Video: Alfred Steiglitz

This video provides a summary of the career of the American photographer Alfred Stieglitz. The music is Pauline García Viardot’s “Hai luli” sung by Cecilia Bartoli.

—

Alfred Stieglitz (1864 – 1946) was an American photographer and modern art promoter who was instrumental over his fifty-year career in making photography an accepted art form. In addition to his photography, Stieglitz is known for his photography magazines; for the New York art galleries that he ran in the early part of the 20th century where he introduced many avant-garde European artists to an American audience; and for his long passionate romance with his muse, the painter Georgia O’Keeffe.

“When, in 1907, Alfred Stieglitz took a simple picture of passengers on a ship bound for Europe, he could not have known that The Steerage, as it was soon called, would become a modernist icon and, from today’s vantage, arguably the most famous photograph made by an American photographer.” — The Steerage and Alfred Stieglitz by Jason Francisco and Elizabeth Anne McCauley (University of California Press, 2012)