t last for a long time and later it became inexplicable, why the goals posed by the pictorializm can be satisfied only by the photo technology. Alfred Stieglitz, who for nearly 15 years was organizing the exhibitions of young budding photographers and artists, at first, in the 1900-s was affected an active combination of photography and art, and later, after ten years, his gallery began to pay more attention on the pictorial art itself. New times had come, and pictorializm as a trend became the production of sentimental pictures. So Alfred Stieglitz deeply changes his manner of taking photos. In the 1890-s he was walking the streets with his “detective” camera and making the reportage photos, not retouching or amplifying them at all. In the later years he talked about the researches of the unknown and said he was looking for the subjects for his works in the sixty yards of his house door. In those days such considerations were innovatory, that was the time of sentimental, genre, compositional and “highart” photos , criticized by Emerson, the author of the “Naturalistic photography”, but still popular in the New-York photo clubs, and these wire-drawn images were hanged out on the walls of artistic salons. Photo portraits Made by Stieglitz were lucid and profound, capitally showing their dispositions. In the 1925 all his works from 1886 to 1921 were formidably demonstrated in the gallery of Mitchell Kennerly in New-York, and press had been extolling their values. But the most famous his work is The Steerage. It was captured by Alfred Stieglitz in 1907 on the lower deck of “one of the largest and fastest ships in the world at that time, SS Kaiser Wilhelm II, The Steerage- because the snapshot had chased the lower class passenger’s area, known on most ships as the steerage” (Whelan, 1995). The story of this photo is that one day Stieglitz went for a walk around the ship and accidentally such a view greeted to his eyes: one young man with a round straw hat was watching the men, women and children, maybe the immigrants, on the steerage deck. From the upper steerage deck there was attached a gangway bridge, then Alfred could see a narrow stairway leading to the upper deck of the steerage and to the left there was an oblique funnel. At the very top of the picture one of the booms can be seen. All the elements are the figures of the passengers, geometrical shapes of the iron machinery and the triangle in the center of the image, formed by the mast pole and by the opposite inclines of the staircase, all they piece out an abstract composition in the best traditions of Cubism. It is very laconic and strong in its rhythm of the big planes, some round and cylindrical shapes, and doesn’t have any redundant elements. And also it is very important that photo is gray scaled, because the color would distract our attention of the perception of this local cubic composition. There is an interesting fact: the photo was captured by the hand-held 4x5 Auto-Graflex that used glass plate negatives, with only one glass plate prepared at the time… It was like a one chance, and Stieglitz used it successfully. Later, in Paris, he went to a local photographer's home and developed the plate there. As he said, The Steerage had become a great shift in his own evolution, “a spontaneous discovery”. But its importance consists not only in this, because this photo “captures in a single image both a formative document of its time and is one of the first works of artistic modernism” (Whelan, 1995). Personally I believe that there is no “spontaneous discoveries” in art. It is progressing accordingly to the demands of the epoch, all the occasions happening in art are consistent and who knows, what art we would get in our technogenic era in prospect. Bibliography : 1. Whelan, Richard. Alfred Stieglitz: A Biography. NY: Little, Brown., 1995: pp. 224–226. Read More