Alfred Stieglitz

In his various roles as an advocate for photography and modernism -- editor, publisher, curator, gallerist, Photo-Secession founder and organizer, and of course photographer -- Alfred Stieglitz wrote and published extensively, if not consistently. A mix of criticism, credo, polemic, theory, craft instruction, and autobiography, those writings appeared as magazine articles, formal correspondence in photography journals and Dorothy Norman's Twice A Year, editorials in the periodicals he edited (Camera Notes and Camera Work), and other forums.

In addition to his own significant and still-resonant efforts as a writer on the medium, numerous examples of which appear in this Archive, Stieglitz served the literature in two notable other ways as well. First, he encouraged others to write about it as well, most notably -- in terms of the extent and breadth of their contributions -- the art critics Sadakichi Hartmann and Charles Caffin, both of whom became advocates of photography and regular contributors to Camera Work, but also published extensively on the medium in other periodicals. Additionally, Stieglitz elicited invaluable commentaries on photography from a range of cultural figures from the early 20th century. In that regard, his insistence on aligning photography with the other arts, including literature, resulted in an attention to photography from contemporary writers of all kinds, including poets and novelists. Many of the texts that ensued from this cross-fertilization appeared in Camera Work, the journal he edited and published from 1903-1917, which served as the house organ for the Photo-Secession and for the first exhibition space he ran, the Little Galleries, in three rooms at 291 Fifth Avenue, which he maintained from 1905-17 and which came to be known simply as "291."

Camera Work was the first journal that Stieglitz published but the second that he edited; it was preceded by Camera Notes, the journal of the Camera Club of New York, which Stieglitz took over and, to the consternation of some of the more conservative members, turned into a forum for a wide-ranging discussion of issues in photography, rather than a mere medium for the exchange of technical information. Eventually, amidst much controversy, he gave up its editorship and abandoned the club to establish a more serious set of launching pads for photography as a fine art.

Camera Work was among those stimuli, and while it proved itself an influential tool (within in a small, elite circle) for establishing the credibility of photography as an art form, its legacy turned out to be a problematic one at best. By insisting on labor-intensive design and production for this journal, Stieglitz effectively married the idea of a critical journal for photography to the premise of expensive reproductions of photographs. This meant that any critical journal adopting that model would constantly face the extraordinary costs involved in presenting faithful ink versions of the images under consideration. The expense of this made Camera Work's continuation a steady financial drain on Stieglitz's resources, and eventually doomed it. Yet publication after publication thereafter would ignore that lesson and attempt to replicate the Camera Work model, only to come to financial crisis. Indeed, only one -- aperture, founded in 1952 -- emulated Camera Work and survived. Not until Nathan Lyons founded Afterimage at the Visual Studies Workshop in 1971 did a critical journal in photography take a different path.

-- A. D. Coleman