Steerage and Alfred Stieglitz 9780520352476, 9780520266230

Citation preview

The Steerage and Alfred Stieglitz

Defining Moments in American Photography Anthony W. Lee, Editor

1. On Alexander Gardner’s “Photographic Sketch Book” of the Civil War, by Anthony W. Lee and Elizabeth Young 2. Lynching Photographs, by Dora Apel and Shawn Michelle Smith, with an introduction by Anthony W. Lee 3. Weegee and “Naked City,” by Anthony W. Lee and Richard Meyer 4. “The Steerage” and Alfred Stieglitz, by Jason Francisco and Elizabeth Anne McCauley, with an introduction by Anthony W. Lee 5. Trauma and Documentary Photography of the FSA, by Sara Blair and Eric Rosenberg, with an introduction by Anthony W. Lee

The Steerage and Alfred Stieglitz

j ason f rancisco e lizabeth a nne m c c auley

Published with the assistance of The Getty Foundation

University of California Press Berkeley Los Angeles London

The publisher gratefully acknowledges the generous contribution to this book provided by the Art Endowment Fund of the University of California Press Foundation, which is supported by a major gift from the Ahmanson Foundation.

Contents

introduction / 1 anthony w. lee

The Making of a Modernist Myth elizabeth anne mccauley 16

The Prismatic Fragment jason francisco 66

notes index

/

113

/

135

Introduction

a nthony w . l ee

impresario, gadfly, artistic visionary, practical theorist, incessant promoter and provocateur, at once magnetic and insufferably arrogant, supportive and contemptuous, approachable and pugnacious, the photographer Alfred Stieglitz was a bundle of contradictions. But there is no doubting his lifelong drive—or his achievements—in promoting photography as a fine art. With his many New York galleries, including the Little Gallery of the PhotoSecession, 291, the Intimate Gallery, and An American Place, and his journals, magazines, and quarterlies, including Camera Notes and the more sumptuous Camera Work, which he wrote, edited, and published for nearly a decade and a half, Stieglitz almost single-handedly transformed American photography at the turn of the twentieth century, introducing to an art-going audience the exquisite photographic print and carving out a legitimate place for photography as a serious art form. He presented works by then-obscure photographers, argued for their aesthetic achievements and cultural significance, and compared them, though sometimes to the raised eyebrows of skeptics, to the likes of Cézanne, Matisse, and Picasso. Throughout his long life, he argued repeatedly for a photography that was equal in artistic merit and high seriousness to painting and sculpture and had no hesitations in exhibiting photographs side by side with the most daring artworks coming out of Europe. He regularly displayed and published examples of his own work—in one celebrated case,

1

Anthony W. Lee

2

interleaving his photographs with reproductions of Picasso’s paintings and drawings—to suggest what a fine photograph could and should be, in contrast to what he took to be the mind-numbing work of commercial photographers, newspaper hacks, and common portraitists.1 Or, as Stieglitz put it in his inimitable way, he strove to make pictures of high individual expression and formal rigor that simply paled the hackneyed work “of the doctrinaire, of the compromiser . . . of the unbeliever, of the Philistine.”2 The history of American photography is punctuated by Stieglitz’s energies, enthusiasms, and pictures. Of the many photographs Stieglitz made, one above others, The Steerage (figure 1), was by his own admission a defining picture. Photographed in 1907, just two years after Stieglitz had opened the Little Gallery and four years after he had begun publishing Camera Work, The Steerage was a kind of manifesto, in which photography’s claim as a fine art was, in his mind, most cogently realized. Taken while Stieglitz was onboard a ship bound for Europe, the picture became over time the preeminent example of his efforts as an artist and helped to establish the parameters for art photography when the idea for such a thing—that photographs could have intrinsic artistic values—was only then taking root among critics and patrons. He would later regard The Steerage as the seminal work of his career, declaring that “[i]f all my photographs were lost and I’d be represented by just one, The Steerage, I’d be satisfied.”3 Indeed, The Steerage is today arguably the most famous photograph made by an American photographer in the early twentieth century. Certainly The Steerage has achieved an iconic status because Stieglitz published and exhibited it repeatedly and, furthermore, offered several detailed accounts about how he came to make the photograph and how he interpreted it (and how we should interpret it) as a work of art. Although it’s unclear whether Stieglitz initially recognized the photograph’s significance in 1907, by 1911 he felt strongly enough about the picture to publish it in Camera Work, and then published it again in the Saturday Evening Post in 1912, American Photography in 1916, Artlover, The Outlook, and Vanity Fair in 1924, the New York Herald Tribune in 1935, again in the Saturday Evening Post in 1944, and

Figure 1

Alfred Stieglitz, The Steerage, 1907. Courtesy of the Mount Holyoke College Art Museum. Mount Holyoke College Art Museum, South Hadley, Massachusetts. Purchase with the Jean C. Harris Fund.

Anthony W. Lee

4

once again in American Photography in 1945.4 He exhibited it in galleries on at least nine occasions between 1913 and 1944, and printed it numerous times as a photogravure, each with subtle variations in tone and on different paper stock, and as a gelatin silver print. That is, The Steerage obtained its status partly as a result of Stieglitz’s efforts to promote it and his own claims of its significance. In 1942, thirty-five years after taking the picture, he penned a long account about the photograph’s origins, his intentions, and the picture’s key meanings, calling it in retrospect, after years of publishing and exhibiting it, the work that made him “completely satisfied . . . [s]omething I not often was, or am.” Yet, in recounting the story of the picture in such detail and offering an interpretation of it that has continued to serve as a guide to understanding it, Stieglitz raised a central contradiction about his brand of art photography and of The Steerage as representative of it. For if, as he argued repeatedly, an art photograph was self-sufficient, made from the combination of high feeling and formal rigor, and had no need of justification or explanation other than its attainment of formal expressiveness, the tense combination of representation and abstraction, the pursuit of “pure photography,” “material truths,” and the “comprehension of form,” as articles in Camera Work declared—in short, photographs as independent modernist works of art—then it seems ironic that Stieglitz relied so heavily on words to expound at length on the picture’s supposedly self-sufficient meanings.5 In this volume of the series Defining Moments in American Photography, two writers, Elizabeth Anne McCauley, a photo historian, and Jason Francisco, a photographer, take up the challenge of understanding The Steerage and Stieglitz’s writings about it. Unlike many previous observers of the photograph, they do not view the writings as merely helpful guides to the main business of interpreting the picture but instead see them as in need of investigation right alongside it. In particular, they both address “How The Steerage Happened,” which appeared in the select journal Twice a Year in 1942 and was the longest and most revealing of the many accounts Stieglitz offered of the photograph.

Introduction

5

And they explore what the photograph might mean in at least two senses— by itself, as against the insight or impediment that the story contributes, and also ineluctably as bound up with it.

it’s worth transcribing Stieglitz’s extraordinary account in “How The Steerage Happened” in full: Early in June, 1907, my small family and I sailed for Europe. My wife insisted upon going on the Kaiser Wilhelm II—the fashionable ship of the North German Lloyd at the time. Our first destination was Paris. How I hated the atmosphere of the first class on that ship. One couldn’t escape the nouveaux riches. I sat much in my steamer chair the first days out—sat with closed eyes. In this way I avoided seeing faces that would give me the cold shivers, yet those voices and that English—ye gods! On the third day out I finally couldn’t stand it any longer. I had to get away from that company. I went as far forward on deck as I could. The sea wasn’t particularly rough. The sky was clear. The ship was driving into the wind—a rather brisk wind. As I came to the end of the desk [sic] I stood alone, looking down. There were men and women and children on the lower deck of the steerage. There was a narrow stairway leading up the upper deck of the steerage, a small deck right at the bow of the steamer. To the left was an inclining funnel and from the upper steerage deck there was fastened a gangway bridge which was glistening in its freshly painted state. It was rather long, white, and during the trip remained untouched by anyone. On the upper deck, looking over the railing, there was a young man with a straw hat. The shape of the hat was round. He was watching the men and women and children on the lower steerage deck. Only men were on the upper deck. The whole scene fascinated me. I longed to escape from my surroundings and join those people. A round straw hat, the funnel leading out, the stairway leaning right, the white drawbridge with its railings made of circular chains—white suspenders crossing on the back of a man in the steerage below, round shapes of iron machinery, a mast cutting into the sky, making a triangular shape. I stood spellbound for a while, looking and looking. Could I photograph what I felt, looking and looking and still looking? I saw shapes related to each other.

Anthony W. Lee

6

I saw a picture of shapes and underlying that the feeling I had about life. And as I was deciding, should I try to put down this seemingly new vision that held me,—people, the common people, the feeling of ship and ocean and sky and the feeling of release that I was away from the mob called the rich,—Rembrandt came into my mind and I wondered would he have felt as I was feeling. Spontaneously I raced to the main stairway of the steamer, chased down to my cabin, got my Graflex, raced back again all out of breath, wondering whether the man with the straw hat had moved or not. If he had, the picture I had seen would no longer be. The relationship of shapes as I wanted them would have been disturbed and the picture lost. But there was the man with the straw hat. He hadn’t moved. The man with the crossed white suspenders showing his back, he too, talking to a man, hadn’t moved, and the woman with the child on her lap, sitting on the floor, hadn’t moved. Seemingly no one had changed position. I had but one plate holder with one unexposed plate. Would I get what I saw, what I felt? Finally I released the shutter. My heart thumping. I had never heard my heart thump before. Had I gotten my picture? I knew if I had, another milestone in photography would have been reached, related to the milestone of my Car Horses made in 1892 [also known as The Terminal], and my Hand of Man made in 1902, which had opened up a new era of photography, of seeing. In a sense it would go beyond them, for here would be a picture based on related shapes and on the deepest human feeling, a step in my own evolution, a spontaneous discovery. I took my camera to my stateroom and as I returned to my steamer chair my wife said, “I had sent a steward to look for you. I wondered where you were. I was nervous when he came back and said he couldn’t find you.” I told her where I had been. She said, “You speak as if you were far away in a distant world,” and I said I was. “How you seem to hate these people in first class.” No, I didn’t hate them, but I merely felt completely out of place. As soon as we were installed in Paris I went to the Eastman Kodak Company to find out whether they had a dark room in which I could develop my plate. They had none. They gave me an address of a photographer. I went there. The photographer led me to a huge dark room, many feet long and many feet wide, perfectly appointed. He said, “Make yourself at home. Have you developer? Here’s a fixing bath—it’s fresh.”

Introduction

7

I had brought a bottle of my own developer. I started developing. What tense minutes! Had I succeeded, had I failed? That is, was the exposure correct? Had I moved while exposing? If the negative turned out to be anything but perfect, my picture would be a failure. Finally I had developed and washed and rinsed the plate. In looking at it, holding it up to the red light it seemed all right, and yet I wouldn’t know until the plate had finally been completely fixed. The minutes seemed like hours. Finally the fixing was completed. I could turn on the white light. The negative was perfect in every particular. Would anything happen to it before I got to New York? I washed it. No negative could ever receive more care, and when the washing was finished, I dried the negative with the help of an electric fan. I waited until it was bone dry, and when it was completely dry I put the glass plate into the plate holder which originally held it. In that way I felt it was best protected. I would not remove it from that place till I had returned to New York. I had sufficient plate holders with me to permit myself that luxury—or, should I say, that insurance? I wanted to pay the photographer for the use of his dark room, but he said, “I can’t accept money from you. I know who you are. It’s an honor for me to know you have used my dark room.” How he happened to know me I couldn’t understand. Later on, I discovered that my name was written on a package which I had left in his office while in the dark room. And when I got to New York four months later I was too nervous to make a proof of the negative. In making the negative I had in mind enlarging it for Camera Work, also enlarging it to eleven by fourteen and making a photogravure out of it. Finally, this happened. Two beautiful plates were made under my direction, under my supervision, and proofs were pulled on papers that I had selected. I was completely satisfied. Something I not often was, or am. The first person to whom I showed The Steerage was my friend and co-worker Joseph T. Keiley. “But you have two pictures there, Stieglitz, an upper one and a lower one,” he said. I said nothing. I realized he didn’t see the picture I’d made. Thenceforth I hesitated to show the proofs to anyone, but finally in 1910 I showed them to [Paul] Haviland and Max Weber and [Marius] de Zayas and other artists of that type. They truly saw the picture,

Anthony W. Lee

8

and when it appeared in Camera Work it created a stir wherever seen, and the eleven by fourteen gravure created still a greater stir. I said one day, “If all my photographs were lost and I’d be represented by just one, The Steerage, I’d be satisfied.” I’m not so sure that I don’t feel much the same way today.

The ship, the crowd, the spellbinding scene, the feverish rush to take the picture, the nervous excitement in the darkroom, the extraordinary care to transport and print, the support offered by knowing contemporaries, the triumphant verdict—it is rare to have so full an account about a photographer’s intentions and a photograph’s origins, meanings, and early effects. Stieglitz had even more to tell, especially of the picture’s critical and financial fortunes. After recalling for readers how one of his magazines also “happened” under his leadership and those of his friends and fellow artists Haviland and de Zayas, Stieglitz explained how The Steerage continued to play a key role in all of their lives. Haviland and de Zayas came to me one day and said, “Stieglitz, we feel that a double number of 291 should be devoted to photography, with The Steerage as a basis.” The Steerage was considered by many the most significant photograph I had ever made. It had even attracted the attention of Picasso in 1912. De Zayas had taken a print to Paris to show it to Picasso. Picasso was reported to have said, “This photographer is working in the same spirit as I am.” The print shown to Picasso was an eleven by fourteen photogravure proof of The Steerage made under my supervision. A similar proof Dr. Jessen of the Berlin Museum had bought for his museum for a hundred dollars. There were nine other photogravures for which he also had paid a hundred dollars each. Several of the proofs were also bought by other collectors for a hundred dollars a piece. Whenever I have received money for any of my work I have turned it over to artists of one kind or another. I never have kept any of such money for myself. Haviland and de Zayas claimed that for the sake of photography, for the sake of the idea we were all working for, it would be a great thing if I were to have five hundred proofs

Introduction

9

of the photogravure plate pulled on Imperial Japan paper for a small special “de luxe” edition on thin Japan tissue. Haviland and de Zayas each wrote an essay on photography for this number taking The Steerage as a basis. I had the editions printed under my direction and paid for the cost. It was a special contribution of mine. The double number containing the Imperial Japan proofs was sold to subscribers for twenty cents each. The thin Japan ones for a dollar each. Hundreds of people, rich and poor, had been clamoring for Steerage prints. The poor could not afford the hundred dollars and the rich could not afford the hundred dollars. I was in no position to give away the few proofs I had, before printing this edition for 291. I really printed the edition for 291 to see what would happen. The subscribers to 291— there were about a hundred to the ordinary edition—duly received their copies. There were eight subscribers to the de luxe edition and they received their copies. These eight subscribers paid one dollar for their copies. The two editions called forth great admiration from all classes of people. No attempt was made to solicit subscribers or to sell the magazine. What interested me was to see what the American people would do if left to themselves. That has been an underlying principle in everything I’ve touched for all these years. When, in 1917, the place 291 had come to an end, and I had lost practically all of my friends—certainly those identified with the magazine 291—I didn’t know what to do with the upward of eight thousand copies of the magazine 291. I called a rag picker. It was war time. The cost of paper was high. I had never done anything like this before. Maybe the gesture was a satirical one. The rag picker offered five dollars and eighty cents for the lot. This included the wonderful Imperial Japan Steerage prints. I handed the five dollars and eighty cents to the girl who had been part-time secretary to me and said to her, “Here, Marie, this may buy you a pair of gloves, maybe two pairs.” I had no feeling whatsoever about this transaction—this act of mine. It was merely another lesson to me. I kept most of the de luxe editions but even in time I destroyed most of that. And now I asked myself why was a Dr. Jessen, director of the Berlin Museum, willing to pay a hundred dollars for a copy of The Steerage, which my American friends did not seem to want even for one dollar, though for years they had been at me to give them a chance

Anthony W. Lee

10

to acquire a print? Now that it was possible to get a print for a dollar they wondered why I didn’t give them prints. As a matter of fact wasn’t I “giving them away” at a dollar? Outside of the hundred subscriptions to the regular edition of the magazine 291 and the eight subscriptions to the de luxe edition, how many single copies of either edition do you think were bought? Make your estimate as low as your imagination will permit—not a single one. This is America. [ . . . ] Not so many years later when I came into [the Weyhe Shop] on Lexington Avenue one day I saw my Steerage framed and hanging on the wall amongst etchings and lithographs—some very good etchings and lithographs. “What’s the price of The Steerage?” I asked. “Four dollars.” I was tempted to buy it. It looked so handsome, and how ridiculously low the price. I remembered that I was living on fifty cents a day for food and that four dollars meant eight days’ food. Did I have a right to buy my own picture under such conditions? For at least three or four years this print hung on the walls of Weyhe’s. I often frequented that shop as it seemed one of the few human places in New York. One day while I was visiting the Weyhe shop, [Carl] Zigrosser said, while talking about photography, “Stieglitz, a man the other day, a collector of Leonardo da Vincis, a man for whom Leonardo was the only thing in the world, saw The Steerage. He asked what it was and where it came from. “A photograph,” I told him. He looked at it again, asked the price— four dollars—and took it.” “Well,” I thought, “it’s in good company and maybe if Leonardo knew he wouldn’t mind.” I was glad that I had not succumbed to the temptation and that I had had food for eight days—once in my life at least I had been wise. I had not succumbed to the temptation of buying a picture, even though the picture was my own.6

How do we understand such a tale, so full of the photographer’s self-assurance and abundant ego, in relation to the picture? Can the photograph, upon close inspection, sustain the weighty claims made for it—for its capacity to capture Stieglitz’s early feelings of alienation and release, later its ability to stand up to Picasso’s cubism, and still later to allure the eye of a connoisseur of Leonardo? Does the story really provide the key to unlocking The Steerage’s central con-

Introduction

11

cerns, or does it, like most retrospective accounts, open up to other questions, in this case, about Stieglitz’s complicated feelings of triumph and loss, exultation and bitterness, or about photography’s still-uncertain relation to other fine arts, or finally about The Steerage’s seemingly underappreciated status (at least to Stieglitz, who always pined for more) as the years passed away? Or, to put it another way, does the tale from Twice a Year still have a claim on the meanings of the picture, if it ever did, or is it—and the complex set of intentions it represents—merely one historical perspective to be weighed against others? Even the barest of facts are up for reassessment. Consider, for example, Stieglitz’s simple description about where he stood on the Kaiser Wilhelm II, where he was “as far forward on deck” as he could perch himself. Based on what some consider a contemporary model of the ship, he would have stood, according to his account, roughly where the “X” is on the left side of figure 2. But if that were true, the large upright mast as it appears in The Steerage seems far too close to the deck where the crowds appear, producing in the photograph a much more compressed space than seems to be the case on the ship itself (figure 3). A more logical place for Stieglitz to have stood, given the evidence in the photograph, would have been on a platform of the passenger deck below the bridge (figure 4), where the rear mast is much closer to the deck opposite the photographer’s perch and is angled more sharply away from the deck, just as it is angled in the picture. But if that perch were indeed the case, then Stieglitz would have been required to elbow past the crowds to reach his cabin to retrieve his camera, and then pass through them again to return to his original vantage point. Given this new possibility, how should we interpret his longing to escape from the tiresome nouveaux riches and “join those people,” or his equally loaded claim that the fastened gangway leading up to the steerage “remained untouched” during the trip, as if, in both of those observations, no jostling between the two kinds of passengers ever occurred and the experience of communion was a purely visual one? The coauthors of this book reassess Stieglitz’s physical and emotional relationship to the crowds he describes, the transition between his regard of the

Figure 2

Model of Kaiser Wilhelm II, bow. Deutsches Museum, Munich. Photo: Jason Francisco.

Figure 3

Model of Kaiser Wilhelm II, bow. Deutsches Museum, Munich. Photo: Jason Francisco.

Figure 4

Model of Kaiser Wilhelm II, passenger deck. Deutsches Museum,

Munich. Photo: Jason Francisco.

Introduction

15

crowd in social terms to one more attuned to formal and aesthetic concerns, and the pronouncements of eventual triumph and the strong sense of valediction. But then after offering nuanced (and distinct) readings about the story, photo historian and photographer part ways to take up markedly different aspects— and offer dramatically different interpretations—about the relationship between word and image. Anne McCauley explores what it must have been like for Stieglitz, an American of a German Jewish background, to see and understand The Steerage’s crowd in the ways he proclaimed. In doing so, she searches for the fraught silences in his story—the various subjects about race and class that were not spoken plainly, or only by indirection—and understands the photograph in relation to them. In comparison, Jason Francisco explores Stieglitz’s account of looking in terms of the photographer’s habits with his camera and argues for the philosophical issues about seeing and making that such a scene must have posed to him. While McCauley is skeptical that Stieglitz realized in 1907 that The Steerage represented a moment of aesthetic awakening, Francisco accepts it and deciphers what such an awakening might have meant, and still means to photographers, given the demands of the camera as a uniquely mechanical way of apprehending the world. One thing the two writers agree on: there is no use denying that Stieglitz’s words have shaped our regard, and celebration, of his most famous picture. What now matters, McCauley and Francisco argue, is how we understand the relationship of word and image and how paying attention to their complicated play can open up to a greater understanding of The Steerage’s foundational meanings. Together they suggest that the words are equivocal, at once ancillary to the picture (whose formal self-sufficiency remains one of the hallmarks of its accomplishment as an early modernist photograph), and yet also inseparable from it, perhaps even necessary to it. They make The Steerage, today, what Stieglitz himself made it over the years: a photo-text work.

The Making of a Modernist Myth

e lizabeth a nne m c c auley

But then what is your myth—the myth in which you do live? Carl Jung, Memories, Dreams, Reflections (1963)

after his eight-year-old daughter Kitty finished the 1907 school year and his small gallery on Fifth Avenue closed down for the summer, Alfred Stieglitz gathered his family, along with Kitty’s German governess, Clara Lauer, for their second excursion to Europe. Sailing on the luxurious Kaiser Wilhelm II, the Stieglitz clan settled into their comfortable first-class berths. After two boring days of burrowing in his deck chair with his eyes closed to screen out the nouveau-riche socialites who mindlessly chattered around him, Stieglitz took to his feet and roamed the boat to avoid the crowds and his fashion-conscious wife. On the prow and steerage deck the third-class passengers were basking in the sun and trying to fight the nausea brought on by the rough seas and fetid, garbage-littered sleeping quarters below. From his safe perch at the end of the walkway, just outside the stuffed chairs of the reading room, Stieglitz looked down on young women airing linens and tending children and across to the more adventuresome crowd gathered at the highest and most forward point on the boat. Then, in a “eureka” moment that stayed with him the rest of his life, the scene before him sparked a surge of emotion: “I stood spellbound for a while, looking and looking. Could I photograph what I felt, looking and looking and still looking? I saw shapes related to each other. I saw a picture of shapes and underlying that the feeling I had about life.”1 Rushing back to

17

Elizabeth Anne McCauley

18

his cabin to get his Graflex camera and his one remaining unexposed plate, he returned to find the “picture” he had seen still there. The shot was taken, the plate developed after the family arrived in Paris, and the print known as The Steerage emerged from the developing bath back in New York in the fall (figure 1, p. 3). “If all my photographs were lost and I’d be represented by just one, The Steerage, I’d be satisfied,” Stieglitz recalled himself saying some time later.2 This detailed invocation of the making of a photograph—a photograph that for its creator encapsulated a life’s work—is one of many tales Stieglitz spun for the entranced visitors who gathered around him in the modest galleries he ran in New York between 1905 and 1946. It is not known when he began crafting “How The Steerage Happened” (as well as two additional episodes tracing the subsequent fate of the photograph, “The Magazine 291 and The Steerage” and “The Steerage at Weyhe’s”), but he was still telling the story to friends in 1940.3 His disciple and lover Dorothy Norman published the fullest version, along with many other memoirs from his early life based on “over one hundred stories dictated by Alfred Stieglitz without any idea on his part that they were to be printed,” in her magazine, Twice a Year, as an homage to an aging legend in 1942.4 A second transcription, somewhat abbreviated and differently worded, appeared in her 1960 encomium, Alfred Stieglitz: An American Seer.5 Herbert J. Seligmann, claiming to be working from notes taken on November 1, 1926, offered the most condensed variation in his Alfred Stieglitz Talking: Notes on Some of His Conversations in 1966.6 Despite subtle shifts in phrasing and the addition of more self-reflective comments in the 1942 version, these three texts define a master narrative, consistent down to specific turns of phrase and evocations of the emotions that swelled within the photographer. In the explosion of critical writing about Stieglitz after his death in 1946, extracts from these published versions were repeatedly cited as evidence of the photographer’s groundbreaking invention of a modernist, abstract, “straight” photography in which form, rather than depicted content, was of primary concern. Despite some quibbling about the details of the account and Allan Sekula’s

The Making of a Modernist Myth

19

important deconstruction of the story as “pure symbolist autobiography,”7 the narrative, through repetition in popular books such as Beaumont Newhall’s History of Photography: From 1839 to the Present Day (first written in 1937 and expanded through many editions), acquired the weight of truth. Stieglitz’s declaration that “another milestone in photography” had been reached became a self-fulfilling prophesy: marked by Stieglitz’s vivid narrative as a turning point in his career, the photograph was reproduced in every textbook and hailed as a canonical symbol of American greatness. But, when looked at without the rosy-tinted lenses of Stieglitz’s fond memoirs and the enthusiastic accolades of his biographers, The Steerage can seem oddly pedestrian. Known today only through gelatin silver prints made in the 1920s and 1930s and variously enlarged gravures that can be dated to 1911, 1913, and 1915, The Steerage flaunts its geometric structure, defined by the white slash of the painted gangplank that splits the dappled crowd; the thick mast rising toward the upper left; the spatially ambiguous, raking hauling boom that presses down on the heads of the figures; and the metal stairs leading nowhere on the right. Its emphatic, two-dimensional composition is harmonious and balanced, but no more striking than that of Stieglitz’s earlier prints, such as On the Ferry Boat (1902), The Flatiron (1903), and Going to the Start (1904), in which silhouetted, flattened linear shapes repeat and emphasize the edges of the frame. Furthermore, crowded steerage passengers, the “huddled masses” of Emma Lazarus’s already famous poem of 1883, had been recorded with increasing frequency in the early twentieth century by countless amateur, news, and documentary photographers intent on exposing the hardships facing a growing mass of poor and illiterate immigrants. Can we believe that Stieglitz, in 1907, considered The Steerage the epitome of his life’s work? And, more important, why did he feel compelled to compose a story, firmly in place by the early 1920s, that painted him as a lonely outcast who, on the third day, rose again from the spiritually dead to find salvation among the common people and in the beauty of his own creation? Far from being a factual account of how The Steerage was made in 1907 and

Elizabeth Anne McCauley

20

subsequently greeted by the public, the text published in 1942 is a selectively remembered, carefully crafted, and embellished parable consistent with the endless outpouring of words that flowed from Stieglitz’s pen and mouth throughout his career. It forms part of a personal mythology, described by Carl Jung (an author whom Stieglitz admired) as a series of stories that individuals invent to make sense of their lives. Upon closer scrutiny, the events that Stieglitz recalls are suspect, his motivations for taking the picture are suppressed, and his interest in the scene determined by his position in the 1920s rather than in 1907. In addition, what he actually did write about his reasons for taking the picture has been misrepresented by subsequent scholars, who have drawn selectively from the 1942 article to justify condemning or praising him as a formalist. Although there is certainly no single or “true” reading of this photograph and its justificatory text, we can measure them against one another and against external evidence to uncover the unresolved conflicts in Stieglitz’s personality. What emerges tells us a great deal about how The Steerage and the retelling of its creation functioned as screen memories, ostensibly confirming Stieglitz’s prowess as a photographer, hatred for consumerist society, and humanitarian desire to be one with the lower classes, while repressing his anxieties about his social status, sexual performance, and lifelong accomplishments.

in the spring of 1907, Stieglitz by all accounts was feeling dissatisfied. He had not done much photographic work in several years and was mostly cycling older prints through foreign exhibitions. Editing Camera Work and mounting new shows, including his first display of contemporary drawings at the Little Galleries in January, kept him busy but out of the darkroom. The most exciting recent photographs he’d made that spring were a series of experimental nudes, shot with his friend Clarence White and two local girls who were willing to assume graceful poses adjacent to Japanese ceramics and potted plants as long as the prints were blurry enough to hide their identities. White knew about photographing nudes, but Stieglitz had steered clear of the

The Making of a Modernist Myth

21

subject since his student days. Whereas White’s wife was comfortable with letting him pose her in the buff in front of the window or even outdoors, Stieglitz’s Emmeline never agreed to such liberties and would have been suspicious of her husband’s interest in undressed models. Stieglitz always greeted the end of the gallery season with relief: the city exhausted him, and he relished returning to better air and greener vistas, later to be satisfied by extended stays at his family’s home at Lake George, New York. A trip to Europe with the family, however, promised to be less than relaxing. Stieglitz had lived in Germany from 1881 to 1890, but since his marriage in 1893 had returned only for a belated honeymoon trip in the summer of 1894 and his first excursion with wife, child, and nanny in 1904. The decision to cross the Atlantic in 1907 was influenced by a number of forces, primarily Emmeline’s desire for Parisian shopping and visits to her German relatives; it was not something that he was looking forward to. As Stieglitz wrote to the photographer Heinrich Kühn in March, “For two years my wife has been absolutely against my work. I have never discussed it and don’t want to go into details. . . . So you see, dear friend, since the European trip will be principally a pleasure trip for my wife, I can make no plans for myself.”8 Stieglitz’s marital stress, manifest in his hypochondriacal ailments, led him to complain to the San Francisco pictorialist photographer and health nut Anne Brigman, who advised him in April 1907 to pack in his trunks Annie Bryson Call’s book Power through Repose, a guide to better relaxation through mental and physical exercises.9 Stieglitz filed a passport application on May 11 and cast off from the Hoboken docks of the North German Lloyd Line on May 14, not in early June as he later recalled.10 The Kaiser Wilhelm II, the “fashionable ship” that his wife insisted on taking, left only once a month from New York, and the ship’s next sailing was June 11.11 But Stieglitz’s friend Joseph Keiley had already gotten a card from him sent from the boat by May 24, and had received a letter from Paris mailed on May 28.12 If one accepts that the identification of the ship is correct (it can be confirmed only that Stieglitz returned to New York on September 24 on the Kaiser Wilhelm II),13 then his memory of the date is inaccurate.

Elizabeth Anne McCauley

22

His characterization of a liner crowded with “nouveaux riches,” whose faces and vulgar English gave him “cold shivers,” accurately reflects the clientele of one of the world’s fastest and most luxurious transatlantic vessels. Modeled after the first four-funneled steamer, the Kaiser Wilhelm der Grosse, launched by Kaiser Wilhelm II in 1897 as a symbol of German technological supremacy, the Kaiser Wilhelm II, whose maiden voyage began on April 14, 1903, was even bigger and faster. Measuring 707 feet in length, the North German Lloyd ship set the eastbound speed record—an average of 23.58 knots—after being refitted with new propellers in 1904. Matching its claims of being the biggest and fastest, the boat housed its 775 first-class passengers in 290 cabins, each sleeping from one to four passengers, and boasted two imperial suites, eight luxury cabins, and four cabins with adjoining bathrooms. Stieglitz and his family ate in a dining room that seated 554 persons and could stroll in a smoking room, drawing room, children’s saloon on the lower promenade deck, two cafés, and a reading and writing room on the upper promenade deck (figure 5). Although rumors of a new, bigger, and faster ship commissioned by the Cunard Line, the Lusitania, had hit the press in the days before Stieglitz’s voyage, 14 the Kaiser Wilhelm II jealously guarded its reputation as the most comfortable and rapid mode of transport to Europe.15 The passengers attracted to the North German Lloyd behemoth were not only those who prided themselves on taking the state-of-the-art luxury vessel, but also those Americans of German heritage who appreciated that the crew, owners, and cultural amenities of the boat were German. Although the Stieglitz family did not warrant mention in the society columns, the papers noted that their fellow passengers included members of the German nobility and diplomatic corps (Baroness Loeffelholz von Colberg, General von Lowenfeld, the Prinz von Sachsen-Coburg, Count von Hatzfeld-Trachenberg); successful German-born merchants who had carved empires in brewing, like Stieglitz’s wife’s family (Adolphus Busch of St. Louis, George Ehret of New York) or retailing (Louis Stern of Stern Brothers department store, Ewald Fleitmann); German-speaking lawyers and financiers (George Burghard, Anthony Drexel

Figure 5

Reading and writing room, Kaiser Wilhelm II, ca. 1905. Deutsches Schiffahrtsmuseum/German Maritime Museum, Bremerhaven, Germany. Image courtesy of the Deutsches Schiffahrtsmuseum.

Elizabeth Anne McCauley

24

of Philadelphia); and German cultural celebrities (the singer Marcella StengelSembrich, the Boston Symphony Orchestra conductor Karl Muck).16 Stieglitz’s complaint about “those voices, and that English—ye gods!” is an underhanded reference to the Yiddish- and German-inflected accents of most of the people with whom his wife socialized. Perhaps the most famous fellow travelers were William Ellis Corey, the self-made president of U.S. Steel who had settled a million dollars on his wife to get a Reno divorce in 1906, and Mabelle Gilman, the actress he had wed at 1:30 a.m. the very morning of the ship’s departure. The Coreys were wafted in the dead of night from their wedding supper to the captain’s suite, where they were attended by four ship’s stewards, a valet, and a maid, and would not “be obliged to mingle with other passengers on the Kaiser Wilhelm II, unless they so desire.”17 Where Stieglitz drew the line between the “old” and “nouveau riche” is unknown, since his and his wife’s families certainly had accumulated their wealth during the previous thirty years, but undoubtedly the excesses of the likes of the Coreys embodied the mixture of ostentatious consumption and vulgarity that caused Stieglitz to bury himself under a blanket in a deck chair. Stieglitz’s discomfort with the rich may have also been heightened by events immediately preceding his departure. The Kaiser Wilhelm II suffered a series of well-publicized setbacks during the week before the Stieglitzes were booked to leave. As the ship passed by Nantucket heading down to New York, it almost hit another German cruiser traveling toward Boston.18 By the time it approached the Hoboken docks on May 7, four thousand longshoremen in Hoboken and Manhattan, including six hundred employees of the North German Lloyd Line, had walked off the job, demanding more pay. The captain was warned not to approach the Hoboken dock, and told to anchor overnight at Quarantine, the wharf set aside for inspection of individuals suspected of carrying contagious diseases.19 In the coming days, the strike spread and violence increased: freight handlers walked out on May 10, and the longshoremen predicted that the teamsters and the grain elevator operators would walk out in sympathy with the twenty-five thousand longshoremen striking in New York

The Making of a Modernist Myth

25

and New Jersey.20 Thanks in part to scab labor, the transatlantic liners were still managing to leave more or less on time, and the general manager of the North German Lloyd Line assured the public on May 11 that “[a]ny report to the effect that the transatlantic lines will effect a compromise with the striking longshoremen . . . is absolutely groundless. The North German Lloyd will most assuredly fight this strike to a finish.”21 The day of the Stieglitzes’ departure, the North German Lloyd spokesman asserted in the New York Times that the newly hired men were working well and the “Kaiser Wilhelm II was fully coaled and loaded and would sail to-day.”22 With police, strikebreakers, and striking men warily eying one another on the docks and longshoremen swearing to stand up to the big transatlantic companies (the strike did not end until June 13), the firstclass passengers nervously boarded, while some 343 second-class and 770 steerage passengers passed down the gangplanks reserved for them. Stieglitz apparently did not stop long to settle into his cabin but immediately came out to capture the exciting departure from the pier and the view across to Manhattan. According to a letter sent to Stieglitz in Europe by fellow photographer Alvin Langdon Coburn, “Hope you had a good trip. You were altogether too busy snaping [sic] the new Kodak to wave your hand at us from the steamer as it pulled out, but I got you [sic] p.c. [postcard] which came back with the pilot.”23 This letter is telling, not only because it indicates that Stieglitz was shooting photographs from the time he boarded the ship, but also because of its reference to his “new Kodak.” Stieglitz mentioned in his later account that The Steerage was made with a Graflex, one of several single-lens reflex cameras sold under that name that he owned by 1906 in which a mirror reflected an undistorted image onto a ground-glass screen at the top of the camera that was visible thanks to a leather focusing hood.24 The camera, which had to be supported with both hands and pressed against the waist for stability while focusing, was much larger than famous Kodaks such as the Bull’s-Eye or Brownie series and was at the heavy end of portable handheld models. Coburn might have dubbed the Graflex a “Kodak” because the Folmer and Schwing Manufacturing Company, which had introduced the camera in

Elizabeth Anne McCauley

26

1899, had been bought by Eastman Kodak in 1905. Or, one could posit that Coburn was referring to another, as yet unidentified, smaller-format Kodak camera that Stieglitz had just acquired before the trip. Coburn’s image of Stieglitz as a busy snapshooter jars with the present-day tendency to contrast Stieglitz (and the Photo-Secession, which he helped to found in 1902) with the tasteless amateurs who embraced the medium after the mass marketing of cheap handheld cameras in the 1880s. But this distinction has always been less clear than either the self-justifying rhetoric put out by the Photo-Secession or the subsequent assessments of photographic historians would suggest. Although he fulminated against George Eastman, Stieglitz had won prizes in Kodak competitions held in 1905 and 1907 and allowed his works to appear in traveling exhibitions sponsored by the company.25 He also promoted the Graflex and other Kodak products on the pages of Camera Work. And in recording memorable events involving his family and private life, he often embraced subjects dear to amateur tourists or proud parents, albeit with different compositional strategies. On all his trips to Europe, Stieglitz, like passengers wielding Kodaks, had taken pictures on the boat during the passage. In 1894, on his belated honeymoon trip to France on the S.S. Bourgogne, he made a self-consciously artistic, abstracted view of the foaming whitecaps behind the boat that he titled MidOcean, suggesting his isolation and the unfathomable grandeur of nature. More sociably, he posed his wife, his good friend the painter Sime Hermann, the Washington landscape painter Parker Mann and his wife, two other saloon passengers, and the attractive actress Lotta Linthicum on the upper deck (figure 6). Ensconced in their heavy blankets, the group pretended to be reading or conversing, while the poised and comely Miss Linthicum smiled out at the cameraman. She became the willing subject of a second study, leaning against the railings in her elegant toque and fur-trimmed coat and gracefully clasping a floral sprig. Enlarged onto platinum paper and exhibited as Outward Bound, the photograph commemorated a brief flirtation under the guise of a celebrity portrait.

Figure 6

Alfred Stieglitz, Sime Hermann, Mr. and Mrs. Mann, Dr. Brown, Mr. McGibbon, Miss Lonthicum [sic], and Emmy on Board the Bourgogne, 1894. Alfred Stieglitz Collection, National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC (1949.3.244). Image courtesy of the Board of Trustees, National Gallery of Art, Washington.

Elizabeth Anne McCauley

28

In 1907, Stieglitz had been shooting during the early days of the crossing, as he let slip in his account of The Steerage and as Coburn’s letter confirms. He had used up the plates he brought with him, possibly making views of friends at his wife’s behest as well as another deck scene of his traveling companions (figure 7). His daughter Kitty smiles pertly at him at the center of the frame, flanked by a distracted Clara Lauer and Emmy, once again pushed to the edge and pretending to sleep (as her slight smile reveals). Known only as a small contact print, the picture has a very narrow depth of field, with fuzzy objects cut off in the foreground and even Emmy’s face slightly softened. It is for all intents and purposes a fairly close-up snapshot, marking Stieglitz’s attempt at bonding with his daughter even though his wife remains distant and downright homely. The claim that he took The Steerage on the third day of what was a six-day eastward passage to Plymouth cannot be upheld.26 With characteristic attention to the weather at the time of shooting, Stieglitz observed: “The sea wasn’t particularly rough. The sky was clear. The ship was driving into the wind— a rather brisk wind.”27 As Beaumont Newhall first noticed (and as anyone who has taken a transatlantic crossing in early summer knows), the people wearing thin shawls and straw boaters and the girl in a long-sleeved cotton dress standing at the foot of the stairs at right show no signs of braving the ferocious cold gusts that whip the bow of a boat in mid-ocean. When the Kaiser Wilhelm II left New York at 7:30 a.m. on May 14, it was 48 degrees; when it arrived in Plymouth on May 20 or May 21, the weather was unusually cold— not above the low fifties, seemingly much colder than what is suggested in the picture.28 Furthermore, as Newhall deduced, the direction of the shadows cast by the railing of the gangplank fall to the right, which in the northern hemisphere during the summer is possible only if the bow of the boat is facing west, not east.29 Newhall concluded that the ship was probably docked off Plymouth, where it had to be reached by tenders since the dock area was too shallow. However, there is no reason that the boat could not have been moving slowly out of Hoboken or even berthed in Cherbourg, where the Stieglitz family descended.

Figure 7

Alfred Stieglitz, Clara Lauer, Kitty, and Emmy Stieglitz, 1907. Alfred Stieglitz Collection, National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC (1949.3.287). Image courtesy of the Board of Trustees, National Gallery of Art, Washington.

Elizabeth Anne McCauley

30

The gazes of the press of figures in the upper right of the photograph suggest that they were within sight of a landmass (or another point of interest) off to the right. All that can be safely determined is that the ship was not moving in mid-ocean at the time the shutter was released and that, once again, Stieglitz’s memories are approximations, despite his inclusion of what seem to be very specific and factually corroborating details. Stieglitz uses his distaste for his wife’s world to justify his wandering as far forward as possible on the upper promenade deck, where, alone, he encountered the steerage passengers. His emphasis on the accidental quality of this vision (he called it “a spontaneous discovery” and titled his account of its making “a happening”) echoes the rhetoric surrounding the handheld camera, which was touted as mobile, able to capture spontaneous scenes, and unobtrusive, in contrast to larger-format, tripod-bound view cameras. In his creation story, Stieglitz is compelled to figure the discovery of his subject as somehow divine, beyond his conscious control, and thus predestined and magical. Had he been carrying a smaller Brownie, he could have shot the scene immediately, but the sense of overcoming adversity would not have been as strong. The prey had to freeze for several minutes until the hunter had gotten his gun (or in this case the clunky Graflex back in his cabin). The tension mounted; the stakes were high with only one plate remaining. Invoking orgasmic release, Stieglitz described the triggering of the shutter: “My heart thumping. I had never heard my heart thump before. Had I gotten my picture?”30 The only problem with this account of visceral excitement and successful preservation of a once-in-a-lifetime feeling is that it isn’t true. Stieglitz had shot this picture before, or at least this part of the boat (figure 8). In late October 1904, he and his family had taken the Kaiser Wilhelm II back from Southampton to New York;31 they may have taken the same boat on the eastbound trip. Moving to the bow while the crew was casting the anchor prior to landing, Stieglitz stood on the port side of the topmost deck (at the level of the captain’s quarters) and looked down at a sailor adjusting the rigging. The steerage passengers were gathered in the same areas as in 1907: the forecastle deck

The Making of a Modernist Myth

31

at the bow of the ship and the deck immediately above their crowded sleeping quarters. But they were pushed to the right side of the composition and subjected to the greater blurriness that marked the exposure as a whole (and that was increased in the translation of the negative to a photogravure, published in Camera Work in 1905). Continuing the process of giving his prints generic titles that alluded to his temporal and geographical location (MidOcean, Outward Bound, On the Ferry Boat, or Snapshot—From My Window— Berlin), Stieglitz named this work Nearing Land.The silhouetted laboring sailor, the mulling crowd of steerage passengers, the triangle of water, the emphatic line of the anchor chain, and the slip of land on the horizon were gathered together to paint the mood of an exciting moment of arrival. No single element was given primacy, in either the composition or the title. Stieglitz did not photographically “see” the steerage passengers in 1904, but they must have at some level left a trace in his memory. When he decided not to visit the cafés, reading room, or smoking salon and strode away from the sheltered areas where his fellow first-class passengers had claimed deck chairs, he knew where he was going. Classes were rigorously segregated on ocean liners, so that steerage passengers were crowded below deck in the front of the ship, had no dining hall (and were thus fed in the open area shown in Stieglitz’s photograph), and were forbidden to mount the two stairs that led from the main deck to the upper promenade deck. Similarly, Stieglitz was not allowed physically to enter the steerage quarters or the bow of the ship, but he chose to walk along the upper promenade deck, which extended slightly farther toward the bow than the two decks above it. In 1904 he had shot on the port side of a deck that was probably two levels above the steerage area so that he captured more of the bow and looked down on the steerage passengers gathered on the forecastle. In 1907, he moved one deck lower and to the starboard side, adjacent to one of the two stairs that descended to his subjects. This was as close as he could get to them. Stieglitz wrote, “I longed to escape from my surroundings and join those people,” and that longing found expression in the way he transformed the scene

Figure 8

Alfred Stieglitz, Nearing Land, 1904.

The Making of a Modernist Myth

33

by using a very long lens to allow him to overcome the spatial limits imposed on him by the class-based rules of the ship. As a comparison with the floor plan of the Kaiser Wilhelm II makes clear (figure 9), the apparent distance between the foremast on the left (which Stieglitz erroneously refers to as a funnel) and the railing of what he dubs the “upper steerage deck” (forecastle deck) is radically compressed in the photograph. The distance between where Stieglitz was standing and the upper steerage deck was about twenty meters, with the hatch down into the steerage dormitories in fact behind the mast in the area lost in shadows. By using a long lens with a narrow angle of vision, Stieglitz isolated a swath, some twenty feet wide, of the activities on the steerage decks and thus pulled the figures closer to the viewer, who could then study their clothing and facial expressions without being physically next to them. In choosing to shoot from the deck reserved for the first- and second-class passengers looking down into the only part of steerage activity that was visible to him, Stieglitz entered into a dialogue with several decades of representations of immigrants in popular prose, photography, and illustrations. Most elite passengers knew about the details of crossing by steerage from the point of view of bourgeois journalists who reported from the outside, interviewing government officials, gathering statistics, and occasionally conversing with former passengers who spoke English and had succeeded in the New World. They might have acted like the “first cabin lady” addressed in the opening section of Edward Steiner’s book of 1906, On the Trail of the Immigrant, who threw down chocolates to the “frowsy headed, ill clothed women, the men who looked so hungry and so greedy.”32 Most commercial photographs of steerage passengers were made from this high vantage point, such as the Underwood and Underwood stereograph from 1905 that figures early in Steiner’s book (figure 10). The foreground railing at once served as a protective barrier between the camera (and presumed viewer) and the crowd purposely gathered below, most of whom acknowledged the camera’s presence without asserting notably individual reactions or identities. It was in fact this distance between a single, elite viewer (implicitly defined by the camera’s monocular way of

Figure 9

Detail of plan and cross section of the upper decks of the Kaiser Wilhelm II, reproduced in Arnold Kludas, Die Geschichte der deutschen Passagierschiffahrt (Hamburg: Ernst Kabel Verlag, 1987), vol. 2, pp. 184–85. Image courtesy of the Deutsches Schiffahrtsmuseum.

The Making of a Modernist Myth

35

recording and specific placement) and the anonymous immigrant mass that the book was designed to break down by describing the actual life beneath the deck and following a group of immigrants into their new homes in Lower East Side ghettos. The same strategy of personalizing the immigrant experience so that bourgeois and elite readers would be sympathetic to and supportive of improvements in immigration policies was taken a step further by Broughton Brandenberg and his wife in 1903. Using a technique that muckraking journalists had introduced in the nineteenth century, the Brandenbergs dressed up as Italian immigrants to get material for an insider account of the steerage crossing from New York to Italy and then the return with a typical Italian family. Even though they selected North German Lloyd boats (the Lahn eastbound and the Prinzessin Irene westbound), which reputedly had better facilities in steerage, the living conditions were appalling. Brandenberg’s descriptions—of the women’s compartment, in which 214 women and children crowded into 195 iron bunk beds with only one coarse wool blanket apiece, the twenty-fivegallon tanks of unrecognizable slop ladled into tin cups that could never be washed, the decks covered with vomit and food, and the rough treatment that many passengers received at the hands of the German crew—were supplemented by sixty Kodak photographs that he shot as evidence.33 His shortexposure view of the steerage deck of the Lahn (figure 11), looking back toward the pilot’s house, records the chaos of activities taking place within reach of the photographer, who claimed that he tried to keep his camera hidden to avoid having the immigrants look at the lens. Similarly, his more static studies of women and children on the deck were newsworthy because they allowed a closer scrutiny of subjects in a situation normally off limits to most genteel viewers (figure 12). As he did expressly in conversation when he met a group of condescending first-class passengers criticizing the filthy masses, Brandenberg used the photographs to demonstrate to a wider American readership that the immigrants were not lazy, unkempt, vulgar people but families forced to cope with inhumane, unhygienic living conditions while on the boat.

Figure 10

Underwood and Underwood, New York, As Seen by My Lady of the First Class Cabin (steerage passengers), 1905, reproduced in Edward Steiner, On the Trail of the Immigrant (New York: Fleming H. Revel Company, 1906), facing p. 10. Photo: Anne McCauley.

Figure 11

Broughton Brandenberg, Life on the Steerage-passengers’ Deck on the Lahn, reproduced in Brandenberg, Imported Americans: The Story of a Disguised American and His Wife Studying the Immigration Question (New York: F. A. Stokes, 1904), facing p. 28. Photo: Anne McCauley.

Figure 12

Broughton Brandenberg, Mid-Voyage Scenes: Mora—Syrian Jews— Prostrated by the Swell—Children Escaping Seasickness, from Brandenberg, Imported Americans, facing p. 184. Photo: Anne McCauley.

The Making of a Modernist Myth

39

The impetus behind the self-proclaimed “documentary” exposés of steerage life by Steiner, Brandenberg, and many other magazine writers was the flood of immigrants into the country in the first years of the twentieth century and the resulting critique of federal immigration laws.34 The New York Times announced on May 3, a few days before Stieglitz’s departure, that a record 25,000 steerage passengers had arrived in New York in the previous twentyfour hours,35 and some 1,285,000 are estimated to have landed in 1907, the largest number ever recorded for a single year. Although many American citizens were foreign-born or children of immigrants, the new arrivals were accused of forcing wages down, contributing to crime, crippling state and charitable institutions, bringing diseases, and inciting political instability. As Frederic Austin Ogg wrote in an article published in May 1907, “American Immigration at High Tide,” the quality of the immigrant stock had become significantly lower, and thus the need for legislative changes to regulate the types and numbers admitted was even more pressing.36 Much of the rhetoric calling for stricter immigration laws centered on the racial differences between the “good” Northern European and Protestant waves of immigration earlier in the nineteenth century and the “bad” new immigrants who were markedly more Jewish and Eastern European. Ogg reproduced a pie chart showing that 13.9 percent of immigrants in 1906 were “Hebrew” and 26 percent Italian, while Burton J. Hendrick, writing in McClure’s in January 1907, painted an alarmist picture of what he titled “The Great Jewish Invasion.” Claiming that “at the present rate, New York, in ten years, will contain a million and a half of Jews,” Hendrick traced the land lust and commercial success of the Russian Jews, who changed their names, spread from the Lower East Side to new bourgeois neighborhoods in Harlem, and assumed the manners and lifestyles of comfortable Americans: “From Fourteenth to Twenty-third Street, Fifth Avenue, the former homes of the Knickerbocker aristocracy have been replaced by Jewish business blocks.”37 Even though he concluded that the Russian Jews did not represent a political threat, since they voted as individuals rather than in blocks, the way the Irish did, Hendrick

Elizabeth Anne McCauley

40

nonetheless implicitly stoked the anti-Semitic fears of Gentile readers that Jewish money was taking control of America’s largest city. Attention to what was broadly described as the “immigration problem” in 1906–7 was also motivated by debates in Congress over the need to pass new immigration laws. In 1903 Congress had approved a compromise measure that added anarchists and prostitutes to the list of excluded persons and raised to two dollars the head tax charged to each immigrant, but did not impose a literacy test. After his reelection in 1904, President Theodore Roosevelt pushed again for tighter immigration policies and proposed reducing the number of immigrants allowed per tonnage weight of ships to an extent that would essentially destroy the steerage system.38 A new immigration bill was proposed in the House of Representatives in April 1906 that further raised the head tax to five dollars, required adult males to demonstrate that they possessed twentyfive dollars (fifteen for women and children), excluded anyone with a poor physique or mental illness, and imposed a literacy test. Thanks to the opposition of the National Liberal Immigration League (founded in 1906 by Jewish, German, and Irish leaders) and to the appointment of Oscar Straus, a leader of the Jewish community, as the Secretary of the Department of Commerce and Labor (which oversaw the Bureau of Immigration), the bill was amended.39 The final bill, passed on February 20, 1907, raised the head tax to four dollars, omitted the literacy test, and set up a commission (eventually known as the Dillingham Commission, named after its head, Senator William P. Dillingham) to do a systematic study of the economic and social impact of immigration. The bill also addressed the conditions in steerage by increasing by 25 percent the amount of space required for each steerage passenger. According to this new rule, which went into effect only in January 1909, each paying passenger would be entitled on average to eighteen square feet of deck space (little more than four by four feet), based on an estimate that the distance between decks was seven feet.40 The steerage passengers that Stieglitz sought out on the Kaiser Wilhelm II already benefited from as much space as the new law required, since the Ger-

The Making of a Modernist Myth

41

man lines were notoriously more generous than many of the Italian or French companies, but they did not present threats to American workers or New York charitable agencies. As Stieglitz tells us in his narrative, the photograph was shot on the way to Europe, so the passengers were leaving, not arriving in, the United States. They were thus a mixture of successful emigrants returning to the old country to see relatives and recruit friends; workers who had failed to achieve financial success; and new arrivals who had been rejected at Ellis Island. According to Brandenberg in “The Tragedy of the Rejected Immigrant,” published in 1906, more than sixty-eight thousand were refused embarkation between June 1905 and 1906 for reasons ranging from trachoma (an eye disease) and other illnesses to old age, poverty, or previously negotiated labor contracts (which were illegal).41 A celebrated case was that of Fanny Diner, who had fallen ill when fleeing the Odessa massacre and was rejected in 1906 along with her mother. Her brother, a successful pharmacist already settled in New York, appealed to President Roosevelt and members of Congress, but she was finally deported in April 1906.42 Brandenberg and many others agreed that inspections had to take place overseas before immigrants departed for the United States and that the current situation resulted in undue cruelty and hardships.43 Stieglitz, as a New York resident reading the daily papers and middle-class news magazines, could not have avoided the debates over the need for new immigration laws and the condition of immigrants. But what was his attitude toward the steerage passengers? What expectations did he bring with him when he strolled toward the bow of the ship to look at what was going on in steerage? Certainly, one image that he may have recalled came from his younger brother, Leopold, who, shortly after completing his medical training in Heidelberg and setting up his practice in New York, had had first-hand experience with the subject. In September 1892 Leopold was asked by the agent for the Hamburg-American Packet Company to assist the ship’s doctor on the Rugia, a liner being held in quarantine in New York because of an outbreak of cholera.44 There had been four deaths among the 436 steerage passengers during the crossing from Hamburg, and the ninety-eight uninfected first-class

Elizabeth Anne McCauley

42

passengers were desperate to get off the boat, where they were being retained. Leopold wrote a letter about the conditions on the ship in which he reassured the public that the “cases of cholera were isolated” and “the steamship was for the most part clean, though there was some dirt in the steerage.” However, he noted that “the persons who were carried into hospital were, I think the dirtiest set of human beings I ever saw” and that the ship could not be properly disinfected until “the steerage passengers were all taken away.”45 Leopold’s clinical assessment of the potential dangers posed by the unregulated admission of immigrants onto American shores echoes that of the successful, educated New York Jewish community, which was sympathetic to the plight of the new immigrants but distanced itself from the “dirty,” most abject Eastern European poor. Their attitude reflected their position as former immigrants themselves, but largely from the more civilized lands of Germany rather than the ghettos of Poland and Russia. Jacob H. Schiff, who had emigrated from Frankfurt to New York in 1865 and proceeded to become a senior partner at Kuhn, Loeb and Company, was a moving force in founding the Industrial Removal Office in 1901, which tried to place Jewish immigrants in rural jobs in the center of the country.46 As Christopher Sterba has noted, in 1906 the New York German-Jewish community organized the American Jewish Committee to help facilitate this assimilation.47 The following year, this effort was supplemented by a new organization, the Jewish Immigrant Information Bureau, which planned to ship Jews to Galveston, Texas, before moving them to the interior of the country, where more jobs were available. As Schiff declared in a speech on May 27, 1907 ( just after the Stieglitzes landed in France), “We can return our country a great service by turning this immigration in the direction of Texas. I can see no greater work than to aid this cause, to make the immigrant welcome not in the crowded towns, but in this region.”48 Based on their personal history, the Stieglitz family would naturally have shared Schiff ’s concern about the successful assimilation of the new wave of Jewish immigrants. Ephraim Stieglitz, Alfred’s father, had himself been part of an enormous migration of 1,120,000 Germans to the United States between

The Making of a Modernist Myth

43

1845 and 1855. Coming mostly from western or southwestern Germany, these immigrants were known as the “Forty-Eighters” because many, including Ephraim’s two brothers, left after the revolution of that year. Changing his name to Edward, the senior Stieglitz, who arrived in 1849, gave up the Orthodox faith of his ancestors and followed the teachings of Isaac Wise, a spokesperson for recent Jewish immigrants, who advocated their discarding their hats and prayer shawls and conducting their services in English.49 Nonetheless, the Stieglitz elders maintained their German cultural pride, collected German contemporary art, patronized German musicians,50 and schooled their children in polite bourgeois manners. The family moved from Hoboken, New Jersey, to one of the new brownstones off Fifth Avenue on East Sixtieth Street when Alfred was seven, and Edward Stieglitz amassed enough money in the wool trade to retire by the time he was forty-eight. When the newly formed City University of New York failed to inspire their son, Stieglitz’s parents, like most of their peers,51 decided that only a German Hochschule would have the appropriately rigorous training in the sciences that citizens of the new age required. In 1881 Edward transplanted his entire family to Europe, and Alfred, with his two younger brothers, settled first in Karlsruhe and then Berlin, where he would remain, with the exception of a brief trip back to the United States in 1888, until 1890. It is difficult to locate the Stieglitz family precisely within New York Jewish society, in large part because Alfred, its most vociferous and ultimately famous member, consistently erased any signs of his Jewishness from his autobiographical writings. As a partner in Hahlo, Stieglitz, and Co., dealers in wool, Edward Stieglitz was certainly not as wealthy as those who had made fortunes in banking and finance by the 1880s, such as Solomon Loeb, Jacob Schiff, Sam Sachs and his partner Marcus Goldman, Otto Kahn (who converted to Christianity), August Belmont, and Bernard Baruch. Although he had not moved up from the ranks of being a traveling peddler, as did Joseph Seligman, Meyer Guggenheim, Marcus Goldman, Henry Lehman, and Samuel Rosenwald (father of the future president of Sears, Roebuck),52 Edward socialized with fel-

Elizabeth Anne McCauley

44

low Jewish businessmen who shared his German background and mercantile profession. In 1875, for example, he joined other dry goods and wool merchants, including Jacob Bamberger, Nathan Strauss (the New York distributor for Levi Strauss and Co.), and Louis Stix, in raising money for the Hebrew Charity Fair for Mount Sinai Hospital.53 Perhaps the Stieglitz family’s most important and influential friends within the New York Jewish community were the Strauses—Oscar, Nathan, and Isidore. Sons of a Bavarian immigrant who had started out as a peddler in Georgia before moving to New York after the Civil War, the Strauses followed a career path that paralleled that of the Stieglitzes (albeit reaching higher ranks). Thanks to his education at Columbia College and Columbia Law School, Oscar Straus had formed a successful law partnership before turning to retail and then a career in politics. His brothers Nathan and Isidore in the 1880s took over the department store founded by Roland H. Macy and built a retail empire. The Straus brothers were also the underwriters of the Heliochrome Company, a commercial venture aimed at profiting from new color photomechanical printing techniques. Edward Stieglitz joined them in investing in the company and, in 1891, placed his son, Alfred, as director (the only formal job the photographer ever held). Leopold Stieglitz later became the personal physician for Nathan Straus (and was at his bedside when Straus died in 1931). As a further sign of the families’ close ties, Leopold’s daughter Flora married Nathan Straus’s son, H. Grant Straus, in 1913. Oscar Straus was in fact one of the most influential voices on the immigration question at the time that Alfred Stieglitz shot The Steerage. Having served as the U.S. minister to Turkey in 1887, where he objected to the treatment of Jewish and Russian immigrants to that country, Straus had joined with Jesse Seligman and Jacob Schiff in 1891 to protest the pogroms in Russia.54 His concern with the state of the Jewish people led him in 1899, at the end of his second mission to Turkey, to meet in Vienna with Theodor Herzl, an Austrian journalist considered to be the founder of the Zionist movement. Although

The Making of a Modernist Myth

45

Straus opposed the establishment of Palestine as a Jewish state, he supported the Jewish Territorialist Organization, under the leadership of the British writer Israel Zangwill, which favored the establishment of a Jewish settlement wherever one could be freely made.55 Closer to home, Straus studied the condition of immigrants in the United States and in 1901 read a paper titled “The United States Doctrine of Citizenship and Expatriation” at the American Social Science meetings.56 Appointed Secretary of Commerce and Labor in 1906 by President Roosevelt, Straus was the first Jewish cabinet officer in American history. He personally handled the appeals of all immigrants rejected at Ellis Island that were sent to the department and “felt that there was a domestic tragedy involved in every one of these cases.”57 This, however, did not prevent him, in 1908, from advocating greater enforcement by immigration officials of the laws calling for the deportation of anarchists and criminals.58 To the extent that Alfred Stieglitz identified with the values of his family and their friends, he could have shared their conflicted attitude toward immigration, in wishing to embrace the new Jewish arrivals but being reluctant to admit the most marginal and uneducated. Stieglitz had been a dutiful son: he had married a Jewish girl from a good family, had tried to run a business, had made a name for himself as a photographer, and faithfully visited his parents every week. But, as his account of the taking of The Steerage reveals, he did not identify with their old country manners and the materialism of the most successful Jewish families. By striking out as an artist and depending on his wife’s family and his parents for support, he defined himself as a rebel. In many ways, his attitude echoes that of the heroine in Emanie Sachs’s novel of 1927, Red Damask, which is set in New York between 1905 and 1912. Sachs, the daughter-in-law of Goldman Sachs partner Samuel Sachs, traces the frustrated attempts of a young department store heiress to escape the stifling GermanJewish elite society that governs her life: They think alike and act alike and they’re scared to death not to talk alike. The men go to jobs their fathers or grandfathers created, and all they do is sit at desks and let the orga-

Elizabeth Anne McCauley

46

nization work. They give money to the Alliance because they’d be talked about if they didn’t, and they like to see their names in print. They haven’t enough physical courage to go in for sports like the rich Gentiles, and a little too much brains. So they go in for art collections with an expert to help. They wouldn’t risk a penny on their own tastes. They wouldn’t risk anything.59

Stieglitz’s repeated assertions throughout his life that he scorned commerce and money-grubbing represent a rejection of the stereotype of the avaricious Jewish peddler (or, in a more modern guise, the Wall Street financier) and a denial of his family’s origins and social position. This attitude, as Edward Steiner pointed out in 1906, was typical of many first-generation Jewish Americans: “Americanization means to the Jew in most cases dejudaicizing himself without becoming a Christian. . . .The American Jew becomes over-conscious of the faults of his race, and not seldom hates the word Jew and feels himself insulted if it is applied to him.”60 For Stieglitz, the only way to negotiate an acceptable self-image as an American was to erase his family’s Jewishness and attribute all its positive values—a belief in the redemptive qualities of the fine arts, a sense of moral superiority, a messianic faith in individual accomplishment— to German traditions. The particular alienation that Stieglitz felt within his extended family was not mitigated by a sense that he was in fact accepted by other Gentile elites. Buried within Stieglitz’s published autobiographical writings, one finds disguised references to the discrimination that even the most financially successful Jews still confronted. When he mentioned the Strauses in “Why I Got Out of Business” (an essay justifying his abandonment of commerce as corrupt and dishonest published at the same time as “How The Steerage Happened”), Stieglitz noted that “they had built a Lakewood Hotel as a protest against some Jewish question which had arisen in the most fashionable of the Lakewood hotels.”61 This “Jewish question” was part of an ongoing anti-Semitism most famously expressed in the 1877 rejection of the banker Joseph Seligman by the Grand Union Hotel in Saratoga Springs.62 Stieglitz’s own family had stayed

The Making of a Modernist Myth

47

in Saratoga hotels before this incident and ended up vacationing in Lake George, where they managed to avoid both the new enclaves of working-class Jewish hotels opening in the so-called borscht belt of the Catskills and the risk of rejection by luxury hotels by purchasing their own summer home, Oaklawn, in 1886. Stieglitz’s wife, Emmeline, vacationing in the summers of 1915 and 1916 in Maine and New Hampshire, complained to him repeatedly of the hostility of “regular New Englanders” and the difficulty that she had in getting a satisfactory room: “I think it was the Jew question, don’t you?”63 In contrast to Emmeline’s frequently expressed sensitivity to social affronts, Stieglitz proclaimed his withdrawal from the status game and constructed a counteridentity as the champion of the outcast, the neglected artist, the common man of feeling who could appreciate the work on offer at his 291 Gallery. One can posit that his attitude toward the immigrant was even more sympathetic than that expressed by his peers in the Jewish community and that his politics were farther left than those of President Roosevelt’s supporters. Never one to join political parties, Stieglitz nonetheless appreciated the defenses of the common worker, attacks on capitalism, and calls for a return to handicrafts found in much anarchist and socialist literature.64 He had in his library Memoirs of a Revolutionist and The Conquest of Bread by the Russian anarcho-communist Peter Kropotkin.65 Prince Kropotkin, whose works were frequently excerpted on the pages of arts and crafts periodicals such as The Craftsman that featured photographs by members of the Photo-Secession,66 was the most famous anarchist at the turn of the century. He envisioned an ideal society that “no longer recognizes a division between exploited and exploiters, governed and governors, dominated and dominators, and it seeks to establish a certain harmonious compatibility in its midst—not by subjecting all its members to an authority that is fictitiously supposed to represent society, not by trying to establish uniformity, but by urging all men to develop free initiative, free action, free association.” Stieglitz might have also relished Kropotkin’s advice to artists in The Conquest of Bread: “You must have spent time in a factory, known the fatigues and the joys of creative work, forged metals by the vivid light of

Elizabeth Anne McCauley

48

a blast furnace, have felt the life in a machine to understand the power of man and to express it in a work of art. You must, in fact, be permeated with popular feelings, to describe them.”67 Another clue that the steerage passengers represented for Stieglitz innocent victims of a world that failed to embrace and nurture them (and him) was a reference to Rembrandt that he made in his 1942 account. Stieglitz wrote that when looking down on the men, women, and children gathered on the deck, “Rembrandt came into my mind and I wondered would he have felt as I was feeling.”68 Rembrandt was a master of black and white in etching, just as Stieglitz was in photography. But more important, he was an artist renowned for his depictions of everyday people, including the Jews of Amsterdam, shown with great tenderness and sympathy.69 Rembrandt, the miller’s son, “was the champion of individualism and the foe of the artists enlisted under the banner of classical art”;70 he depicted himself in self-portrait etchings with wild hair “as an Anarchist, it might seem,” and ended his life a bankrupt. The twotiered scene before Stieglitz, with its milling, shabby crowd, may have recalled Rembrandt’s etching Ecce Homo (figure 13), a distant view of Christ next to Pilate, presented on a raised platform to a gesticulating audience of bearded old Jews and women with babies. The artist has distilled the poignancy of the moment, in which the rabble fails to understand the sacrifice that Christ will be making for them, without formally privileging any single character, so that the scrawny, naked savior is as humble as the man doffing his hat in the center. Rembrandt thus envisions Christ as a common man watched in awed silence by figures modeled on Amsterdam’s ghetto population—collective victims of the rich, turbaned Pontius Pilate and his military minions. Whereas Rembrandt composed his Ecce Homo so that the presumed viewer looks up at Christ and his guards from across an empty foreground, Stieglitz, out of physical necessity, gazed down on his subjects with all the worldly knowledge and superiority that that vantage point inscribes. As his account of 1942 reveals, he fought against this physical and psychological distancing (identifiable with bourgeois and mass-produced views of steerage passengers as

Figure 13

Rembrandt Harmensz van Rijn, Ecce Homo (Christ Presented to the People), 1655. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York (41.1.34). Photo: Art Resource Inc.

Elizabeth Anne McCauley

50

other) in an effort to be them, to “join those people” as part of their community.71 This impulse could be read as romantic or primitivizing, in the same way that many earlier avant-garde artists had idealized the African or Tahitian native as uninhibited, innocent, closer to nature, and sexually fulfilled. Or it could contain a masochistic element, a need to atone for what was perceived as undeserved social and material success by giving up earthly goods and becoming a pauper. Either way, Stieglitz fantasized an escape—from a life that he, thinking back over his career in the 1920s, found particularly oppressive in 1907—and an absorption into a mass of strangers returning to Bremen, effectively reversing the migration that his own parents had made some sixty years earlier.

for all stieglitz’s emphasis on the actual shooting of The Steerage and its role in his artistic development, his behavior in the years following the picture’s creation suggests that either he did not recognize it as a signature image or he could not admit to the feelings that it inspired. He carefully harbored the negative during his travels from Paris to Munich to the Bavarian resort of Tutzing, where he met up with fellow photographers Frank Eugene, Edward Steichen, and Heinrich Kühn and experimented with the finicky new autochrome color process. Upon his return to New York, it was the autochrome, with its amazing ability to capture color, that excited him:72 the only two shows he mounted at 291 in fall 1907 were his own, Steichen’s, and Eugene’s color “experiments,” mostly traditionally composed plein-air portraits of friends and family shot in a slightly soft-focus style. According to Stieglitz’s remembrances, he was initially “too nervous to make a proof of the negative.”73 This seems disingenuous, since he was not too nervous to develop it in Paris or to exhibit his even more recent work using a medium that he had just mastered. He also claimed that, when he exposed the plate, he envisioned enlarging it to eleven by fourteen inches in order to transform it into a photogravure. Prior to 1910, however, Stieglitz did not publish gravures on that scale (which was much larger than the pages of Camera Work,

The Making of a Modernist Myth

51

where most of the gravures from his photographs appeared), and thus it is unlikely that he could have conceived of enlarging a four-by-five-inch negative to such an extent in 1907. In 1910, Stieglitz did not include The Steerage among the twenty-nine works spanning his career from 1892 to 1910 that he selected for the important Albright Art Gallery’s International Exhibition of Pictorial Photography. Perhaps he did not have a photogravure in time, or perhaps he had been put off by the comments of his old friend, fellow photographer Joseph Keiley, who coedited Camera Work and functioned as Stieglitz’s business manager and faithful adviser. Keiley, he recalled, looked at the proof of the gravure and “didn’t see the picture I had made,” complaining that it was two pictures, “an upper one and a lower one.”74 Effectively dismissing Keiley (who was apparently a practical man with a taste for mysticism, to judge by his published articles) as something of an old fogey, Stieglitz showed the proof at some point around 1910 to “[Paul] Haviland and Max Weber and de Zayas and other artists of that type,” who “truly saw the picture.”75 Not only were all three men fifteen years younger than Stieglitz and familiar with Parisian avant-garde art, but they were advocates of even more radically abstract art than the drawings and sculptures of Rodin or Matisse that Edward Steichen had been sending to 291 from Paris. Weber, who had returned to New York in 1909 after studying with Matisse and who broke with Stieglitz two years later, showed his own African-influenced paintings of nudes and fractured still lifes at 291 in January 1911. Paul Haviland, through his brother Frank Burty Haviland, and Marius de Zayas, meanwhile, were negotiating with Picasso about staging a drawings show in New York.76 Always wanting to maintain his reputation as the defender of sincerely felt personal expression, Stieglitz eagerly devoted the April–July 1911 issue of Camera Work to the new French art and basked in the hoopla that the spring 1911 Picasso show inspired. As he wrote de Zayas, “In a way this is the most important show we have had. . . . The future looks brighter than it has in a long while.”77

Elizabeth Anne McCauley

52

It was this sense that the younger generation was turning to more radical, angular shapes inspired by primitive cultures that prompted Stieglitz to retrieve The Steerage for its first public viewing on the pages of Camera Work in October 1911. Inserted amid other gravures made from snapshots taken in 1910 of the New York skyline and water traffic on the Hudson as well as a few earlier urban images, such as The Terminal (1893) and The Hand of Man (1902), The Steerage was recontextualized as a contemporary evocation of the bustling modern city with its faceless crowds and industrialized forms (dirigibles, biplanes, trains, ocean liners, skyscrapers). Softly focused, with no harsh tonal gradations, the set of gravures became “modern” solely because of their subject matter, which suggested anonymous New Yorkers on the move, by sea and land and air, under the rising skyscrapers that marked The City of Ambition, as Stieglitz titled one print. By playing off the inherent rectilinearity of the new modern architecture and the repetition of mechanical forms, always contrasted with the organicism of smoke, water, and atmosphere, Stieglitz could use the camera to evoke the same sense of dynamism and excitement that the fractured planes and harsh contour lines of French Cubist paintings inspired. To further insert his photographs into a dialogue with modernism, Stieglitz effected a kind of laconic montage by adding to the Camera Work issue a reproduction of a Picasso charcoal drawing that he had bought from the show that had closed in May 1911 (figure 14). The curved arcs and perpendicular, linear scaffolding, onto which Picasso superimposed parallel hatching to invoke a barely recognizable standing nude, rhymed with the angular white gangplank and railings in Stieglitz’s snapshot of the steerage. This accidental pairing, unrelated to the context in which either work was made, etched itself into Stieglitz’s mind and persisted even in the hanging of the 1937 retrospective exhibition at An American Place of Stieglitz’s career as a curator, Beginnings and Landmarks: “291,” 1905–1917. In an installation photograph (figure 15), we can see one of the large gravures of The Steerage mounted next to the Picasso drawing, as if to confirm that they were joined at the hip. Stieglitz had met Picasso for the first time in Paris during what would, in

Figure 14

Pablo Picasso, Standing Female Nude, 1910. Alfred Stieglitz Collection, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York (49.70.34). Photo: Art Resource Inc.

Figure 15

Unknown photographer, Installation view of “Beginnings and Landmarks: ‘291’ 1905–1917,” An American Place, October 27–December 27, 1937. Yale Collection of American Literature, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, New Haven. Photo: Beinecke Library.

The Making of a Modernist Myth

55

the end, be his last trip to Europe in the summer of 1911, and he took the Spaniard’s audacious and controversial works as the basis for a new aesthetic framework. As he wrote in 1912 to Heinrich Kühn: “Now I find that contemporary art consists of the abstract (without subject) like Picasso etc. and the photographic. . . . Just as we stand before the door of a new social era, so we stand in art too before a new medium of expression—the true medium (abstraction).”78 Two months later, he expressed similar feelings to George D. Pratt: “But men like Matisse and Picasso and a few others are giants, their vision is anti-photographic, their art will live as long as art will mean anything to the most cultured race. It’s this anti-photography in their mental attitude and in their work that I am using in order to emphasize the meaning of photography. . . . I feel that within a very short time the main part of my work for photography will have been completed.”79 If painting’s social function to disrupt the common way of viewing the world is accomplished by eschewing the mimetic or photographic, then Stieglitz’s medium, photography, needed to communicate directly through forms and shapes, to be abstract and without subject. When he wanted to give an additional imprimatur to his history of the creation of The Steerage, Stieglitz invoked Picasso as an early admirer of the print. “It had even attracted the attention of Picasso in 1912. De Zayas had taken a print to Paris to show it to Picasso. Picasso was reported to have said, ‘This photographer is working in the same spirit as I am,’ ” recounted Stieglitz.80 Once again, Stieglitz selectively remembered events and pushed the date two years earlier to make himself look even more visionary. De Zayas did meet with Picasso, but in early June 1914, and he wrote Stieglitz: “The sum and total of his [Picasso’s] talk was that he has absolutely entered into the field of photography. I showed him your photographs and Walkowitz’s drawings. He came to the conclusion that you are the only one who has understood photography and understood and admired the ‘Steerage’ to the point that I felt inclined to give it to him. But my willpower prevented me from doing it.”81 Thus Picasso, who had been taking photographs himself since 1904, re-

Elizabeth Anne McCauley

56

sponded to The Steerage from the vantage point of a fellow photographer and said nothing about sharing a “spirit.” As Anne Baldassari has demonstrated, Picasso had consistently toyed with the differences between the way the camera sees space and tone and the ways paintings are constructed.82 In the years immediately preceding the meeting with de Zayas, during which he turned to collage and built still-life forms out into space, Picasso photographed actual arranged objects in his studio, the paintings inspired by them, the maquettes for three-dimensional constructions, and his own body. In 1913 he even went so far as to mask parts of the photographic paper during exposure to make what might be called a cubistic photogram. This habit of looking at the photographic print as yet another found pattern of shapes (like printed wallpaper or chair caning) caused Picasso to seize upon the inherent geometry of The Steerage, but with a sensibility that had none of Stieglitz’s reverence for the beauty and importance of “art photography.” Stieglitz’s willful reading of Picasso’s approval was matched by his assertion that the large, eleven-by-fourteen-inch gravures of The Steerage (like the one sent to Picasso), which had sold badly in the United States, had been appreciated by European connoisseurs such as “Dr. Jessen of the Berlin Museum,” who was “willing to pay a hundred dollars” for it.83 Peter Jessen was the director of the library of the Royal Arts and Crafts Museum in Berlin and had visited the 291 galleries in 1913 en route to Asia. His immediate purchase that year was a complete set of Camera Work (forty issues, for five hundred dollars), which Stieglitz shipped in November. Jessen was interested in starting a collection of art photography in the library to complement the materials acquired from the well-known German collector Fritz Matthies-Masuren, which included two early Stieglitz prints (of Venice and the Jungfrau). Horrified to be represented by such outdated works, Stieglitz proposed a package of eleven New York subjects that included The Steerage: “These eleven pictures have been the basis for most of the street work done in photography in this country and even in Europe. . . . I feel that the series ought to be kept together. . . . The price of individual prints is $100.00. If the museum is willing to take the set of eleven

The Making of a Modernist Myth

57

I would make a special price of $550 for the series.”84 Even at this reduced price, Jessen hesitated through the spring of 1914. In the last letter to Stieglitz that survives, Jessen agreed to Stieglitz’s request to contribute to the special issue of Camera Work devoted to “What is 291?” The fateful date of this letter, July 24, 1914, suggests the outcome: on July 23 the Austro-Hungarian Empire sent an ultimatum to Serbia, and by August 4 Germany had entered into a world war against Russia, France, and Great Britain. No subsequent comment by Jessen appeared in Camera Work, and the hundred-dollar sale remained a dream rather than a reality. What is most curious about the Jessen affair is the way that Stieglitz was able to package his photographs to suit the audience with which he was dealing. To Jessen, a German intrigued by America, Stieglitz pushed a group of large gravures because of their New York subject matter: he proclaimed that the series “has historical value outside of its art value.”85 The Steerage thus becomes a picture not about a mid-ocean passage but about the city of New York as a melting pot. In subsequent retrospective exhibitions, the image fell into categories Stieglitz defined as “early prints” (in 1921) or “Older New York Series” (in 1932). Continuing the geographical theme of his first published portfolio, Picturesque Bits of New York and Other Studies (1897), Stieglitz placed The Steerage comfortably amid his New York subjects even though it was not, by his own account, shot in New York. But within a year of his letter to Jessen, Stieglitz eagerly sought yet another context for his 1907 snapshot. Haviland and de Zayas wanted to publish an issue of their new avant-garde folio magazine, 291, “devoted to photography, with The Steerage as a basis.”86 Stieglitz had been a cautious participant in the new monthly, launched in March 1915, a time when both the gallery and Camera Work were desperate for patrons, but he helped finance it and contributed an article on three of his dreams for its first issue. For the issue of September– October 1915, the editorial team (Haviland left for France before the issue appeared) decided to sell two editions, both containing essays on photography by Haviland and de Zayas published in French and English: a deluxe edition

Elizabeth Anne McCauley

58

with a photogravure of The Steerage on thin Japan paper for two dollars (a normal issue was ten cents), and a regular edition on less expensive, heavier Japan paper for twenty cents.87 The idea was that the gravure would function as a bonus or premium for the experimental journal, at once popularizing Stieglitz’s art and tempting potential subscribers. Haviland’s and de Zayas’s short notices were more manifestos about photography than commentaries on The Steerage in particular. Inspired by recent works by Francis Picabia, Haviland exalted the machine age and painted photography as the metaphorical offspring of “man, the creator” and the maternal machine, subject to his will; there was no mention of Stieglitz or this particular print.88 De Zayas, however, opened his essay with the claim that The Steerage “obtained the verification of a fact” and embodied the ability of photography to represent “objective truth” rather than the falsity of conventional art and beauty.89 He praised Stieglitz as constituting “the history of photography in the United States,” but chastised him for having given sometimes “too much importance to the intellectual juggleries of others in mechanical representation” (perhaps a stab at the shows Stieglitz devoted to Picabia). Nonetheless, de Zayas concluded by praising Stieglitz for having defined the “initial condition of the phenomena of form.” By this, he alluded to the ideal of innocent vision, the moment when light hit the retina before the mind synthesized stimuli into named shapes, concepts, and emotions.90 Stieglitz, in his 1942 recollection of the 291 issue, did not comment on Haviland’s and de Zayas’s interpretations of his photograph but seemed more interested in tracing the mixed success of the popularization of his work. Apart from the one hundred subscribers who received the cheaper gravure, only eight people subscribed at the deluxe level. After the 291 galleries closed in 1917, Stieglitz sold all remaining copies of 291 to a ragpicker for $5.80. The final word, according to Stieglitz, came several years later (in the 1920s) when he saw a framed copy of The Steerage for sale, for four dollars, in the Weyhe Gallery in New York. Too broke to buy it himself, Stieglitz learned a few days later that a celebrated collector of Leonardo da Vinci’s work had acquired the picture.

The Making of a Modernist Myth

59

This postscript closed his account of The Steerage’s fate, thus confirming that good taste wins out, despite the hopeless blindness of the average American. The photographer-genius, impoverished but true to his ideals, gains solace in the promise of posthumous acclaim by the few connoisseurs who recognize transcendent talent.

stieglitz’s multipart history of the life of a single photograph, from the moment of its inspiration to its descent into the ragpicker’s bins and then survival in the collection of an elite patron, encapsulates the romanticized saga of his own career, full of adversities, financial failure, and ultimately small triumphs through art. The saga’s poignancy hinges, however, on the power of the opening scene, in which Stieglitz has to convince us that the photograph epitomizes what he felt not only about art, but about life. Did Stieglitz in fact believe that subject matter was unimportant and that art was merely about forms that provoked emotions directly? Did he even have a coherent concept of what The Steerage was all about and what it meant to him? I have argued that there was no way that Stieglitz, as the son of a Jewish immigrant and as a person politically sympathetic to social outcasts, could not have been moved by the struggling families that he saw before him in 1907. Although he never directly challenged the social conditions exposed in the picture, he did not deny their presence outright. His choice of words, addressed originally to visitors who already knew him and were listening raptly in his gallery, carefully sidestepped the causes of his emotions: he described “a feeling I had about life,” “this seemingly new vision that held me,” “the feeling of ship and ocean and sky and the feeling of release that I was away from the mob called the rich,” “the deepest human feeling, a step in my own evolution, a spontaneous discovery.”91 In contrast to the meticulous cataloguing of what he could see in front of him in the photograph itself (clothing, railings, hats), what he was thinking remained unstated. The elliptical quality of Stieglitz’s prose—whether in his letters or published texts or oral anecdotes—was very much a self-conscious mannerism used to

Elizabeth Anne McCauley

60

confirm his aura as a seer or prophet. Had he come right out and told the gallery visitor or correspondent exactly what his attitude was toward particular subjects that he photographed, the pictures as well as their creator would have lost their mystery. And in fact Stieglitz, as someone who acquired many of Freud’s writings and was friends with Abraham Brill, Freud’s American translator,92 knew that no individual could be consciously aware of all that he experienced and felt at a given moment. Like the three dreams that he published in 291 in 1915, the tales that he spun about The Steerage beg to be interpreted as manifest content, signs that repress their meanings and that the author himself chooses not to explain. We can be sure that Stieglitz would not have begun telling the extended story of The Steerage until after he had thrown away the photogravures, closed down the 291 gallery (in 1917), and ended his problematic relationship with his wife (he left her in 1918, but they divorced only in 1924). One of the key reasons that he cited for exploring the ship was his unhappiness with his wife and her friends, an unhappiness that that could have been made public only after the relationship was for all intents and purposes dissolved. He could also not have had a happy ending for his story unless he had reached a point where his reputation was ascendant, the art of Picasso was widely appreciated, and abstract painting styles were seen as the wave of the future. Since he had drifted, effectively jobless, between 1917 and 1921, the time for the crafting of the completed story of The Steerage as a Bildungsroman was not yet ripe. With the opening of a two-week major retrospective of 145 prints at the Anderson Galleries in February 1921—the first significant exhibition that he had had since 1913—he seems to have reached a turning point. The Steerage, invisible from 1907 to 1911, had grown in importance during the war years: he exhibited it in 1915 (one of only four works he showed that year), 1916 (one of two works), 1917 (one of two works), and 1918 (one of two works). In 1921, it predictably appeared again, standing in a critical relationship to the powerful statement with which Stieglitz prefaced his exhibition brochure: “I was born

The Making of a Modernist Myth

61

in Hoboken. I am an American. Photography is my passion. The search for Truth is my obsession.” Stieglitz’s declaration of his origins—his birth in Hoboken, his Americanness—and his drafting of “How The Steerage Happened” share a theme and a moment of creation. They both repress the subject of immigration: that of Stieglitz’s family and that depicted in the photograph.93 By 1921 Stieglitz had lived for only six years in Hoboken, and passed about forty-one years (excluding the nine he had spent in Germany) in New York City. Why invoke Hoboken, a working-class town of 68,000 in 1920 and only 2,352 when he had left it in 1870? Why not claim to be a New Yorker, a proud citizen of the world’s greatest city, whose economic fortunes were rising daily as a crippled Europe was trying to rebuild itself? Hoboken, a small town known as “Little Bremen” with a German population that constituted 55 percent of its citizens by 1900, represented the comfortable, tight-knit community of Stieglitz’s boyhood. With its beer halls and singing societies, it was as close to the old country as one could come in America, and distinctly more provincial than rapidly growing Manhattan, where the Stieglitzes were small fry in a faceless urban mix.94 However, after America entered the war in April 1917, passed the Espionage Act on June 15, 1917, and amended it as the Sedition Act of 1918, which criminalized any person “who shall willfully utter, print, write, or publish any disloyal, profane, scurrilous, or abusive language about the form of government of the United States or the Constitution of the United States, or the military or naval forces of the United States,” Hoboken’s reputation began to change. German-speaking residents had to curb their allegiance to the old country and no longer speak their native tongue in public; Germans working along the Hoboken docks were fired.95 The years 1919 and 1920 saw a Red Scare orchestrated by Attorney General Mitchell Palmer and his assistant, the young J. Edgar Hoover. Many Germans, as well as American socialists and anarchists (including Emma Goldman and the staff of The Masses magazine, which included friends of Stieglitz),

Elizabeth Anne McCauley

62

were arrested. Thousands of Germans began to leave Hoboken, to such an extent that by 1920 the city had become majority Italian. The port of Hoboken, which had formerly been the bustling dock for luxury liners, in 1917 assumed a new role as the principal embarkation point for American troops heading for the European front. By 1918, over two hundred thousand American soldiers were being shipped each month from there to France. The city’s identity had become so closely associated in soldiers’ minds with their last contact with American soil that General John Pershing rallied his troops for the Meuse-Argonne offensive on September 26, 1918, by promising them that they would be home by Christmas “by Heaven, Hell, or Hoboken.” Come back they eventually did, after the victory in November, but over eight thousand returned in caskets to the army pier of Hoboken, where Pershing honored the dead in July 1921, a few months after Stieglitz’s retrospective.96 In the immediate postwar period, and just a month before the revocation of the Espionage Act in March 1921, Stieglitz’s mention of Hoboken was at once a nostalgic evocation of his small-town, modest German origins and an association with patriotism and the American mobilization. The future lay with America, not with Germany, and his prewar voyages on the great German liners seemed like memories from another world. Even the Kaiser Wilhelm II no longer existed: it had been seized by the American government and in the fall of 1917 was transformed into a troop carrier and renamed the U.S.S. Agamemnon (figure 16). There would be no civilian passengers, steerage or otherwise, on the boat ever again. Reminiscing while looking at a photogravure of The Steerage in the early 1920s, Stieglitz read off the shapes on the print and recalled what that time had meant for him and how far he had traveled. Life with Emmeline had been a nightmare; Clara Lauer had had to return to Germany during the war because it was no longer safe for Germans to stay in the country; even his daughter Kitty and he had drifted apart. He had failed as a pater familias and would never share the simple affection shown by those young mothers scattered across the two steerage decks and holding their bundled babies.

Figure 16

Unknown photographer, U.S.S. Agamemnon, 1918. U.S. Navy Historical Center, Donation of Terri D. Lewis. Photo: U.S. Navy Historical Center.

Elizabeth Anne McCauley

64

He could also never recapture a sense of belonging to Europe, to the regions to which those modest folk were returning. Until America entered the war, Stieglitz had staunchly defended Germany as a standard for civilization. In 1914 he had written Dr. Jessen that he considered Berlin his second home: “As a matter of fact I feel that my life was shaped there. It took me years to accustom myself to the idea not to live there permanently. I am anxious to see all the wonderful things that Berlin has done since I lived there. . . . I wish that in New York a little more of the Berlin spirit could be instilled. That constructive spirit which is the foundation of the German Empire.”97 Only a few months later, after the German invasion of Belgium, Stieglitz wrote Fritz Goetz, the German printer for Bruckmann Verlag in Munich who pulled many of his gravures: “To me Germany has for years been the nation which I have admired most. As a nation. And this in spite of my dislike of many of the Prussian traits. In spite of my feeling that from a certain point of view Germany was not creative in the same sense that France is.”98 To the charge that he was pro-German, he responded that he was “pro nothing. I don’t believe in governments as governments exist today. I do not believe in flags and all that sort of thing. . . . And so I tell people if they insist that I be for one nation or another, that I am for Germany.”99 But by 1917 Germany had failed him, not as individual people (he maintained personal ties to the extent that it was possible during the war), but as a nation. The secret wish to return to Berlin that he had revealed to Jessen had died, because that place no longer existed and he, as an American from Hoboken, could no longer feel comfortable there. Thinking back to 1907, Stieglitz condensed into his story of The Steerage all the hopes that he had harbored about the promise of the American dream, his desire for a community of like thinkers and artists, and the harsh personal realities that had checked his own career. The unnamed feelings that he had about life were perhaps better expressed in 1924 by his close friend Paul Rosenfeld, another offspring of a German-Jewish family who also took the port of New York as the theme for his moving book profiling modern American artists:

The Making of a Modernist Myth

65

Somewhere in one always there had been the will to take root in New York; to come into relation with the things and the people, not in the insane self-abnegation of current patriotism and nationalism, but in the form of one’s utmost self; in the form of realizing all the possibilities for life shut inside one, and simultaneously finding oneself one with the people. Somewhere within, perhaps in obedience to some outer voice trusted in childhood, there was a voice which promised one day the consummation. One day a miracle should happen over the magnificent harbor, and set life thrilling and rhythming through the place of New York. . . . And sometimes, one supposed that where the immigrant ships had come in, a supernatural and winged visitor would have to appear, fall into the port as a meteorite might fall from the sky, before the new state which had not been reached when the immigrant feet had touched earth at Castle Garden would declare itself.100

The immigrants represented the potential for a better American future, the power of faith and work to create a new homeland for displaced souls. Stieglitz’s heart beat faster at the thought of this potential consummation and oneness, even though, because of his class and family situation, he could not walk down into steerage to chat with that pretty blonde girl resting in the center of the deck who had caught his eye; he could not blend in with that crowd. Physically and socially blocked, all that Stieglitz could do was take pictures, or find them, or let them happen. The impotence that he often commented upon in his letters found its compensation in the “feeling of release” that he got from photographing.101 His solace for the isolation that marked the episode on the Kaiser Wilhelm II was the satisfactory grasp of a fleeting moment, the possession of an instant that he could reshape and mold as he saw fit for the rest of his life. Looking down on the steerage deck, he saw his past; holding the velvety photogravure in his hands and starting to talk, he defined his future as the father of American fine art photography.

The Prismatic Fragment

jason f rancisco

Free acts are exceptional. Henri Bergson, Time and Free Will (1889)

it is june 1907, on the liner Kaiser Wilhelm II, at port near Plymouth, England. A man in early middle age, well dressed and pensive—we will call him Stieglitz—leans against a railing at the forward edge of the lower promenade deck, looking west toward the ocean just crossed. A capable sometime photographer, he is cradling a camera. It is midday, unsparingly bright and duly warm. The voyage has forced a certain idleness upon him: a man of the leisure class, he is not by disposition a man of leisure. He is traveling neither quite for business nor for pleasure, though there will be episodes of both. Rather, he is pulled from New York to Europe on the tides of an idiosyncratic career and—we can surmise—his wife’s bourgeois petulance, which the European trip indulges and against which it offers a measure of escape. He has made a name for himself as an impresario for photography as a new art—an expressive art of high seriousness. As an artist in his own right, a writer, gallerist, and publisher, he has made a vocation of his own temperamental antipodes— bombast and reticence, prognostication and advocacy, gallant arrogance and idealistic generosity. To look at him inferentially, as from a distance—and how else are we to know a man at the center of his own myth?—is to see someone at variance with himself: unorthodox and methodical in equal measures, occasionally innovative and consistently protective of the idea of innovation, imperious and impulsively anti-authoritarian. The downtime of the weeklong Atlantic pas-

67

Jason Francisco

68

sage has left him disagreeable, if relaxed, and the ship offers little escape from the time with himself.1 The forecastle below the ship’s bow that the photographer looks out on contains the steerage, the hold of the ship allocated for third-class passengers. What the photographer sees from the foredeck on which he stands is in fact only a small part of the steerage, most of which is below deck, extending deep into the ship’s hull. Windowless and claustrophobic, the steerage is quite unlike the ship’s staterooms and promenade decks, and the small section he sees—crowded with passengers enjoying fresh air—only intimates the conditions below. Even at a glance, the steerage recalls the crowded, tenement-thick neighborhoods of the photographer’s own New York—the Lower East Side, The Bend, and the Fourth Ward—and their counterparts in other cities along the eastern seaboard and farther west, in the interior of North America. Likewise, the people before him are recognizable as erstwhile inhabitants of these cities—destinations in the greatest labor migration in human history. This photographer, looking into his camera, out at the scene before him, and back into his camera—what does he see? Then and there, what does he know? The particular distance separating himself and the third-class passengers is about fifty feet, near enough to hear the crowd as a crowd but out of earshot of any individual. Even if he wants to, he cannot speak with them, and the burden of not speaking is shifted toward seeing—seeing as the echo of stories and voices cascading in the mind. Whence these stories, these voices? First of all, there are the articles appearing in the New York and national media on steerage-related issues: crowding, hygiene, food, medical care, the treatment of women, accidents, and generally grim conditions. These stories are one aspect of investigative journalism on immigration issues: health, hygiene and housing conditions, job safety, and the social and political implications of demographic shifts, which are among the central issues of the day.2 “I shall never forget the first meal I received on this boat,” writes the investigative

The Prismatic Fragment

69

reporter Kellogg Durland, traveling incognito in steerage in 1906 in order to describe the experience of a third-class passage: When my turn came to receive the dole [of food] I had to brace myself considerably . . . . A hand soiled with all kinds of dirt—ship dirt, kitchen dirt and human dirt—pulled a great “cob” or biscuit out of a burlap sack and shoved it towards me. Then he snatched up a tin dipper and filled it with coarse red wine. As he handed this to me he sneezed—into the hand from which I had just taken my biscuit . . . . I can, and did, more than once, eat my plate of macaroni after I had picked out the worms, the water bugs, and on one occasion a hairpin. But why should these things ever be found in the food served to passengers who are paying $36.00 for their passage?3

Likewise there is the New York Times’s sobering account of the findings of the Senate Immigration Commission’s investigation into conditions in steerage, particularly for women, as reported largely by undercover women agents: During these twelve days in the steerage I lived in a disorder and in surroundings that offended every sense. Only the fresh breeze from the sea overcame the sickening odors. The vile language of the men, the screams of the women defending themselves, the crying of children, wretched because of their surroundings, and practically every sound that reached the ears irritated beyond endurance.4

And perhaps the memory also rings in his ears of the immigrant tailors who sought him out in his New York gallery only months before this trip, requesting his assistance in their struggle for better wages and working conditions: “We understand you are interested in the working-class. In justice.” “Well,” I said, “what is it I can do for you? What is it you want from me?” They said, “We’d like you to be an arbiter for us.”5

Their request both flatters and corners him—can he deny that justice is on their side, or that pursuing justice is a duty for a man who preaches a high-

Jason Francisco

70

minded dedication to truth in the name of art? But the self-fashioned nobility of his life’s work is at odds with social activism, and he refuses the request by way of an awkward promise: “You will find many men who will plead your case for higher pay and shorter hours. You do not need me, but if ever you should come to me and say, ‘We refuse to work for anybody who will not let us give our best,’—I’ll be your leader. My life will belong to you.”6

If he is less than convincing as a rhapsodist of the common man, failing to recognize that the tailors speak as proletarians, not artisans, his response signals an honest dilemma. Looking out over the steerage, contemplating distances, apprehending, lingering in the midst of half-grasped intentions, Stieglitz has found his way to an edge. Behind him is the bourgeois world in which his career and social standing are embedded, a world he largely detests, and before him are “the people” not in any nationalistic, ethnic, historical, or creedal sense, but in a free and inadvertent collectivity of once and could-have-been Americans held together by need and unseen forces, and a quality of solitariness made manifold.7 Inasmuch as the crux of his own Americanness is a spirit of dissidence and refusal, he may well recognize his own solitariness in the combined solitudes of the scene before him.8 The steerage, as he encounters it, is a pent-up and spontaneous community, a place of desperation and determination undischarged onto any final shore. In orbits of closer and more distant empathy, his mind and his heart travel: his role is to circle, to round a recognition, to see a landscape, a cityscape, a shipscape whose surfaces are a rapid unsentimental education he identifies and does not fully understand, and more: to notice his own alienation as one position in that landscape, a counterpart to a dense anonymity. His share in the world before him is to know acutely—even if just for an instant, and even if knowing does not quite mean possessing it as an object of knowledge—that freedom for anyone on this ship glides within and not away from a more encompassing uncertainty.

The Prismatic Fragment

71

Here I am in the presence of images . . . images perceived when my senses are opened to them, unperceived when they are closed. Henri Bergson, Matter and Memory (1896)

alfred stieglitz makes a picture from his place above the steerage of the Kaiser Wilhelm II.9 The picture has an experiential origin—as all photographs do—in a photographer’s time with a camera, in this case an instrument of elegant design and superb versatility, used to make four-by-five-inch negatives on glass plates. The Graflex: a leather-covered box, turtlelike when closed and cranelike when open. From behind a fitted frontside panel, the lens creeps forward by the turning of a small knob, lightly knurled for thumb and forefinger, a deliberated conveyance along a finely cut rack and pinion (figure 17). The lens is the prized Goertz Double-Anastigmat (“Dagor”), six inches in focal length, exquisitely sharp, and with a maximum aperture of f/6.8, which is to say wide enough make use of the Graflex’s other great advance: its fast shutter speeds—including twelve speeds between 1/100th and 1/1000th of a second.10 Deep within the mechanical body, shaded by its tall folding hood, is a finely ground glass on which the photographer sees a glowing play of shape, color, focus, and texture in constant motion. It is an engrossing phenomenon—a private spectacle in alluring, dimmed miniature, reversed left to right, its forms shifting endlessly. To photograph with this camera is, more than anything else, to intervene in this display, to make decisions about framing, timing, focus, and focal depth, and other instrumental concerns. If it is right to say that every camera naturalizes the audacious thought that a machine can transmogrify the world into a picture in the first place, the Graflex does so by its tacit suggestion that the world’s surfaces, resplendent on the ground glass, are graced and not betrayed in this act of intervention, which responds to their endless play by ceasing it. In the picture Stieglitz makes, we look out across a distance to two decks of the steerage (figure 1, p. 3). Like a figure, the image conveys the architecture of the ship fugue by describing an elaborate counterpoint of line, volume, and

Figure 17

Unknown photographer, Alfred Stieglitz Photographing on a Bridge, ca. 1905.

The Prismatic Fragment

73

tone. Across the picture’s width is a heavy beam, dark and slightly bowed as the picture gives it to us, dividing the composition in two. A gleaming gangway adorned with scalloping chains elaborates this division, emerging abruptly from the left, traversing the distance of the frame to the support beam. Other horizontal forms emerge—the bundled tarpaulin just below the beam, the brief lines of the sheened metal steps at the far right of the picture, the dark boom extending across the sky, and its umbral twin, the mysterious black band across the picture’s bottom border.11 Against this horizontality are complementary vertical and nearly vertical elements that create a complex of trapezoids and triangles. The large mast is the largest of these upright diagonals. Its complement is the narrow, crescent-topped pole holding up the gangway, as well as the stanchions leaning to and fro on the gangway, the handrails of the metal staircase, and the many standing figures on both levels. The result is a formal organization that is all at once ponderous and weightless. The effect is of a massive structure suspended within the frame, attached (as it were) where the center beam touches the left and right edges. This beam becomes a kind of a pivoting axis on which the whole scene is liable to swing forward and backward into space, as if to mimic the lapping movements of the vessel. Stieglitz’s depiction of the scene is, of course, a handling of photographic variables that are also worth noting. There is the drawing of the lens—the specific proportionality, compression, and scale it yields—and also the moderately low contrast of its uncoated glass. There is the discrete depth of field (the amount of space in the world that appears to be in focus), which begins at approximately the plane marked by the capstan in the picture’s lower left corner and falls off just behind the row of figures standing at the middle railing. This moderately shallow depth of field renders the figures at the top of the frame less distinct individually and more continuous with one another, articulating them as a group or a mass both tonally and socially. The wide aperture that yields this particularly shallow depth of field demands a moderately fast shutter speed, which endows objects and figures with an added crispness, what I would call a certain optical alertness. My guess is that this fast shutter

Jason Francisco

74

is Stieglitz’s technical priority. He is, after all, dealing with an organic, moving world—the passengers are themselves in motion, as is ship and the sea beneath him. A deep depth of field would be a moot choice if the entire picture were blurred from a slow shutter.12 If it is right to say that in the intricate design and formal organization Stieglitz studies how line, shape, volume, and tonality acquire the discrete solidities of the imagined objects themselves, the picture is equally a meditation on space in and around these solids, which is to say the implications of a vantage point that is not physically locatable in the scene depicted. It is as if we are perched or floating before what we see: space drops off precipitously in front of us, the view is both tightly cropped and oddly expansive, and the selfsplitting of the composition creates a sense of peripheral vision. Or to put it differently, it is as if space—or whatever we are to call the volume of light bending outward from where we look—were itself a body in the picture, occupying the area between the (implied) vantage point and the ship’s objects and figures, “touching” them and us both. This amplitude of distance seems in many ways to indicate the picture’s deep subject—namely, what distance as apartness might mean in this place, for this photographer, and for us as viewers. Of the figures we see—I count eighteen below the gangway, of which six are children, and at least thirty above the gangway, including at least one child—none is the protagonist or acts as a foil for the others. Distance itself mediates our encounter with these passengers: the picture has the effect of a reaching toward them, as if casting out a line of sight with no assurance that it quite reaches them, or can be relied on to catch or hold insight, much less knowledge. If anything recuperates our (imagined) connection to these passengers, however tentative, it is that they themselves are in a state of waiting. In this steerage, at this moment (a moment that the photograph prolongs to infinity) they abide where past and future are held indefinitely in abeyance—marooned in a listless present. There is scant activity, no work, and little of what we would call leisure. These are migrants and expatriates, perhaps erstwhile pilgrims,

The Prismatic Fragment

75

seekers or ex-seekers, goal-setters and chance-takers, all returning to Europe for reasons and purposes that the picture does not reveal. Some may be making a round-trip as migrant workers; others may be among the large number of immigrants who returned to Europe—over one-fifth of the arriving Eastern European Jews, over a third of Poles, Serbs, Croats, Slovenes, and Greeks, and over half of the Italians, Hungarians, and Slovaks.13 If we read the pictures as a study in power relations, its strong lateral division means that literally— and so metaphorically—we look down at these passengers of a “lower” social stratum and, at the same time, across to them as equals. We are positioned both “above” them and “with” them. The picture’s social understanding is as much horizontal as it is vertical—or rather, it is equally detached from both, with the result that the passengers we see are neither objectified nor subjectified. They are not social specimens meant to elicit paternalistic sympathies, nor members of notional communities to which we ourselves might belong or not belong. The picture presents them without origins and destinations, without nationality, language, occupation, or politics. We see no discernible bonds or lack of bonds between them; the picture does not bend us toward hope, nostalgia, or grief, and confesses no narrative of survival or of failure. One might say that it is a picture of diaspora—a picture of what dispersedness looks like, the condition between coming and going, quest and aftermath. In short, if photographs are unique among objects of visual culture in being hungry for stories, hungry for connections to other photographs, hungry for analysis, hungry for autonomy from analysis, in this picture social testimony acquires the peculiar force of inconclusiveness. Seen “on its own”—one limited way among others of approaching it—the image offers a non-declamatory testimony of starts and suggestions that is appropriate for a subject that itself equivocates. The picture in effect is the equivalent of a language inadequate to describe how these passengers are at once “in,” “on,” and “of ” this ship— neither captives of it nor free to roam it, neither sojourners nor inhabitants of the vessel, or of the undeclared places toward and away from which it moves. The picture’s formal exactitudes as Stieglitz renders it from the incessant play

Jason Francisco

76

of form and light upon a ground glass, ultimately shows a “floating” world, and likewise inaugurates a floating, indeterminate reckoning. Wherever anything lives, there is, open somewhere, a register in which time is being inscribed. Henri Bergson, Creative Evolution (1907)

thirty-five years after making the photograph, and thirty-one years after first publishing it, Stieglitz publishes an extended account of its making, “How The Steerage Happened,” a narrative from outside or “behind” the picture, into which it enters.14 The text—to paraphrase it—recounts how Stieglitz sails with his family for Europe in first class on the fashionable Kaiser Wilhelm II. He suffers the shallow society of the “nouveaux riches” until the sheer sounds of their voices drive him from his steamer chair. He walks as far forward on the deck as possible, and alone—which is to say against his aloneness— encounters the steerage. The scene fascinates him, and then holds him spellbound, forming within him a “new vision,” which he describes, first, as a sequence of observations in time and, second, as layering of observations in (inner) space, as if striate within himself. The ordering of elements is similar in the two renditions. “The people” come first or, in the spatial imagination, on the top, then the ship and its paraphernalia, then the abstracted “shapes” these make (a contrapuntal harmony of imitative geometric forms—something perhaps like the mathematical exactitudes of a baroque fugue), and finally an “underlying” feeling “about life,” a powerful sense of a common humanity mingled with a “feeling of release.” Stieglitz then finds himself racing to and from his cabin for his camera, hoping against hope to find the scene intact and the spell unbroken. To his delight and astonishment, all is as it was, and with but one unexposed plate and a thumping heart, he makes a picture. As the shutter closes, the epiphany begins to deflate, replaced by dancing visions of an artistic accomplishment so significant that it will eclipse all his earlier works, and indeed may open a “new

The Prismatic Fragment

77

era of photography, of seeing.” Eventually he returns to his wife, still dazed by his time “far away in a distant world,” explaining to her (in vain, we deduce) his sense of social alienation, though this hardly describes his experience. He processes the negative in Paris at the darkroom of a mysterious and kind stranger, and packs it for safe passage back to New York. Trepidation about his accomplishment keeps him from doing anything with the masterpiece negative for some time. When finally he makes a gravure and shows it to his confidant, the man cannot see it for what it is, and so Stieglitz puts the picture away until he is in the company of artists who can “truly see” it. When he judges the world ready for it, he publishes it in his journal Camera Work in 1911, some four and a half years after making it, to great and ongoing acclaim. It would be presumptuous to judge the honesty or dishonesty of Stieglitz’s claims about his private experience. Who among us is in any position to act as judge over another’s rapture? We can say, though, that the text reads like a fable (and is as fallible as fables are). Structured on a mythic motif—the central figure, a social misfit and truth-seeker, “captures” a transformative insight and brings it back (in the form of a photograph) for the betterment of the world— the text reads as a comparatively shameless piece of self-hagiography. Many of its details are implausible. If the ship were driving into a brisk wind, as Stieglitz claims, why are the clothes on the line in the lower left hand corner of the picture not fluttering even a little? If the ship is traveling east, as Stieglitz claims, the shadows should be falling from right to left (from south to north) and not the opposite way, as they do in the image. Why does Stieglitz go to the darkroom of a stranger when he is on his way to see his close friend Edward Steichen, who maintains an excellent darkroom?15 A look, once again, at the picture’s particularly photographic qualities suggests that, contrary to Stieglitz’s claims, the negative for The Steerage was most likely far from perfect, and its imperfections may partly account for his delays and possible early ambivalence about the image. It is not accidental that when Stieglitz’s narrative has him anxiously ask, “Had I succeeded, had I failed?” he immediately qualifies the question by asking, “That is, was the exposure

Jason Francisco

78

correct?” It is well to remember that Stieglitz’s foundational training in photography is rigorously scientific. Beginning in 1884, he studies with the eminent photochemist Hermann Wilhelm Vogel at the Königliche Technische Hochschule in Berlin, and technical control and perfectionism of craft thereafter remain at the core of his abilities and identities as a photographer.16 The first dozen years of his published writings (1888–1900)—as well as the next decade’s—are devoted substantially to technical matters, with articles written both in English and in German on all manner of subjects from exposure and development to methods of copying negatives, platinum printing and toning (a subject of particular interest and expertise) and experiments in color photography.17 Later in his career, Stieglitz makes a point of describing even his aesthetic and expressive concerns as matters of “scientific” understanding, saying of himself that “at heart, [I am] a scientist.”18 This is not just to say that science—knowing experiential control of photography’s material processes— is the very precondition for Stieglitz’s art, but that technical skillfulness is the precondition for any photographer wanting to transcend the mere application of technical procedures. Like science, art for Stieglitz is a matter of specifying rules, testing the limits of one’s own habits discerningly, and then breaking these habits consciously, resulting in self-governed artistic discovery. Or to put the point differently, for Stieglitz art is not simply an ennobled “use” of a basically scientific approach to photography, but is a deeper reason for a scientist’s sensitivity to an instrument and a medium in the first place. Technically, Stieglitz’s picture appears to fail on his own terms. His decision to opt for a fast shutter speed is a gamble that results in an underexposed negative that he cannot or did not adequately compensate for in development.19 Indeed, reading as a photographer, I see that his own description of his picture unwittingly draws attention to this “failure.” A pattern emerges among the elements Stieglitz names as formally significant—the straw hat, the suspenders, the white gangway and its stanchions and chains, the metal stairway at the picture’s far right, the funnel at the left, and the triangular sliver of sky at the top of the frame. Almost all of these elements are tonal highlights, the

The Prismatic Fragment

79

parts of the negative that received sufficient, or as photographers say, “proper” exposure. It is true that the highlights reach the eye more insistently than the midtones or shadows, which may explain Stieglitz’s attentiveness to them. Still, Stieglitz’s emphasis on the highlights seems oddly one-sided—inasmuch as the image seems more self-evidently an intricate balancing of light and shadow. In other words, it is not the brilliance of the gangway against the cavernousness of the below-deck shadows that he sees, nor the silhouettes with the shape(s) of the sky. Rather he offers an inventory of those parts of the picture that to him are technically adequate, passing over the (inadequately described) middle and darker values. Likewise suspect is his claim not to have proofed the negative. It would have been reasonable to expect him at least to make a platinum print of a negative that so excited him, especially if it is technically “perfect.” A thin negative, however, does not print well in platinum—this he knows. He knows further that the gravure process can provide better separation in the dark areas but is timeconsuming and costly, and requires the expertise of an assistant to make the copper plates and pull the prints. It stands to reason that these technical problems result in, or compound Stieglitz’s indifference to the negative, and they also help to explain the delay between his making of the negative in May 1907, its appearance in Camera Work four and a half years later, and its first exhibition two years after that, in 1913.20 Still, even if Stieglitz’s bombast and self-mythologizing actually betray a sense of failure (and compel us to “de-auto-mythologize” him)—in other ways his narrative is a plausible and, indeed, valuable description of creative tribulation.21 We as viewers may or may not care about his technical standards for his work, but we must accept that he holds them for himself. If his narrative is an effort to dissimulate a sense of failure, as I suggest above, we can choose to fault him for his guile or empathize with an honest sense of failure, and an honest need to lament. And suppose this argument is not wholly persuasive— suppose the thrall of his own legend simply seems to have overtaken him—in that case, we are left with another example of an artist not knowing how to

Jason Francisco

80

judge creative effort. First he underestimates his work and himself, then he overestimates—the dissemblances of the text are, at the least, a fair record of this sincere struggle. Moreover, it is entirely reasonable—and no discredit to Stieglitz—that others probably had to intervene in his understanding of the picture before he could really to grasp it, that the picture’s conception came, as it were, after its birth. According to Edward Steichen, in 1911 the painter Max Weber brought The Steerage to Stieglitz’s attention as a Cubistic accomplishment, and only Pablo Picasso’s admiration for the picture—and his praise of Stieglitz as “the only one who has understood photography”—allowed Stieglitz to see the picture in the formalist terms he narrates.22 If so, there is nothing unusual about that sequence, as working artists know. It would be normal, in other words, for Stieglitz to fail to grasp everything that happened during the making of the picture—and to need some further experience (such as a response from other artists) to recognize what happened during the creative act and what the resulting picture might mean. Stieglitz’s text is candid about a form of magical thinking common to photography, evident in what I take to be the pivotal moment of “How The Steerage Happened”—not his actual making of the picture, but his decision to leave the scene and return with the camera, hoping ardently that it would remain unchanged in his absence. Stieglitz’s departure and return to the scene, whether or not it actually happened, dramatizes a common inclination to treat photography as effecting a miraculous condition of abeyance, the world seemingly suspended—life pending life, or life in a strange remission from life. Who among us does not think when making a photograph (even if we do not proclaim out loud) “Hold still!”—as if the world could hold still? Who among us does not secretly wish that the world might be made to halt for an instant when so commanded by a person with a camera? The wish is remarkable for its simplicity and its audacity. Should Stieglitz as an artist have been exempt from such wishful thinking? Why should he have gainsaid in advance the insights such a wish might bring to the creative process?

The Prismatic Fragment

81

The triumph of abstract formalism in “How The Steerage Happened”— Stieglitz’s vaporous sanctimony about “feeling,” “seeing,” and “life” and the transcendent affect of simple shapes—is undoubtedly a gloss that reflects personal and curatorial commitments Stieglitz developed in the years between making the picture and writing about it.23 Stieglitz’s interests in European modernism were still largely unformed in the summer of 1907, and his justifying appeal to the ascendant language of pure form is not “original” to the experience on the Kaiser Wilhelm II. Though his aesthetic epiphany is unswervingly Romanticist and remorselessly highfalutin, as Allan Sekula briskly argues, Stieglitz’s holism is not simple or absurd reductionism.24 The publication of “How The Steerage Happened” creates more than a picture alone but essentially a photo-text piece in which meaning no longer comes “from” the picture but from the exchange between the picture and the narrative. Indeed, inasmuch as the written text formalizes a story that Stieglitz had developed in multiple tellings—what might be called an oral text—The Steerage had essentially become a photo-text piece far earlier. For this reason, perhaps, the published text retains just a spark of orality, a sense of a story told—and probably told better—in spoken form. There is a woodenness about the written text, a sense that the language best suited to this picture’s backstory is live, in the mouth and in the body. In any case, the publication of the narrative effectively establishes Stieglitz as not just the picture’s maker but its author, the authorizing force behind its interpretation. As such a force Stieglitz introduces rudimentary problems about photographs that he must wrestle with: does the picture become more or less itself (as it were) when we extend it into words, and do the words become more or less scrutable as a result of the authority invested in their author? On the one hand, the narrative consummates the interpretation of the image and, on the other hand, it explodes any presumption of the image’s self-sufficiency, introducing the radically destabilizing possibility that the picture truly becomes meaningful only by way of an induced dependence on language—by itself it is empty of meaning. The appeal to a transcendent formalism strikes me as a

Jason Francisco

82

desperate attempt to regain control of the turbulent process of making meaning that his “authorizing” narrative introduces prima facie. To put the point differently, by his own logic Stieglitz as narrator can at best be incompletely successful at possessing the image authorially. The problem is that his account gives decidedly mixed messages about its own interpretive authority. On the one hand, he acts heavy-handedly, by turns attempting to place the photograph in a procrustean bed of orthodox formalism and treating the image as an illustration in a memoir. On the other hand, for him the essence of the image’s success is its connection to radical newness, not novelty but a more primal discovery whose arrival in his consciousness is deeply linked for him to the possibility of creativity itself. The implication is that the picture is important not merely as a record of his own private experience, or for its mastery, which has the effect of conquering the viewer, but for its capacity to endorse similar breakthroughs wherever they may happen, to prompt further radical creativity in others. Thus Stieglitz’s account of breaking out of a self-contained, purely inward experience for the sake of a creative act is one of the story’s vital lessons. Artists do become transfixed at certain junctures in the creative process. The core lesson of Stieglitz’s story is that the creative act happens when an artist is moved to snap out of this transfixed state—in Stieglitz’s case, to race for a camera and return, and then to struggle to find a new but related episode of concentration that is equally engrossing but less inert. In this sense Stieglitz’s account shelters a different imperative: that the artist at least try to break free of the inclination to cocoon—and its corollary, the undue privileging of the self—and rejoin the world. In short, the defining tension of Stieglitz’s narrative is the friction between his need to demonstrate an overweening self-importance, and an equal need to violate it in action—to rupture the inner life with the turbulence of the outer world, and vice versa, which is precisely the photographic act. “How The Steerage Happened,” in which Stieglitz appears to present a blooming self-awareness of creative genius, is in effect a description of an aporia—a sustained, irresolvable predicament—that is the very purpose of his

The Prismatic Fragment

83

creative method, as well as a fissure in it. That he purports to tell us “how The Steerage happened” is to say not that he wants to lay down the meaning of the picture, but that he wants the reader to enter a state of extrapolative discernment that brings the picture to life, and pries open, even a little, the disruptive psychic-emotional-aesthetic experience that Stieglitz encountered within himself and not merely within himself. As full of dissimulations as his narrative is, Stieglitz’s text also describes an experience of radical availability to the world, a heightened relational condition that I would call dependent freedom—not freedom from the world but freedom toward it—and an effort to grapple with what creative work in that condition might mean. A perfect definition applies only to a completed reality. Henri Bergson, Creative Evolution (1907)

“i said one day,” Stieglitz writes in conclusion to his 1942 account of The Steerage, “If all my photographs were lost and I’d be represented by just one, The Steerage, I’d be satisfied.”25 For an artist who made photographs for some five decades and made most of his mature work after The Steerage—specifically his (very differently accomplished) pictures of the Manhattan skyline, his portraits of Georgia O’Keeffe, and his series of cloud formations that he termed “Equivalents”—this is a strong claim. It is stronger still given Stieglitz’s legacy in championing the cause of photography as a fine art, the equal of painting or any other expressive form—for which he effectively deems The Steerage his own best contribution. What, then, is the picture’s contribution to the particular category of photographic production called “art photography?” Stieglitz’s most recalcitrant challenge in hoisting photography to the status of high art is the medium’s complicated ontology—what a photograph is to be as an artistic creation. Painting’s ontology—which I would argue holds regardless of medium, history, style, iconography, and social use—only partially describes the issue for photography. In a painting we encounter an image that owes itself necessarily to the creative gesture of an artist who begins with a

Jason Francisco

84

“blank” or “empty” surface and then alters it, marks and perhaps “fills” it. A painting by definition is a mark against marklessness, a something that adduces a ruptured originary nothingness—the latter always retained as a silent counterpoint even in the completed work. In this sense a painting is burdened constitutively by intentionality, or, in the words of the painter-photographer Ben Shahn, “The very act of making a painting is an intending one.”26 Thus even when a painting reads as an account of erasures, removals, and blottings-out or as an accident evacuated of purpose beyond a handling of paint itself, its marks are still built up of these gestures, against the blankness that would otherwise be the case. In this sense a painting is an image consistently in the mode of creative presence. Stieglitz’s long crusade on behalf of photography belabors this approach. Through repetition, bluster, reasoned argument (occasionally), and exquisite production values, he insists that we can approach a photographic image in much the same way—as a unique exercise in markmaking using light-sensitive materials rather than paint. He insists that we flatter the photographic image for its optical, textural, surface, and tonal qualities and that we prize, petition, and valorize (some would say fetishize) the creative intelligence responsible for it. He strives to position the photographer as an image-wright whose choices derive every bit as much from skill and insight as the choices of a painter. For Stieglitz, photographs that display such qualities make the highest claims for photography as art—and for photographers as artists—as irresistible as they are unavoidable. But Stieglitz recognizes that there is another side to the story of photography, a recognition that shows up more in his practice as a photographer than in his writings—and nowhere more so than in The Steerage. Imagine, as an experiment, The Steerage beside a painting that is its identical copy, visually indistinguishable from the gravure original. Would we not be inclined first to see the photograph as a picture “from” a time and a place in the world (1907, on a boat), and the painting as a picture “from” the imagination of the artist? If the answer is yes (the common sense or reflexive answer), the complications of Stieglitz’s task come into view. His problem is to corral into the domain of

The Prismatic Fragment

85

high art the ways that meaning arrives in the photograph from two directions at once: from the world independent of creative agency, and from a creative response to that independence. To photograph is not simply to produce a something from a nothing (an image on a once-imageless surface—paper, glass, celluloid, mirror), but a something from a something else, an image that depends on another image, thrown by a lens onto the ground glass of a camera. In this sense, a photograph is not simply something that a photographer makes, but equally something that a photographer makes happen, a handling—or, more precisely, an intervention upon, a breaking into (which is a breaking-up-of, a breaking-apart-from) the ongoing image-event that photography itself is responsible for, in which a lens issues and keeps issuing an invitation to a picture. Photography’s core illusion—to picture the world as if apart from the contrivances of picturing—in effect proposes the irruptive paradox that the world changes into nothing other than itself when it enters into the predicaments of photography.27 At the heart of this proposition—to digress historically for a moment—is the idea that photography is itself a creative agency as much as (or more than) it is a medium for the agency of its users, an idea that emerged more or less fully formed at photography’s inception, and whose upshot is that the medium destroys any simple possession that the artist can claim over the image. It is particularly the legacy of William Henry Fox Talbot, who in 1839 announced the invention of the negative-positive process that came to dominate the analogue photographic industry for most of its history. Using the metaphor of the photograph drawn by “the pencil of nature” (the title of his 1844 book), Talbot envisions the photograph as a self-made image, an emanation more than a representation, and the photographer as less a producer of images than a midwife in the remarkable phenomenon of the world birthing its own image.28 In other words, one might say that light, for Talbot, bears appearances within itself and that photography, in its particular combinations of optics, chemistry, and mechanics, is the means by which we come to see the world’s mutating surfaces as a presence dwelling within light.29 It is a short step from this approach to

Jason Francisco

86

the by-now naturalized presumption that a photograph confirms the actuality of a subject in shared time and space, at the very least its real existence in discrete time and place before a camera, and so, by extension, before us. In Susan Sontag’s influential articulation more than a century later, “[The photograph is] a trace, something directly stenciled off the real; like a footprint or a death mask . . . a material vestige of its subject.”30 In at least two respects, The Steerage suggests that Stieglitz grasps a significantly more nuanced ontological realism than that which imputes a naïve or axiomatic identity between a photograph and its referent in the world. First, he understands that realism arises because of, and not in spite of, the myriad technical, aesthetic, and heuristic decisions involved in photographic production. Against the fantasy that any photograph represents the appearance of things as-they-are, Stieglitz recognizes that appearances—and what we understand through appearances to be actuality—are profoundly plastic in photography. The Steerage’s purchase on the actuality of the steerage of the Kaiser Wilhelm II on a spring morning in 1907 proceeds by way of certain choices that Stieglitz makes, and not others.31 In effect Stieglitz treats photography as an agency without an agenda, constantly beholden to the photographer’s discrimination or lack of it, deliberation or forfeiture of it. Second, Stieglitz recognizes, at least implicitly, that photographs perform as representations by way of complex imaginative acts through which we reconstruct what the world looks like, relative to more or less familiar pictorial conventions. In photographs, after all, being is necessarily a matter of semblance—a form of seeming—and so of resemblance, which is to say seeming-already-to-have-been. To see the picture as “of ” a steerage is to catalyze the imagination in multiple ways simultaneously (spatially, temporally, symbolically, affectively, and perhaps morally) under the aegis not of invention, but of recognition. It is to inaugurate a chain of hardly noticed conversions in which semblances become resemblances, and resemblances become given things rather than—or in addition to—made things. To put the point differently, a hidden labor of wishing is at work when we

The Prismatic Fragment

87

plausibly contrive an uninvented picture of the world from the “traces” put into light-sensitive emulsions. By themselves, how much do traces tell? Is it really possible to reconfigure a foot from a footprint? Is not something else at play if we “see” the world in a photograph, or a foot from its print, or a glass from a water ring on a table? Photographs are traces of these kinds: traces that communicate partially and selectively the appearance of the subject that left them and operate precisely through a solicitous extrapolating imagination.32 The more useful aspect of the word trace is thus not the imprint, but the sense of tracking-down, following, ferreting-out—precisely what The Steerage so adroitly initiates. Altogether, a reasonable synthesis of Stieglitz’s conception of photography as art (as modeled by The Steerage) would seem to be as follows: photography demands that an artist acquire not only the inner vision of (for example) a painter, but also acquire control over the medium’s attending ontological complications, namely the ways that photography as a creative agency seems to broker the outer world transparently, without calling attention to itself. In this sense, the photographer’s artistry is the better and not just the equal of the painter, inasmuch as the photographer is positioned to be the master of two worlds and not just one. Stieglitz’s narrative of The Steerage confirms certain aspects of such a synthesis, specifically the self-vaunting “perfection” of his picture. To my eye, however, The Steerage proposes photography as art that is more disruptive, and has higher stakes. Much like the hold of the steerage we see in the image (whose distinct social spaces are visible but not accessible to one another), The Steerage offers art photography as an agora—an open space of assembly with no master, no owner, no controlling hand, a space pent up and penned in, through which visuality itself (making-visible, having-made-visible: visibility as a state of becoming)—is the only real freedom. What really counts in the photograph as art is not what the picture “captures” (to use the dominant proprietary metaphor for the photographic act in our own time), but what it releases, what expectations it looses. As The Steerage exemplifies it, the photograph as art operates by way of a triangular relay of meaning—photographer

Jason Francisco

88

to photographed to viewer—with the image itself confirming none of the narratives it petitions about the meanings of this relay, including that of the artist and of the critic. Rather the image submits them, as it were, to perpetual arbitration, unfixing each from a single and singular relation to itself. The image’s artfulness is not a crafting of form that transcends these narratives, but a skillful magnifying of their irresolutions, particularly as these navigate the photograph’s hybridity: part window onto the world and part mirror of the photographer’s interiority. The photograph “becomes” art, Stieglitz’s picture suggests, when its interpretive irresolutions become intrinsically fascinating, and self-perpetuating. Almost invariably this process of becoming-art entails the picture’s restatement in other forms—analyses, decodings, glosses, lore, and speculation, not to mention further photographs—to handle the peculiar combinations of contingency and permanence in its illusions.33 Perhaps the best contemporaneous articulation of this approach is the philosophy of the influential early twentieth-century French philosopher and public intellectual Henri Bergson, from whose book Creative Evolution (1907) Stieglitz published a carefully chosen excerpt in Camera Work no. 36, the same issue in which he published The Steerage for the first time. Bergson’s statement, an “extract” (as Stieglitz aptly titles it) from a complex, sprawling investigation of time, memory, freedom, and evolution, could well serve as Stieglitz’s own artist’s statement. In a nutshell, Bergson’s intellectual project, which begins in his first book, Essai sur les données immédiates de la conscience (1889, translated as Time and Free Will), and develops in phases through the subsequent four decades, is to explore human freedom as a reality of the experience of time, wherein he locates the possibility of radical newness, and ultimately ethical responsibility. Arguing against the Kantian notion that free will is removed from (de-objectified) space and time, Bergson proposes freedom as the experience of time itself (la durée, or what might be called in English “lastingness”), a process of psychic evolution by means of continuous and interpenetrated awareness perfused with cumulative (and so for Bergson differentiative) memory, whose wholeness is neither a unity nor a multiplicity of being, but an ex-

The Prismatic Fragment

89

tended qualitative relationality. In particular, Bergson emphasizes what he calls intuition, a confluence of (analytic) intelligence and (pragmatic) instinct as each gathers force from the other reciprocally and move toward an ever-enlarging heed of “the sympathetic communication . . . between us and the rest of the living.” Though Stieglitz is by no means a theorist—and this can hardly be overstated—his writings about photography as art reflect just such a Bergsonian intuition, namely an entering into things not for the sake of determined outcomes but for the sake of experiential nuance and discovery. Thus Stieglitz, following his elder contemporary Peter Henry Emerson’s emphasis on “selection” in the photographic act, inveighs against derivative, imitative ways of making pictures.34 “Avoid books on composition as you would the plague,” he enjoins in 1905, “lest they destroy in your mind all other considerations than the formulae which they lay down.”35 Instead his “only” advice is “to study the best pictures in all media—from painting to photography—and to study them again and again, analyze them, steep yourself in them until they unconsciously become part of your esthetic being.”36 Likewise he asserts the primacy of a sense of tonal value in photographic prints, which he conceives as an infinitely supple materiality, much like the light and air always around us. “Atmosphere,” he writes, “is the medium through which we see all things . . . . [I]t graduates the transition of light to shade; it is essential to the reproduction of the sense of distance . . . . Now what atmosphere is to Nature, tone is to a picture.”37 (And it would only be apt in a book such as this to add by way of corollary: what tone is to a picture, language is to the phenomenon of photographic meaning.) In the terms of Bergsonian intuition, The Steerage originates by accident, in an unanticipated encounter, for unpredictable ends. Stieglitz sets out to wander aboard a vessel and reaches a boundary point where social and personal contradictions announce themselves sharply and unavoidably. He receives time sympathetically in that liminal place. He negotiates it through a camera, through the instrument’s lure and also its guile. The forms that appear in the ground glass parry inner and outer worlds back and forth, spinning into play

Jason Francisco

90

awareness of the difference between self and other, memory and anticipation, eventually approaching what Stieglitz variously (and roughly) calls “feeling,” “life,” and “living beauty.”38 At some point, this camera-induced aliveness issues an imperative: not to be averred but to be altered, to be morphed (possibly ruinously) into quite another state—a photograph. This imperative is not categorical, not what anyone would do in the same circumstances, but the opposite: it is particular to Stieglitz then and there, elective, noncompulsory and so all the more necessary.39 Just so, The Steerage lays out a set of terms for photography’s success as art, derived from the irruptiveness of the moment’s demand on the photographer. Somewhat schematically, I would name these terms as follows. First, the art photograph (that is, the photograph as art) retains the sense that it cannot have been entirely prefigured— that it has arisen from and proceeds back toward an open encounter with an incomplete world. Second, it retains the sense that its meanings unfold within and not apart from the very changingness of the world it represents. Third, its inner logic suggests that any understanding of it will arise not as (post-facto) knowledge of the image, but as a discovery within it, a dwelling-alongside the work itself. Fourth, and perhaps most important in the case of The Steerage, the differences between reality and representation that the picture announces lure us into the social distances it contemplates and modulates visually. That is, The Steerage’s success as art pivots on its activating and not merely confirming the distancing effects of representation—so that as viewers we are not merely beholders of a performance but participants in an unrepeatable experiment that the photographer begins and hands off to the future, to us.40 In short, art photography as Stieglitz proposes it is a distinctly relational practice that yields—through a transitivity unique to photography—a relational conception of freedom. The photographic process is not fundamentally about gaining possession of the outer, visible world we have in common, or the invisible, inner worlds particular to each of us, but the contrary: it is about conveying (transferring, shifting) the world and the self into a specific, acute awareness of one another, as they are joined evolvingly in time and place. In this sense,

The Prismatic Fragment

91

the art photograph is a by-product as much as a product of the creative process. It comes not as one-directional self-expression, but as explorative absorption in the world and its attending discoveries. In this sense, the most important thing about Stieglitz’s narrative is not its details, but its effort to communicate a state of wonder, which is the locus and the generative source of freedom as Stieglitz understands it. Art photographs are instances not of the world well captured, but well released: they channel the heightened searchingness of free, creative practice into states of stalled aliveness that demand our own engaged participation, most commonly as acts of reading, narrating what we see, telling stories. Or to put it differently, our own reception of such an image is not meaningful simply to the extent that it reconfirms the photographer’s experience or validates a set of prescriptive intentions we can admiringly or honorifically ascribe to the photographer’s “vision.” Rather, our reception is meaningful to the extent that we understand that the photograph was made precisely for us: by making an image, the photographer ruptures what would otherwise be a private affair. The photograph as art—in a lasting formulation I would credit to Stieglitz not because he theorized it, but because he did it—is a dareinfused wish. Stieglitz took up his camera with the hope that all the worlds commingling in the creative process might yield a prismatic fragment through which all manner of insights can pass—literary, historical, scientific, ethical— to be split or synthesized, depending on which direction we are looking. A melody has no dimension in time, because . . . it stands in a definite relation to all other notes down to the last. Hence the last note, which may not be played for some time, is yet already present in the first note as a melodycreating element. Béla Balázs, Theory of Film (1949)

the steerage comes to stieglitz at the midway point of his fifty-oddyear career as a photographer. It follows from several pictures in the preced-

Jason Francisco

92

ing fifteen years that anticipate its concerns, and is followed by several subsequent pictures that reflect on them.41 The anticipatory pictures (on which I wish to focus here) are premonitions of The Steerage more than preparations for it, which is to say that the fraction of a second it took to make The Steerage was the last instant of a years-long process of making. Two issues recur through what can be called the gestation period of The Steerage. First, Stieglitz is drawn repeatedly to littoral boundaries—sea meeting land, meeting city, meeting seafaring vessel—in whose meetings occur larger irreconciliations: settledness and unsettledness, habitation and migratoriness, citizenship and statelessness, national belonging and cosmopolitanism. Second, Stieglitz is preoccupied with the nature of the public as against his own individuality—the ways that photographs invite speculation about the identities, purposes, and power of groups via precisely circumstantial description. In his 1893 photograph West Street, Stieglitz pictures the docks of Lower Manhattan, where great sailing ships join the city for periods of time. Stieglitz positions himself in the midst of an intersection looking down the dockside road, so that the sharply foreshortened city architecture at the left and the receding line of ships at the right are given roughly equal visual balance. Stieglitz positions the camera so that the nearest ship’s massive bowsprit (the spar extending from its prow) appears to reach nearly the width of the street itself, meeting a two-story gas streetlamp to form an urban/maritime arbor. The commerce of the city/ocean occurs as a visually dense band across the picture’s middle, in which street cleaners, horse-drawn carts, stacks of cargo, pedestrians, and signage are all described in a filigree of small shapes and lines. More important to Stieglitz is the street itself—which occupies roughly half of the photograph—covered with a half-melted wintry slush, so that the pavement reads as a body of water. Positioning us in the very midst of this soft / hard earth/sea, we are left to contemplate what it is to dwell at the juncture of the continental and oceanic expanses extending from the left and the right borders of the picture. A related set of concerns is evident in Stieglitz’s 1894 picture The Landing, made in the Dutch seaside town of Katwijk (figure 18).

The Prismatic Fragment

93

Here Stieglitz balances earth and sea, voyagers and townspeople as if on two sides of a scale, each holding the precise social and geographic weight of the other. The format of the picture—panoramic, a comparatively rare cropping for Stieglitz—suggests the scale of the reference, but it is the suppression of detail that lures us in: the picture’s tonal flatness as it melds the turbulent skies and the calm sands, and its use of profile and contour (forms of specificity-from-a-distance) to describe the ships and the aggregate humanity on the beach. In his 1893 picture Five Points, New York (figure 19), Stieglitz puts himself, and so puts us, too, in the middle of a muddy street at a carefully chosen distance from the curbside. The streets intersect at an angle somewhat less than 90 degrees—without the corner building looking obviously triangular—so that the picture describes a dynamic spatial geometry, a buoyant perpendicularity in which we are almost looking in two directions at once. This dynamism is heightened by the raking descent of the (imaginary) horizon lines of the buildings delineating the street at the right half of the picture—horizon lines deflected near their (hidden) convergence point by a row of buildings in the distance, itself built at a different non-orthogonal angle. Moving through and across the picture’s geometry is a curiously ophidian social organism, a snaking humanity proceeding in contractions along the sidewalk and across the intersection. Or—the effect is the same—they move like a swishing current coursing its way along the path of least resistance. It eddies at the very corner of the block as some men look over one another’s shoulders toward some not-visible, unpicturable activity (a sidewalk vendor? an accident?), while others push their way past and a girl prances. Or—just as likely—they are a human garland strung between mire and masonry, not quite ornamenting a social landscape droll with semiotic counterpoint: painted stars shining in broad daylight, deep shadows and deep discounts, rigid trolley lines and slack laundry lines. As in The Steerage, the common people appear as a body-in-waiting, an anonymous humanity that belongs just as much to untold other corners and to myriad unseen instants, both subsequent and antecedent. In this sense, the picture is

Figure 18

Alfred Stieglitz, The Landing, 1894.

The Prismatic Fragment

95

not just a description of a time and place bound in actuality, but a positing of a life-world that extends in all directions and grows with our attention to it. Stieglitz makes two photographs in 1904 that take up similar concerns—a significantly impenetrable but not remote social body—both pictures made while aboard vessels in New York harbor. In some contrast to the earlier pictures, in which an undisturbed solitariness seems the predicate of what opens out before us, in On the Ferry Boat and Nearing Land (figure 8, p. 32), we are among the people we see, though not quite as a member of the crowd. In the former picture, we stand behind the figures, and in the latter, we hover across from their own hovering as they spill off the right and bottom edges of the frame, visually unsupported by the boat itself. In effect, The Steerage combines the vantage points of these two pictures, On the Ferry Boat’s horizontality and demotic connotations, and Nearing Land’s elevation and attendant shadings of elitist privilege. As with the earlier pictures, in both of the 1904 pictures Stieglitz approaches the social body as something dislocated from any mediating collective consciousness of power, or will to it—as docile, penned-in, perhaps impotent, and only coarsely defined by words such as crowd or throng. As with The Steerage, he is interested in the commonplace as a precisely equivocal, largely unfathomable whole, and he treats photographs as harbingers of the honest difficulty of understanding social otherness encountered in quasishared public space. Unlike the earlier photographs, in which inscrutability is not a spectacle held at a distance, by 1904 it is an animatedness of form—a beckoning darkness in On the Ferry Boat, and a shimmering blur of figures in Nearing Land—that approaches and even touches us. In 1910 Stieglitz again photographs the ferries of New York harbor (figure 20), with the public now shown retreating. The melancholy of these pictures complements the picturesque optimism of his views of lower Manhattan (figure 21) and also his later cityscapes (figure 22), in which stark volumes and dizzying heights eclipse whatever might be sympathetically called human scale. It is worth mentioning that Stieglitz is only one photographer among many others at the turn of the century concerned with what might be called exploratory

Figure 19

Alfred Stieglitz, Five Points, New York, 1893. Philadelphia Museum of Art: From the Collection of Dorothy Norman, 1986.

Figure 20

Alfred Stieglitz, The Ferry Boat, 1910. Courtesy of George Eastman House, International Museum of Photography and Film.

Figure 21

Alfred Stieglitz, Lower Manhattan, 1910. Courtesy of George Eastman House, International Museum of Photography and Film.

Figure 22

Alfred Stieglitz, Looking Northwest from the Shelton, New York, 1932. Philadelphia Museum of Art: The Alfred Stieglitz Collection, 1949.

Jason Francisco

100

realism—pictures that describe a shared social world in which the viewer and the subject viewed are mutually implicated. In contrast to the well-known work of Jacob Riis and Lewis Hine, who made exploratory social photography (later called documentary) for politically instrumentalist purposes—campaigns for social reform—Stieglitz’s approach is more like that of Alice Austen and Charles Zoller (in New York), Arnold Genthe and Alice Iola Hare (in San Francisco), and others looking at how immigrants form metonyms for the uncertain entity called “the public” as it is taking shape in the American psyche (figs. 23 and 24). Like Stieglitz, these photographers variously see immigrant subjects as curiosities (threatening or not), alterities (approachable or not), forces of latent populism (orderly or disorderly), or simply lacunae in America.42 What distinguishes Stieglitz’s pictures from those of his contemporaries is a persistent reticence, differently modulated in each picture, but consistently present. Stieglitz is also not the only turn-of-the-century photographer working in the idiom of unscripted witness in steerages. Contemporaneous photographs by Edwin Levick (figure 25), William Rau (figure 26), and an anonymous photographer (figure 27) show in differing ways just how insistently Stieglitz takes a nonparticipatory approach. Levick’s photograph shows a remarkable density of immigrants on the open deck of an ocean liner, with virtually everyone standing at attention, looking toward, if not directly up at, the camera in a vast group portrait. The multitude here overtly collaborates in the picture, which is made with their knowledge and presumably their consent—and so in some sense it is made for them as much for the private purposes of the photographer. Rau’s photograph likewise pivots on a returned gaze, though here the passengers seem less collaborative than curious (or aware but uninterested) in the photographic act. Where Stieglitz’s vantage point in The Steerage betrays a distantly inclusive, noncommittal, or paternalistic attitude toward his subjects (depending on one’s perspective), Rau’s picture allows the steerage passengers to begin to emerge as individuals and cotravelers. The anonymous photographer’s picture does what none of the others attempt: it enters the space

Figure 23

Alice Austen, Hester Street, Egg Stand, 1895. Staten Island Historical Society, Alice Austen Collection.

Figure 24

Charles Zoller, Man and Child in Street, ca. 1900. Courtesy of George Eastman House, International Museum of Photography and Film.

The Prismatic Fragment

103

of the steerage itself and assumes the vantage of its subjects, portraying them in repose rather than leisure. What distinguishes The Steerage from these and other contemporary pictures is not just the (irritatingly) high preciousness with which Stieglitz treats his subject, but the pendant descriptive mode that he finds his way into, which is less overdetermined than a genre scene, less risky than a snapshot, more spontaneous than a study, more sustained than a glimpse. Set midway into Stieglitz’s own evolution as a photographer, The Steerage likewise sits at the midpoint of photography’s now 173-year history (1839– 2012)—a useful coincidence inasmuch as diverse artistic and photographic lineages pass through it, so that the picture extends and embroils itself in time future and time past, and in relevance of distinct sorts. Stieglitz’s career on behalf of photography as art—as The Steerage ties it all together—is an attempt to lure the anxieties of self-consciousness into collaboration with the medium’s erstwhile social descriptiveness. Stieglitz does not disavow that descriptiveness, but invests it with the ethos of solemn contemplation, thereby lending it opacity as well as ingenuity. In effect, he redirects the social tasks of applied image making—expository, narrative, technical—toward the prestige of the auratic art object, as mediated by the bourgeois institutions of the emerging art world (the gallery, the club, the curatoriat) rather than the chamber of commerce or the state. Such a vision remains the foundation of art photography into our own time. If Stieglitz’s own work in subsequent years does not fully dilate the particular challenges of The Steerage—its simultaneous self-centeredness and orientation toward others—the work of other photographers does, and with Stieglitz’s blessings. In 1917, Stieglitz devotes the final issue of Camera Work to the work of the young Paul Strand, whom he essentially names as his heir apparent.43 Photographing mostly in public places in New York City, Strand produces a portfolio of unflinching, even confrontational, and perspicacious works. An elegant brutality ricochets in these pictures, nowhere more so than in his photograph of 1916 Blind Woman (figure 28). The photograph forces an encounter with a beggar, a woman announcing a ruthless disadvantage with

Figure 25

Edwin Levick, Immigrants on an Atlantic Liner, 1906. Library of Congress.

Figure 26

William Rau, Emigrants Coming to the “Land of Promise,” ca. 1902. Library of Congress.

Figure 27

Unknown photographer, People in Steerage on Deck of Ocean Liner, n.d. Library of Congress.

The Prismatic Fragment

107

a bold word that she carries as a brand on her person. Above it floats a metal tag, her official license to loiter for alms. The photograph works contrapuntally, with her inability to return our gaze matched by our own inability to turn away: she is stare-hardened and stare-softened at once. Likewise the merciless attention that the photograph pays to her vulnerability is an appeal for mercy: her survival depends on generosity (both blind and clear-sighted), so that her very presence stands for our mercy or lack of it.44 At the same time, as much as the picture leads us to reflect on her condition, it also proclaims how little we understand her: she is a cipher, without a known story and at the same time capable of resisting whatever story we might impose on her. In this sense the picture preserves for her an autonomy—it does not look down on her (not just because the vantage point is low) and also does not heroize her. More needful than needy, she is not a symbol of a cause, but the sight of her is a challenge to reflect on our own social and political commitments. In connection to The Steerage, we might imagine her as an immigrant some years after her arrival in New York, but more to the point, Strand’s photograph furthers what Stieglitz’s picture began—the photograph as a source of uncertain knowledge that declares what it does not resolve. Strand’s example, in turn, plays itself out in the work of numerous American photographers in subsequent decades who embrace the poetic indeterminacy of direct observation. At mid-century and afterward, Robert Frank, Louis Faurer, Dave Heath, Lisette Model, Leon Levinstein, and William Gedney (among others) are—like Stieglitz—outsiders conscious of their outsiderness, interested in depicting the stranger as a stranger, and doing so with a certain nonconfessional intimacy. This lineage continues into the late decades of the twentieth century and into the new century in the work of photographers for whom discrete inconclusiveness is a form of social observation: the defeated humanism of Andrea Modica’s Treadwell, the stiff revelations of Tina Barney’s aristocrats, the nonplussed alienation of Joel Sternfeld’s Stranger Passing, the buffered sadness of Larry Sultan’s Los Angeles sex workers. In various ways, each of these photographers draws out the implications of The Steerage’s opaque

Figure 28

Paul Strand, Blind Woman, 1916. Aperture Foundation, Inc., Paul Strand Archive.

The Prismatic Fragment

109

entreaties. Other contemporary photographers pursue related themes that look to the equivocations of the art photograph to interrogate loss, historical disjunctions, and the complications of collective memory. I am thinking, for example, of Richard Misrach’s Violent Legacies, An-My Lê’s Small Wars, Mark Klett’s After the Ruins, and Robert Polidori’s After the Flood.45 Individually, each of these books contemplates fragments of a traumatic history, specifically American militarism and its legacy (Misrach, Lê), and the destruction and/or reconstruction of major cities (Polidori, Klett). These works broaden the irresolutions of The Steerage by linking the testimonial indeterminacies to social histories that are themselves constitutively unsettled.46 The dialectics of The Steerage are likewise at play in the work and influence of Walker Evans, whose defining gesture is forthright antiexplanation, a type of delphic social commentary that resists (its own) social consequence, whose formal economy is so great that it appears to mitigate or even cancel its documentary value. Evans’s example leads on the one hand to mid-century American photographers whose pictures offer elegant accretions of the world’s detail, suffused with an accompanying heaviness of spirit that does not call attention to itself as such—as in the work of Max Yavno, Andreas Feininger, Wright Morris, and George Tice. On the other hand, it leads to the mannered visual survey, typified in the 1970s New Topographics work of John Pfahl, Steven Shore, and Robert Adams, whose pictures might be summed up as scrupulous pseudo-analysis, formalist self-expression clothed as social investigation. Their work in turn informs the modish postmodern orthodoxy of contemporary photographers such as Jeff Wall, Gregory Crewdson, and PhilipLorca DiCorcia, for whom the photographic real is indistinguishable from the imitation of the real, and photography’s actuality is a bottomless artifice, a miming of mimicry itself. These photographers’ elaborately directed tableaux offer us prosthetic worlds—not observations but shills of observations that contrive and then deplete “the actual” as a coherent idea in photography. At the same time, their practice is bent toward lavish commodification, much like Stieglitz’s, girded by the assertion that photography is as artful as painting—“a legitimate

Jason Francisco

110

child of the Western pictorial tradition,” in the words of Peter Galassi—and more, is indistinguishable from it.47 Perhaps the most direct response to The Steerage in contemporary photography is Allan Sekula’s 1995 work Fish Story, a sprawling photo-text inquiry into the “imaginary and material geographies of the advanced capitalist world” as encountered in maritime spaces.48 Exploring the multiple associations between port cities, coastlines, trade and migration routes, varieties of labor, and flows of capital, Sekula firmly directs the legacy of The Steerage back toward critical testimony, and at the same time explodes the terse authority and cult status of Stieglitz’s picture. Twining together pictures and stories of docks and dockworkers, as well as literary, philosophic, economic, historical, and art historical references—including a trenchant analysis of The Steerage itself— Sekula’s work illuminates just how little The Steerage participates in the traditions of maritime painting, and also falls between the cracks of the very modernism it stands for. The Steerage is, for Sekula, simultaneously a romantic vision of a world unto itself (although without rehearsing the familiar tropes of the sea as freedom and the ship as entrapment), an oblique confession of how “the sea is money,” and a quelling of the subversive qualities of the ship’s (indwelling) heterotopia. The Steerage emerges from Sekula’s hands as a fragile cultural artifact—alternately prepossessing of its meanings when given work to do and diffident when released from its tasks, deeply in need of the very breadth that Sekula himself brings to bear, and forever self-clinging in its attitude. Doubtless we think with only a small part of our past. Henri Bergson, Creative Evolution (1907)

the point in looking critically into The Steerage, or any single photograph, is not to inspect it in the all-or-nothing spirit of Diogenes, as if it might be a candidate for the world’s one honest picture, free of gambit, guile, and ruse—in short, free of art—and eventually to find it more or less adept at arti-

The Prismatic Fragment

111

fice, and so morally fallen.49 Particularly in the terms of Stieglitz’s artistic practice, a photograph is in itself neither true nor false, neither honest nor dishonest, neither successful nor failed. Rather it gains and loses truth and falsity, honesty and dishonesty, success and failure over time, in relation to the stories we ask it to bear.50 Perhaps it is not too much to say (I venture, painfully aware that the destiny of all criticism is failed metaphor) that as art, a photograph comes to life with these gains and losses. Comes to life: to look critically into a photograph is not to conduct an autopsy, not to handle a carcass, dissect it, and leave it in well-cut bits on the inspection table. Rather, it is to handle a cultural organism that hosts information, analysis, and conjecture all at once—as these nourish and sometimes fail to nourish one another. The point of looking critically into The Steerage is to participate in its liveliness (its livingness, its aliveness), just a little. In this sense, a core challenge of critical looking is what to do with the appeal that photographs continuously make to re-statements in other forms—stories, testimonies, glosses, decodings, arguments, lore, research, liturgies of praise and of condemnation, not to mention further photographs—to handle the combinations of contingency and permanence, intended and unintended consequences, that constitute photography’s illusions. Stieglitz’s own narrative is a consummate example. The Steerage all but beckons Stieglitz to elaborate in words and faith what the photograph only begins, namely a wholeness, a fullness of picturing. But his propensity (and perhaps ours) to push the image toward what we imagine to be its greater coherence—a coherence in language beyond “mere” looking—mistakes what the logic of the photograph as fragment sets out for us. In photographs, we see a severance of time, place, encounter, will, and accident, whose upshot is to prolong each of these in incomplete and uncertifiable forms. With photographs, it is not that the fragment is to be a subset of a missing whole, but that the whole is to be a subset of the replete fragment. The never-completed picture is the totality, and the (imagined) narratives it begets (that aspire perhaps to complete it) are its constituent parts. Inasmuch as a photograph’s testimony is its accumulated lack of guarantees—

Jason Francisco

112

which for anything else would be testimony in tatters—the interpretive complications that result are precisely photography’s foundation as art. The stakes of art photography, as The Steerage offers them, have less to do with authenticating—either the world or author—than with galvanizing photography’s mercurialism. The challenge that Stieglitz poses with The Steerage, and wrestles with in his text, is that a photograph’s artistry is not the ascendancy of the subjective over the objective or vice versa, but the ways that inner and outer observation by turns embellish and cancel, vitalize and deplete one another. All inquiry into the contingencies, contexts, and contra-texts in effect re-prompts the photograph’s performance. In this sense, the unrequitedness of the stories with which The Steerage practically quivers—about making and finding, self and other, Americanness and foreignness, commonness and privilege, and (yes) the actualities of the photographer’s own interiority—is the picture’s most important accomplishment. Photography, as this picture construes it, is a wellspring of meanings lost and found, and a void of inherent meaning. And what the picture, then, perpetually causes to persist: a man with a camera, leaning against a railing on a ship, leaning and still leaning, leaning as long as the photograph itself is alive to us. This man: a capable sometime photographer. The camera he holds—he holds it and holds it. He looks and still looks from the forward railing of the lower promenade deck, westward toward the ocean just crossed. This man, this photographer—what does he see?

Notes

Introduction

1. Camera Work 36 (October 1911). For an assessment of the sequencing of Stieglitz’s photographs and Picasso’s works, see Sarah Greenough, ed., Alfred Stieglitz: The Key Set, vol. 1: 1886–1922 (Washington, DC, and New York: National Gallery of Art and Harry N. Abrams, 2002), xxvi. 2. These claims were famously made by Stieglitz in defense of his founding of the Photo-Secession. See Stieglitz, “The Photo-Secession,” in Richard Whelan, ed., Stieglitz on Photography: His Selected Essays and Notes (Millerton, NY: Aperture, 2000), 154. 3. Alfred Stieglitz, “How The Steerage Happened,” in “Alfred Stieglitz: Four Happenings,” Twice a Year: A Book of Literature, the Arts, and Civil Liberties, nos. 8–9 (Spring–Summer and Fall–Winter 1942): 131. Page numbers for the full text are 127– 31. This reference is for the following quotation as well. 4. See Camera Work 36 (October 1911): plate 9; Marius de Zayas, “The Steerage,” American Photography 10 (March 1916): 121; Artlover 2, no. 1 (1924): unpaginated; The Outlook 136 (February 20, 1924): 297; Vanity Fair 21 (August 1924): 54; Louis Adamio, “An Immigrant Who Made Good in America: How Corsi, Who Arrived in the United States at the Age of Ten, Became Boss of Ellis Island,” New York Herald Tribune Books, January 27, 1935, 3; Thomas Craven, “Stieglitz—Old Master of the Camera,” Saturday Evening Post 216, no. 28 (January 1944): 15; Georgia Engelhard, “Alfred Stieglitz: Master Photographer,” American Photography 39 (April 1945): 11. 5. Marius de Zayas, “Photography,” Camera Work 41 (January 1913): 17–20 and “Photography and Artistic Photography,” Camera Work 42–43 (April–July 1913): 13–14.

113

Notes to Pages 10–18

114

6. Alfred Stieglitz, “The Magazine 291 and The Steerage,” in “Alfred Stieglitz: Four Happenings,” 134–36. In 1942 Twice a Year, the journal in which “How The Steerage Happened” and “The Magazine 291 and The Steerage” appeared, was published only once; but it was a lavish double issue that included the writings of André Malraux, Herbert Seligmann, and Rainer Maria Rilke, a letter from George Sand to Gustave Flaubert, another from Rilke to Lisa Heise, and other literary and occasional pieces from Europe. Stieglitz was the focus of the issue, with a long section devoted to him alone, called simply the “Special Stieglitz Section,” which included reproductions of his photographs, celebrations of him by Henry Miller and Carl Zigrosser, and long essays by the photographer himself. The Making of a Modernist Myth / Elizabeth Anne McCauley

Epigraph: Carl Jung, Memories, Dreams, Reflections (London: Fontana Press, 1963), 195. 1. Alfred Stieglitz, “How The Steerage Happened,” in “Alfred Stieglitz: Four Happenings,” Twice a Year: A Book of Literature, the Arts, and Civil Liberties, nos. 8–9 (Spring–Summer and Fall–Winter 1942): 128. 2. Ibid., 131. 3. Jerome Mellquist, who was interviewing Stieglitz to get material for his book The Emergence of an American Art (1942), wrote to him in 1940: “But what I think of mostly is the story you told about The Steerage. I said to you today that it had opened my eyes about the development of shapes in your work. But there was something more, I was much impressed with what you said about feeling your heart thump.” Mellquist to Stieglitz, YCAL MSS 85, Series I, Box 35, Alfred Stieglitz and Georgia O’Keeffe Archives, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University (hereafter referred to as AS/OK). 4. Dorothy Norman, preface to “Alfred Stieglitz: Ten Stories,” Twice a Year, nos. 5–6 (Fall–Winter 1940 and Spring–Summer 1941): 135. 5. All the autobiographical accounts of Stieglitz’s life in Norman’s book are placed in quotation marks. In her preface, she claimed that they were “directly quoted from conversations we had between 1927 and 1946, unless otherwise noted.” Dorothy Norman, Alfred Stieglitz: An American Seer (New York: Random House, 1960), 7, 75–77. 6. Herbert J. Seligmann, Alfred Stieglitz Talking: Notes on Some of His Conversations, 1925–1931 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1966), ix, 79–80.

Notes to Pages 19–25

115

7. Allan Sekula, “On the Invention of Photographic Meaning,” Artforum 13, no. 5 (January 1975): 36–45. Sekula was the first to analyze the story as a myth that assimilated current, essentially romantic ideas of art as expressive form. James S. Terry further questioned the factual validity of the account by reconstructing the context in which The Steerage was first published and the nature of Stieglitz’s other photographic work in 1907. James S. Terry, “The Problem of ‘The Steerage,’ ” History of Photography 6, no. 3 (July 1982): 211–22. What is surprising is the extent to which the theses of these writers have been ignored by many subsequent historians, who have upheld an interpretation of the picture as a study in form. 8. Stieglitz to Kühn, March 10, 1907, YCAL MSS 85, Series I, Box 29, AS/OK. 9. Anne Brigman to Stieglitz, April 24, 1904, YCAL MSS 85, Series I, Box 8, AS/OK. 10. Passport applications, Alfred Stieglitz, www.ancestry.com. 11. See advertisements for the North German Lloyd Line sailings in the New York Times on May 3, 1907, 15, and May 6, 1907, 17. 12. Keiley wrote Stieglitz on May 24, 1907, to say that he hoped his crossing had been a pleasant one. In a letter dated June 5, 1907, he replied to Stieglitz’s letter posted May 28 and said that he was glad to learn Stieglitz had had a satisfactory trip. YCAL MSS 85, Series I, Box 27, AS/OK. 13. Passenger lists for New York arrivals on the Kaiser Wilhelm II leaving from Cherbourg on September 18, 1907, include Stieglitz, his wife and daughter, and “maid” Clara Lauer. See Alfred Stieglitz, passenger lists, www.ancestry.com. 14. “The Greatest Steamship Ever Built,” New York Times, May 12, 1907, SM4. 15. The North German Lloyd Line had launched its fourth, and last, four-stack liner, the Kronprinzessin Cecilie, in 1907, but the ship was smaller and somewhat slower than the Kaiser Wilhelm II. 16. “Ocean Travelers: Ambassador and Mrs. Tower Sailing Today on Kaiser Wilhelm II,” New York Times, May 14, 1907, 11. 17. “W. E. Corey Weds Mabelle Gilman,” New York Times, May 14, 1907, 1. 18. “Disaster at Sea Narrowly Averted,” New York Times, May 9, 1907, 4. 19. “Kaiser Wilhelm II Held Up,” New York Times, May 8, 1907, 1. 20. “Sound Men Join Longshore Strike,” New York Times, May 11, 1907, 3. 21. Ibid. 22. “Both Sides Firm in Big Pier Strike,” New York Times, May 14, 1907, 2.

Notes to Pages 25–39

116

23. Alvin L. Coburn to Stieglitz, May 1907, YCAL MSS 85, Series I, Box 10, AS/OK. 24. Julia Thompson states that Stieglitz owned three Graflex cameras, which produced negatives that were 5 by 7 inches, 4 by 5 inches, and 31⁄4 by 41⁄4 inches. Julia Thomson, “Chronology of Processes and Techniques,” in Sarah Greenough, ed., Alfred Stieglitz: The Key Set, vol. 2: 1923–1937 (Washington, DC, and New York: National Gallery of Art and Harry N. Abrams, 2002), 945. He also endorsed the Graflex 3A model in 1907. 25. “Kodak Exhibition at 40 Strand,” Amateur Photographer, July 30, 1907, 116. Steichen’s prize-winning photographs were also exhibited in this London show. 26. The Kaiser Wilhelm II set a record in 1904 for passage from Cherbourg to New York in five days, twelve hours, and twenty-five minutes. In December 1906, it raced a French liner and made the passage in five days, seventeen hours, and forty minutes. “Kaiser Wilhelm Wins Exciting Ocean Race,” New York Times, December 22, 1906, 7. 27. Stieglitz, “How The Steerage Happened,” 128. Stieglitz recounted the details of the weather in his accounts of shooting other photographs, such as Winter—Fifth Avenue and The Terminal. His letters throughout his life also show an obsessive interest in his body’s responses to atmospheric conditions of cold and damp, signaling nature’s harshness as well as his own poetic sensitivity. 28. In London on Monday, May 21,1907, the low temperature was 38 degrees. “The Cold Weather,” The Times [London], May 21, 1907, 3. 29. Beaumont Newhall, “Alfred Stieglitz: Homeward Bound,” ARTnews 87, no. 3 (March 1988): 141–42. 30. Stieglitz, “How The Steerage Happened,” 129. 31. Passenger lists, Kaiser Wilhelm II, departing Southampton October 26, 1904, arriving in New York November 1, 1904, www.ancestry.com. Incidentally, the passengers signing the register immediately after the Stieglitz family were showgirl Evelyn Nesbit, age nineteen, and Henry Kendall Thaw, age thirty-three, who two years later would murder Stanford White for having seduced Nesbit, whom he married in 1905. 32. Edward Steiner, On the Trail of the Immigrant (New York: Flemish H. Revell Co., 1906), 10. 33. Broughton Brandenberg, Imported Americans: The Story of the Experiences of a Disguised American and His Wife Studying the Immigration Question (New York: F. A. Stokes, 1904); see 175–77 for descriptions of conditions on the Prinzessin Irene. 34. Virtually every popular magazine in the year prior to Stieglitz’s photograph fea-

Notes to Pages 39–41

117

tured articles on the status of immigrants and life in steerage. For example, see Peter Vay de Vaya and Luskod, “To America in an Emigrant Ship,” Living Age, January 19, 1907, 173–82; James B. Connolly, “Some Phases of Immigrant Travel,” Outlook, May 23, 1903, 231–36; Thomas Darlington, “The Medico-Economic Aspect of the Immigration Problem,” North American Review, December 7, 1906, 1262–71; and Robert De C. Ward, “Pending Immigration Bills,” North American Review, December 7, 1906, 1120–33. The theme also appeared in fiction, such as Francis Hodgson Burnett’s “The Shuttle,” serialized in The Century (see in particular January 1907, 342–56). This theme of class conflict played out on an ocean liner is refigured and politicized in Eugene O’Neill’s play The Hairy Ape (1921). 35. “25,000 Immigrants Arrive,” New York Times, May 3, 1907, 5. 36. Frederic Austin Ogg, “American Immigration at High Tide: The Horde of Aliens, Whence They Come, and Whither They Go,” World’s Work, May 1907, 8879–86. 37. Burton J. Hendrick, “The Great Jewish Invasion,” McClure’s Magazine, January 1907, 307, 316. 38. On Roosevelt’s immigration policies, see Hans P. Vought, The Bully Pulpit and the Melting Pot: American Presidents and the Immigrant, 1897–1933 (Macon, GA: Mercer University Press, 2004), chap. 2. 39. Ibid., 56. 40. “More Space for Immigrants: New Law Increases Room for Each Steerage Passenger,” New York Times, February 21, 1907, 5. 41. Broughton Brandenberg, “The Tragedy of the Rejected Immigrant,” Outlook, October 13, 1906, 362. 42. Ibid., 363. 43. The writer of an editorial in response to Brandenberg’s essay claimed that the tragedy of the rejected immigrant was due to the ignorance of the immigrant himself, who might not know he had a contagious disease. The greed of the steamship companies and the failure to have American inspectors on foreign soil were also posited as contributing factors. “The Rejected Immigrant,” Outlook, November 10, 1906, 603–5. 44. This episode, which involved three liners that brought the Hamburg cholera outbreak to America, is described in “Cholera in America,” Quarterly Register of Current History, vol. 2: History of the Year 1892, 279–83; and Howard Markel, Quarantine! East European Jewish Immigrants and the New York City Epidemic of 1892 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997).

Notes to Pages 42–44

118

45. Letter quoted in “Appeal from the Rugia: Her Cabin Passengers Pray to Be Taken from the Ship,” New York Times, September 13, 1892, 5. 46. On Schiff ’s life and stance on immigration, see Naomi W. Cohen, Jacob Schiff: A Study in American Jewish Leadership (Hanover, NH: University Press of New England, 1999), 50–55, 82–123. 47. Christopher M. Sterba, Good Americans: Italian and Jewish Immigrants during the First World War (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), 25. 48. “Schiff Would Turn the Jewish Tide,” New York Times, May 27, 1907, 16. 49. Leonard Dinnerstein, Anti-Semitism in America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1994), 26. 50. Alfred Stieglitz’s taste for opera and theater is well known. His father, who became an amateur artist after his retirement, supported German singing clubs (Gesangverein) and festivals in New York and collected works by his friends Moses Ezekiel, Fedor Encke, Julius Gerson, and the cartoonist Joseph Keppler (for whose estate he served as executor). “A Monster Music Festival: First German Saengerfest in Twenty-Five Years,” New York Times, April 29, 1894, 21; see also Richard Whelan, Alfred Stieglitz: A Biography (New York: Da Capo Press, 1997), 32, 44–46. 51. For example, according to Barry E. Supple, James Seligman’s son Jefferson studied medicine in Germany before joining his father’s investment firm; the sons of Jules Semon Bache (founder of another investment firm) studied in Frankfurt and Brussels; Morris Loeb (Kuhn, Loeb & Co.) went to Harvard and then studied chemistry in Berlin, Heidelberg, and Leipzig. See Barry E. Supple, “A Business Elite: GermanJewish Financiers in Nineteenth-Century New York,” Business History Review 31, no. 2 (Summer 1957): 160. 52. Supple provides the best sociological study of successful German-Jewish immigrant families who moved from peddling into retail or finance and settled in New York. Supple, “A Business Elite,” 143–78. On peddlers in America, see Maxwell Whiteman, “Notions, Dry Goods, and Clothing: An Introduction to the Study of the Cincinnati Peddler,” Jewish Quarterly Review 53, no. 4 (April 1963): 306–21. 53. “The Hebrew Charity Fair, in Aid of the Mount Sinai Hospital,” New York Times, October 16, 1875, 9. Edward Stieglitz, of Hahlo & Stieglitz, is listed as a member of the fundraising committee for the Woolen, Clothing and Dry Goods Departments of the fair.

Notes to Pages 44–47

119

54. Oscar S. Straus, Under Four Administrations: From Cleveland to Taft (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Co., 1922), 88, 106. 55. Straus was among those meeting in April 1906 at the home of Cyrus Sulzberger in New York to launch an American branch of the Jewish Territorialist Organization. “ITO Society Organized,” New York Times, April 27, 1906, 7. 56. Straus, Under Four Administrations, 163. 57. Ibid., 217. 58. Straus refers to a circular encouraging immigration officials to work with police and detectives distributed after the murder of a Catholic priest by an Italian anarchist in February 1908 and an attack on the Chicago police chief by a Russian immigrant in March 1908. See Straus, Under Four Administrations, 233–34, and “To Drive Anarchists Out of the Country,” New York Times, March 4, 1908, 1. 59. Emanie Sachs, Red Damask (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1927), 219. 60. Edward Steiner, On the Trail of the Immigrant, 171. 61. Stieglitz, “Why I Got Out of Business,” Twice a Year, nos. 8–9 (Spring–Summer 1942 and Fall–Winter 1942): 107–8. 62. This event and the scandal that it provoked are discussed in Stephen Birmingham, “Our Crowd”: The Great Jewish Families of New York (New York: Harper and Row, 1967), 143–50. Birmingham claims that the affair “was the first publicized case of anti-Semitism in America” and was followed by the blackballing of a Jew by the New York Bar Association in 1877, the barring of Jews such as Bernard Baruch from fraternities at City College in the 1880s, and the development of specific Jewish resorts in the Adirondacks. See also Dinnerstein, Anti-Semitism in America, chap. 3. 63. Emmeline wrote Stieglitz from the Chocorua Inn, Chocorua, New Hampshire, in July 1915 describing the other clients as “regular New Englanders who have it written on their faces” that they hate the Jews, and recounted her inability to find a double bed on July 30, 1915. On July 30, 1916, she wrote from the Hotel Wentworth in New Castle, New Hampshire: “Well here we are in an enormous hotel, regular American style and miserably expensive and no jews.” YCAL MSS 85, Series I, Box 57, AS/OK. 64. The extent of Stieglitz’s connections with both socialists and anarchists prior to 1918 demands a paper in its own right. To cite just a few connections, he included within his circle publicly declared anarchists Man Ray and Adolf Wolff; he supported and ex-

Notes to Pages 47–48

120

hibited with John Weichsel’s People’s Art Guild (founded in 1915); he was close to the editorial board and writers for The Masses; and he received letters from Emma Goldman. In his approach to his work and the social role of the artist, I would argue that Stieglitz stood closer to anarchist than socialist beliefs (without espousing any clear party position), a conclusion also argued by Allan Antliff in his Anarchist Modernism: Art, Politics, and the First American Avant-Garde (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001), 32–38, 53–72. I would therefore slightly disagree with the picture of Stieglitz painted by Alan Trachtenberg in his insightful essay contrasting the photographic strategies of Lewis Hine and Stieglitz. Trachtenberg correctly notes that Stieglitz shared with Hine a “generally liberal-progressive outlook,” but appreciates Hine’s faith in collective (and governmental) action to alleviate social problems more than Stieglitz’s focus on the individual artist himself (and his creative products) as a means to assert the value of free expression and anti-materialism. In trying to assert the importance of Hine’s approach (and remedy his exclusion from what became a dominant focus on art photography in the history of the medium), Trachtenberg overemphasizes the “aestheticism” of Stieglitz without sufficiently considering the moral motivations for his work and his closeness to anarchist ideas. It is true that Stieglitz did not appreciate Hine’s work or other photography consciously produced as “documentation,” but that does not mean that he espoused art for art’s sake. Art, for Stieglitz, in its address to the souls of individual viewers, could transform society more profoundly than could legislation or collective political action. Trachtenberg, Reading American Photographs (New York: Hill and Wang, 1989), chap. 4. 65. These books are in the collection of the Georgia O’Keeffe Foundation, Santa Fe. Stieglitz also owned anarchist Emma Goldman’s Anarchism and Other Essays, 2nd edition (1911). 66. On Kropotkin’s influence on American arts and crafts movements, see Steven G. Marks, How Russia Shaped the Modern World: From Art to Anti-Semitism (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2003), 47–50. 67. Peter Kropotkin, The Conquest of Bread (New York: G. P. Putman’s Sons, 1907), 141. 68. Stieglitz, “How The Steerage Happened,” 128. 69. Even though much recent literature has downplayed Rembrandt’s involvement with the Jewish community and choice of Jewish subjects, he was broadly considered in the early twentieth century as a painter of Amsterdam’s Jewish population. See

Notes to Pages 48–56

121

Steven Nadler, Rembrandt’s Jews (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003), for a critique of Rembrandt’s Jewish sympathies; and Michael Zell, Reframing Rembrandt: Jews and the Christian Image in Seventeenth-Century Amsterdam (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002), for an analysis of Rembrandt’s connections with Rabbi Menasseh ben Israel. 70. “Portraits of Rembrandt,” New York Times, October 6, 1901, 8. 71. Stieglitz, “How The Steerage Happened,” 128. 72. In the first issue of Camera Work published after his 1907 summer trip, Stieglitz reproduced a series of letters that he had written in July and August to the English editor of Photography on his experiments with the new Lumière autochrome plates. See “The New Color Photography,” Camera Work, no. 20 (October 1907): 20–25. 73. Stieglitz, “How The Steerage Happened,” 130. 74. Ibid. 75. Ibid., 131. 76. It is telling that Stieglitz in his memoirs did not mention showing The Steerage to Edward Steichen, who was in New York in 1910. Steichen took Stieglitz to the Steins but professed not to understand Cubism and eventually rejected it as too intellectual and gimmicky. Haviland and Weber helped Stieglitz hang the Photo-Secession show at the Albright Art Gallery in the fall of 1910 and were more consistent advocates of abstract styles than Steichen, who was still painting Art Nouveau–derived nocturnes in 1910. 77. Stieglitz to de Zayas, April 4, 1911, quoted in Charles Brock, “Pablo Picasso, 1911: An Intellectual Cocktail,” in Sarah Greenough et al., Modern Art and America: Alfred Stieglitz and His New York Galleries (Washington, DC: National Gallery of Art, 2000), 123. 78. Stieglitz to Kühn, October 14, 1912, quoted in Sarah Greenough and Juan Hamilton, Alfred Stieglitz: Photographs and Writings (Washington, DC: National Gallery of Art, 1983), 194. 79. Stieglitz to George D. Pratt, YCAL MSS 85, Series I, Box 39, AS/OK. 80. Stieglitz, “The Magazine 291 and The Steerage,” 134. 81. De Zayas to Stieglitz, June 11, 1914, YCAL MSS 85, Series I, Box 12, AS/OK. 82. Anne Baldassari, Picasso and Photography: The Dark Mirror (Houston: Museum of Fine Arts, 1997); see particularly 7–123. 83. Stieglitz, “The Magazine 291 and The Steerage,” 134.

Notes to Pages 57–60

122

84. Stieglitz to Jessen, March 10, 1914, YCAL MSS 85, Series I, Box 28, AS/OK. 85. Ibid. 86. Stieglitz, “The Magazine 291 and The Steerage,” 134. 87. Stieglitz recalled in a typed manuscript account titled “The Magazine ‘291’ and ‘The Steerage’ ” that he had one hundred of the deluxe gravures printed and five hundred of the regular gravures, but then destroyed the large print run because it was unsatisfactory and reprinted another five hundred, paid for out of his own pocket. YCAL MSS 85, Series II, Box 98, AS/OK. The prices he quoted in this text are considerably lower than those actually listed in the original publication: “single copies of Double Number 7–8, two dollars—Single copies de luxe, prices on application.” This manuscript, which seems to be a raw transcription of Stieglitz’s account, differs from the text published in Twice a Year and suggests that a similar editing occurred with the “How The Steerage Happened” account. 88. Paul B. Haviland, [untitled], 291, nos. 7–8 (September–October 1915): unpaginated. 89. M. de Zayas, [untitled], 291, nos. 7–8 (September–October 1915): unpaginated. 90. The ways that corporeal “perception” differed from photographic vision particularly concerned philosophers and physiologists from Locke to Helmholtz to Bergson and were invoked in early discussions of Cubism. De Zayas himself in an essay on Picasso in 1911 had said that “just as when we contemplate a part of a Gothic cathedral we feel an abstract sensation, produced by an ensemble of geometrical figures, whose significance we do not perceive and whose real form we do not understand immediately, so the paintings of Picasso have the tendency to produce a similar effect, they compel the spectator to forget the beings and objects which are the base of the picture, and whose representation is the highest state to which his fantasy has been able to carry them through a geometrical evolution” (“Pablo Picasso,” Camera Work, nos. 34–35 [April–July 1911], 67). For de Zayas, Stieglitz’s photographs recorded brute form without narrative meaning or subjectivity and thus could directly trigger emotional responses without passing through the lens of reason or language. 91. Stieglitz, “How The Steerage Happened,” 128–29. 92. On October 23, 1916, Stieglitz wrote Georgia O’Keeffe that he had “been reading some more Psychoanalysis. Have been interested in it for years. Long before it became a New York fad. Have you ever read any of Freud?—Or Jung?” YCAL MSS 85, Series I, Box 58, AS/OK. Stieglitz owned Brill’s English translations of Freud’s

Notes to Page 61

123

Leonardo da Vinci: A Psychosexual Study of an Infantile Reminiscence (1916); Totem and Taboo (1918), and Wit and Its Relation to the Unconscious (1916), as well as other works by Freud published in the 1930s. See the inventory of the Stieglitz/O’Keeffe library, Georgia O’Keeffe Foundation, Santa Fe, and Ruth E. Fine, Elizabeth Glassman, and Juan Hamilton, The Book Room: Georgia O’Keeffe’s Library in Abiquiu (New York: Grolier Club, 1997), 32. Abraham A. Brill (1874–1948) had received a medical degree from Columbia University, studied with Paul Eugen Bleuler and Carl Jung in Zurich in 1907, and corresponded with Freud. After his return to New York in 1908, Brill became Freud’s translator and a leading promoter of Freud’s theories in the United States. In 1911 he was a founder of the New York Psychoanalytic Institute. Among his private patients were Floyd Dell, Theodore Dreiser, and Mabel Dodge (whose primary analyst was Smith Ely Jelliffe), in whose salon he met Stieglitz in 1913. Stieglitz spent an evening in June 1917 talking with Brill, who described his experiences with soldiers. See Stieglitz to O’Keeffe, June 6, 1917, YCAL MSS 85, Series I, Box 58, AS/OK; and Paula S. Fass, “A. A. Brill: Pioneer and Prophet” (M.A. thesis, Columbia University, 1968). Stieglitz also knew Beatrice Hinkle (1874–1953), who studied with Freud in Vienna in 1909 but became more influenced by Carl Jung’s acknowledgment of the importance of mothers (and of female psychology). Hinkle was the analyst for James Oppenheim and Margaret Naumberg, wife of Stieglitz’s friend Waldo Frank. On the discovery of psychoanalysis in America, see Nathan G. Hale, Jr., The Rise and Crisis of Psychoanalysis in the United States: Freud and the Americans, 1917–1985 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995); and Leslie Fishbein, Rebels in Bohemia: The Radicals of the Masses, 1911–1917 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1982), chap. 5. 93. Some critics during the 1930s were aware of Hoboken as a symbol of workingclass Jews and of Stieglitz’s origins in that community. Thomas Craven calls him “a Hoboken Jew without knowledge of, or interest in, the historical American background” in his Modern Art: The Men, the Movements, the Meaning (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1934), 312. Far from being a criticism, these comments supported the idea of Stieglitz as an outsider upholding working-class values and crafting a new vision of what Randolph Bourne described in 1916 as a transnational America. 94. John T. Cunningham attributes the growth of Hoboken’s German population to the establishment of the Hamburg-American Line terminus there in 1863. He also describes the German atmosphere in the community and the negative impact of World

Notes to Pages 61–65

124

War I on German speakers. John T. Cunningham, New Jersey: America’s Main Road (Garden City, NY: Doubleday & Company, 1976), 230–32, 273–74. 95. “Waterfront Closed to Enemy Aliens,” New York Times, July 11, 1917, 5. According to this story, “When the Government took over the German steamship properties Secret Service agents found on the Hoboken piers millions of dollars worth of supplies apparently intended to have been shipped to European neutrals in neutral bottoms, and subsequently delivered to the German Government.” 96. “Pershing to Honor Dead—Will Attend Hoboken Services for First American War Victims,” New York Times, July 10, 1921, 3. 97. Stieglitz to Jessen, March 10, 1914, YCAL MSS 85, Series I, Box 28, AS/OK. 98. Stieglitz to Goetz, December 13, 1914, YCAL MSS 85, Series I, Box 19, AS/OK. 99. Ibid. 100. Paul Rosenfeld, Port of New York: Essays on Fourteen American Moderns (New York: Harcourt, Brace and Co., 1924), 288–89. 101. Francis Picabia’s mechanistic cartoon of Stieglitz as a camera with a flaccid, sagging bellows, published in 291 in July–August 1915, has been read as suggesting the impotence of the photographer. Paul Rosenfeld encouraged this idea of Stieglitz’s camera as a prosthesis in his essay in Port of New York, in which he claimed that Stieglitz “began attempting to make it [the camera] a part of his living, changing, growing body” (405). Stieglitz in his letters encouraged this idea of the photographs as his “children” and, in his most depressed moments, complained to O’Keeffe of his impotence: “It’s as if I wanted you—knew you were willing to give yourself to me—and suddenly discovered myself impotent” (January 8–17, 1917); “There is no trace of sex desire,” he worries on July 5, 1917; a few days later he laughs about how safe a woman would be with him and feels his flesh has atrophied (July 17, 1917); he says later that the sexual side of him is dead (November 3, 1917). YCAL MSS 85, Series I, Box 59, AS/OK. On Stieglitz’s sexual anxieties, see Eugenie Parry, “999 Degrees of Will,” in Therese Mulligan, ed., The Photographs of Alfred Stieglitz: Georgia O’Keeffe’s Enduring Legacy (New York: George Eastman House, 2000), 17–43; and on the Stieglitz circle’s construction of an embodied modernism, see Marcia Brennan, Painting Gender, Constructing Theory: The Alfred Stieglitz Circle and American Formalism (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2001).

Notes to Pages 67–70

125

The Prismatic Fragment / Jason Francisco

Epigraph: Henri Bergson, Time and Free Will: An Essay on the Immediate Data of Consciousness (London: Allen and Unwin, 1910), 166. 1. This sketch of Stieglitz’s character, admittedly telescopic, is my own synthesis of several biographical sources on Stieglitz: Herbert Seligmann, Alfred Stieglitz Talking (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1966); Richard Whelan, Alfred Stieglitz: A Biography (New York: Little Brown and Company, 1995); Robert E. Haines, The Inner Eye of Alfred Stieglitz (Washington, DC: University Press of America, 1982); Dorothy Norman, Alfred Stieglitz: An American Seer (New York: Random House, 1960); and Katherine Hoffman, Stieglitz: A Beginning Light (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2004). 2. The New York Times, to take one example, regularly published news and accounts of steerage passage from the late 1880s well into the 1920s. 3. Thirty-six dollars in 1906 is equivalent to approximately $900 in 2011 dollars. See Kellogg Durland, “Urgency of Improved Steerage Conditions, 1906,” Chautauquan [Chautauqua, NY] 48 (November 1907): 383–90. For information on calculating the value of money across time, see www.measuringworth.com, a project of the Institute for the Measurement of Worth, cofounded by Lawrence H. Officer, professor of economics at the University of Illinois at Chicago, and Samuel H. Williamson, emeritus professor of economics at Miami University. 4. “Women in Steerage Grossly Ill-Used,” New York Times, December 14, 1909, 3. 5. Alfred Stieglitz, “The Six Tailors,” from “Ten Stories,” in Twice a Year: A Book of Literature, the Arts, and Civil Liberties, nos. 5–6 (Fall–Winter 1940 and Spring–Summer 1941): 138–39. 6. Ibid. 7. Any tendency on our part to read tiered visual space as social hierarchy might lead to the mistaken supposition that only the figures below the center beam are steerage passengers. In fact they are all traveling steerage. Its crowdedness owes to its being the only above-board area available to third-class passengers. 8. A decade after his trip on the Kaiser Wilhelm II, Stieglitz discloses that it is “not art as the term [is] generally understood” that defines his life’s work, “but America, my own relationship to my own people . . . [my] endeavoring to find a place in my own country, to find a job for which I [am] fitted amongst my own people . . . [my] trying

Notes to Pages 71–73

126

to understand my people, so myself.” Alfred Stieglitz, “Ten Stories,” [4]: “Percy Stickney Grant’s Church and America’s Entrance into the World War,” Twice a Year, nos. 5–6 (Fall–Winter 1940 and Spring–Summer 1941): 142–43. 9. Henri Bergson, Matter and Memory (London: Allen and Unwin, 1911), 1. 10. 1/1000 of a second is fast compared even with the speed of today’s cameras. The Graflex actually offered a broader range of shutter speeds than was commonly available later in the twentieth century—twenty-four different speeds (1/1000, 1/825, 1/680, 1/550, 1/440, 1/350, 1/295, 1/235, 1/195, 1/160, 1/135, 1/110, 1/90, 1/80, 1/75, 1/65, 1/50, 1/40, 1/35, 1/30, 1/25, 1/20, 1/15, 1/10), compared with the eleven that were common to most cameras in most formats for decades (1/1000, 1/500, 1/250, 1/125, 1/60, 1/30, 1/15, 1/8, 1/4, 1/2, 1). The Graflex’s “curtain aperture” shutter was made of a coil of opaque cloth with differently sized slits in it, which were pulled across the plane of the emulsion by cocking and releasing a spring. The “speed” of the shutter was in fact a function of the width of the window in the cloth and the tension of the spring, both of which were dialed independently according to a chart on the side of the camera. Thus a “fast” speed meant a smaller slit traveling at a slightly faster rate (corresponding to the need for a larger aperture in the lens), and a slower speed meant a wider split traveling at a slower rate (and hence a smaller aperture). Having chosen the slit size and the spring tension, and having set the aperture, the photographer would release the roller blind, the slit would begin to travel from its coiled readiness, and at the same time the mirror would lift out of the way. As the slit traveled across the plate, it would “sweep” the plate with light, covering up what had just been “swept.” Likewise, Stieglitz’s lens compares very favorably to contemporary equivalents today—135mm and 150mm—which are commonly offered f/5.6, only half a stop faster than the Dagor. For information on Stieglitz’s lens, see Richard Whelan, Stieglitz on Photography: His Selected Essays and Notes (New York: Aperture, 2000), 72. 11. This black band appears in a handful of Stieglitz pictures between 1904 and 1910 (all of them, coincidentally, vertical formats and water scenes like The Steerage): Nearing Land from 1904, The Ferry Boat from 1910 (the version also called After Working Hours—The Ferry Boat), and The Mauretania from 1910. The mark is curious. It is hard to account for Stieglitz’s decision to leave it in the pictures (though he does crop it out in the rarely seen silver print he made of The Steerage in the 1920s and 1930s)— but what causes it in the first place? An object in the world, such as a near railing, would have left a line with a much softer edge, and something in direct contact with

Notes to Pages 74–76

127

the plate would have left a much harder edge. The particular softness of the band’s edge indicates to me that its cause is the slit in the camera’s cloth focal plane shutter, a few millimeters in front of the plate. The band’s presence in the picture likely owes to a malfunction of the camera’s shutter mechanism, which occurred as follows: Normally, cocking the shutter would pull the slit to the top of the frame, so that it would completely cover the plate before exposure. On Stieglitz’s camera, however, the cocking mechanism apparently did not always pull the slit all the way across the plate before exposure, but only most of the way, so that the shutter cloth, when cocked, left a small section of the plate uncovered before exposure began—approximately the width of the slit in the shutter cloth. The uncovered section of the plate, of course, meant that the emulsion was open to the interior of the camera, but this did not result in any exposure because the interior of the camera was light-tight due to the mirror being down. When Stieglitz released the shutter, the mirror began to rise and the slit began to fall as usual, so that the section of the plate left uncovered by the miscocking shutter was never exposed to light at all. This resulted in a clear band on the plate that in turn printed as the black band we see. If there were any doubt, this black band proves that Stieglitz made the picture with the Graflex and not some other camera: this mark could have been made only using a camera with a focal plane shutter, which is to say the Graflex. Other 4 × 5 cameras, such as those made by Kodak, all used leaf shutters in the lens, which would not be capable of producing this black band. I am grateful to Craig Weiss of Stanford University for his valuable insights concerning this technical aspect of The Steerage. 12. A six-inch lens used at f/8, when focused at thirty-five feet, yields a depth of field whose near limit is twenty-six feet and whose far limit is fifty-five feet from the camera. This calculated distance closely matches the distance from the deck on which Stieglitz stood to the end of the photograph’s depth of field, as we can measure it by other photographs of the ship—a distance of approximately 60 feet of the ship’s total 707-foot length. My guess, therefore, is that the picture was made at f/8 at about 1/110th of a second, and was at least a stop underexposed, resulting in limited tonal separation in the picture’s lower midtones and shadows. 13. See Virginia Yans-McLaughlin, Immigration Reconsidered: History, Sociology, and Politics (New York: Oxford University Press, 1990), 195. 14. Epigraph: Henri Bergson, Creative Evolution, trans. Arthur Mitchell (New York: Barnes and Noble Publishing, 2005), 14; this edition is a contemporary reissue of the

Notes to Pages 77–79

128

original 1907 edition. Alfred Stieglitz, “How The Steerage Happened,” in “Alfred Stieglitz: Four Happenings,” Twice a Year: A Book of Literature, the Arts, and Civil Liberties, nos. 8–9 (Spring–Summer and Fall–Winter 1942): 127–31. 15. For an insightful analysis of why The Steerage was most likely made while at anchor in Portsmouth, England, see Beaumont Newhall, “Alfred Stieglitz: Homeward Bound,” ARTnews 87, no. 3 (March 1988): 141–42. For an equally probing set of questions about the discrepancies between Stieglitz’s narrative and his actions during and after making the picture, see Sarah Greenough, ed., Alfred Stieglitz: The Key Set, vol. 1: 1886–1922 (Washington, DC, and New York: National Gallery of Art and Harry N. Abrams, 2002), lv n.118. 16. Greenough, Alfred Stieglitz: The Key Set, vol. 1, xv. 17. For a complete bibliography of Stieglitz’s published writings in English and German, compiled by Sarah Greenough, see Richard Whelan, Stieglitz on Photography: His Selected Essays and Notes (New York: Aperture, 2000): 257–68. Stieglitz also studied briefly with the well-known physicist and physiologist Hermann von Hemholtz. See Hoffman, Stieglitz: A Beginning Light, 36. 18. These remarks occur in 1922 a lecture at the Brooklyn Museum of Art specifically for students, in which Stieglitz insists that a critical understanding of representation is essential and indeed primary “in a scientific sense.” He exhorts young students to examine “the relationship of things, of human beings to pictures, prior even to examining the relationship of one human being to another.” See Herbert J. Seligmann, Alfred Stieglitz Talking (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1966), 113. Likewise, in 1914, in a letter to a Boston-based amateur pictorialist photographer, he describes his (patently grandiloquent) ambition “to establish, once and for all, the ‘meaning’ of the ‘idea’ of photography” and how he has, over the course of his career, “proceeded in doing this in an absolutely scientific way.” See Hoffman, Stieglitz: A Beginning Light, 283. 19. Further, Stieglitz’s account lingers curiously over the origin of the developer (he brought his own, though he could readily have procured it in Paris) and the “tense minutes” of the developing process itself. The episode carries within itself a possible tacit admission of a further mistake, namely that underexposure could have been partly corrected by extending the developing time—a rudimentary adjustment. 20. The silver prints that Stieglitz made in the 1920s and 1930s only confirm the thinness of the negative—in short, that he underexposed the negative for the sake of

Notes to Pages 79–85

129

a fast shutter speed, perhaps knowingly, and did not or was not able to compensate in processing to make a technically perfect negative. See Greenough, Alfred Stieglitz: The Key Set, vol. 1, 190–94, for useful reproductions of the gravure and gelatin silver renditions. 21. I am grateful to Jeff Fort of the University of California at Davis for his insightful feedback on my thinking about Stieglitz, including the apt neologism “de-automythification.” 22. See Whelan, Stieglitz on Photography, 197. 23. Stieglitz’s first show of works other than photographs in the Little Galleries opened in January 1907, comprising drawings and watercolors by the American Symbolist artist Pamela Coleman Smith. His second nonphotography show was an exhibition by Rodin in January 1908, followed rapidly by an exhibition of lithographs, etchings, paintings, and drawings by Matisse, hand-carried to New York by Steichen himself—Matisse’s first American show. Only after 1910 did Stieglitz turn 291 and Camera Work consistently toward modernist art, predominantly nonphotographic work by avant-garde European modernists (Picasso, Braque, Brancusi, Picabia) and their American counterparts (Marin, Hartley, O’Keeffe). See Pam Roberts, “291 Gallery and Camera Work,” in Alfred Stieglitz, Camera Work: The Complete Photographs (Cologne: Taschen, 2008): 25–29. 24. See Allan Sekula, “On the Invention of Photographic Meaning,” Artforum 13, no. 5 (1975), reprinted in Allan Sekula, Photography against the Grain: Essays and Photo Works, 1973–1983 (Halifax: Press of the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design, 1984). 25 Epigraph: Bergson, Creative Evolution, 11. 26. Ben Shahn, “The Biography of a Painting,” in The Shape of Content (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1957), 44. 27. Our commonplace language about photographs reflects just this paradox. We say that a painter “makes” a painting and a photographer either “takes” a picture (as if it already somehow existed and the photographer acquires it) or “makes” it. Other times people say, for example, “She takes a good picture,” meaning that she is photogenic. It is as if photography itself somehow passes around the act of “taking,” shifting us back and forth from agent to subject of its power. 28. See William Henry Fox Talbot, The Pencil of Nature, 1844 facsimile edition (New York: Da Capo, 1968). 29. More specifically, the senses in which photography shows light as “carrying”

Notes to Pages 86–87

130

information depends on the use or nonuse of lenses. When passing through a lens (at necessarily decreased intensity) and striking sensitive silver compounds, light seems to contain and so to transport information to the light-sensitive surface, resulting in marks of greater or lesser density relative to this information. When not passing through a lens, light simply darkens or hardens light-sensitive materials (as in contact printing) and seems less informationally fused to the description it allows. See Richard Benson, The Printed Picture (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 2008), 126. 30. Susan Sontag, On Photography (New York: Penguin, 1979), 154. 31. Photographs, for example, may depict the world altogether without focus, or differentially focused, or universally focused in ways quite impossible to duplicate with the eye. A photograph may be faint and underexposed, or dense and overexposed, in either case to the point of illegibility and in ways uncommon in our perception. We do not see the world monocularly or monochromatically or constricted into a square or a rectangle—the list could go on. See Joel Snyder, “Picturing Vision,” in The Language of Images, ed. W. J. T. Mitchell (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980). 32. Sontag and others have relied on the photograph’s physical relation to the world—what C. S. Pierce calls its signifying power as “index” so that the image may become a platform from which to deconstruct how photographs are inscribed with social power. I have always found this a weak argument and that the better tools for deconstruction are resemblance and ascriptive context, or what Pierce calls “icon” and “symbol.” The sense in which the photograph is truly to be leveraged as a critical tool is in the sense that linguists use it: likening the photograph to a word such as “I” or “now” with no inherent meaning, but a meaning that shifts precisely according to context and use. See Pierce’s 1867 paper “On a New List of Categories,” in The Collected Papers of Charles Sanders Pierce, vol. 2, ed. Charles Hartshorne and Paul Weiss (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1934), 49–58. See also Rosalind Krauss, “Notes on the Index: Seventies Art in America,” in Rosalind Krauss, Annette Michelson, Douglas Crimp, and Jean Copjec, eds., October: The First Decade, 1976–1986 (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1987), 2–15. See also John Tagg, The Burden of Representation: Essays on Photographies and Histories (London: MacMillan Education, 1988). See also Alan Sekula, “The Body and the Archive,” October 39 (Winter 1986), reprinted in Richard Bolton, ed., The Contest of Meaning: Critical Histories of Photography (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1992). It is worth mentioning that scientific explanations offer no respite from these com-

Notes to Pages 88–89

131

plications. If light were merely a particle, whatever is before a camera could be said physically to touch an emulsion through light, and so cause its own image to come to exist in collaboration with the (lawful) character of chemistry, optics, and mechanics. But because light is irreducibly also a wave (energy rather than matter), there is no causal connection between an object and an emulsion—just as, for example, a “wave” of people standing up in succession in a sports arena is not a result of any physical contact between them. To speak of photographs as inscriptions, transcriptions, dictations, and correspondences of the world, derived from the particle nature of light, are but one type of metaphor we might use. Others, derived from the wave nature of light, would lead us to speak of photographs as transmittals (sendings-along of the states of things), translations, transpondings, and transductions—words by which we understand that in order to present something as what it is, photographs convert (render, issue) it into something else. 33. Inasmuch as the experience of art is commonly stochastic—inducing skilled guessing in the viewer rather than the overcoming of guessing—a photograph is a trove of particularly knotty complications. A photograph offers no clear primary and secondary experience: looking into appearances is also a looking-through aesthetic effects, and looking from a point of view is also a looking-with intentions that might just as well come after the image as before it. It is not clear whether a photograph perpetuates what it shows as “experience” or ruins “experience” as a possibility. Likewise it is not clear whether the lingual effects of photographs are comprehensible in familiar forms of language. Is a photograph closer to a poetic state of language or to prose? When we speak of iconography and convention in photographs, are we speaking of grammar? Does a photograph offer a syntax to be followed or broken, or for that matter any clear distinction between “parts of speech”—nouns, verbs, adjectives, prepositions, etc.—or between tenses, or any distinction between transitivity and intransitivity of action, or voice, or grammatical subject? Does a photograph communicate in the first or second or third person, singular or plural? 34. See Greenough, Alfred Stieglitz: The Key Set, vol. 1, xviii. 35. Alfred Stieglitz, “Simplicity in Composition,” in The Modern Way in Picture Making (Rochester: Eastman Kodak Company, 1905), 161–64. See Whelan, Stieglitz on Photography, 188. 36. Stieglitz, “Simplicity in Composition,” 161–64. See Whelan, Stieglitz on Photography, 184.

Notes to Pages 89–107

132

37. Alfred Stieglitz, “A Plea for Art Photography in America,” Photographic Mosaics 28 (1892): 135–37, reprinted in Whelan, Stieglitz on Photography, 29–30. 38. For a photographer prone to feel something toward it, activity on the ground glass is a site of projection from two sides: from the outer world of space and time, and from the imaginative world of the beholder. In the experience of and with the phenomenon of the ground glass, it is precisely not clear who or what controls the confluence: in what measure appearances are a durably impersonal actuality proceeding more or less with the force of nature, and in what measure they are a (cunningly approachable) theater of actuality is prevailed upon by skill and concentration and a witting collaboration with the creatively invested implement. What is clear is that no photographer will resolve this problem by any action the camera can make; rather, the photographer will participate in the problem, and every instant of its recognition will contribute something to it. 39. Using the kindred terms of the contemporary artist, psychoanalyst, and feminist theorist Bracha Ettinger, the artistry of a photograph like The Steerage is to venture toward a social and psychic borderspace, a matrixial (surrounding) space that induces a kind of productive rupture, a co-fading of the familiar alignments of self against other and a corresponding co-emergence of new, trans-subjectivities. See Bracha Ettinger, “The With-in-Visible Screen,” in Cathérine de Zegher, ed., Inside the Visible (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1996), 89–113. 40. On the ways that the image constructs modes of beholding, see Michael Fried, Why Photography Matters as Art as Never Before (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2008). 41. Epigraph: Béla Balázs, Theory of the Film, in Daniel Talbot, ed., Film: An Anthology (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1969), 214–15. Stieglitz’s active years as a photographer were 1883–1937. 42. It is important to mention that Riis and Hine are very different photographers. Riis is inclined toward what we might now call victim photography, more or less condescending images of the disempowered. Hine consistently pictures people who are wronged and not incapacitated, and his way of handling his subjects photographically is significantly non-instrumentalist by comparison with Riis. 43. See Camera Work, nos. 49–50 (June 1917). 44. Though Strand, a Jew, was not religious, the photograph calls to mind the ancient Jewish teaching that the messiah will come as a beggar, the sight of whom is a

Notes to Pages 109–111

133

test of our individual and collective ethical evolvedness. See Babylonian Talmud, tractate Sanhedrin 98a. 45. See Richard Misrach, Violent Legacies (New York: Aperture, 1992); An-My Lê, Small Wars (New York: Aperture, 2005); Mark Klett, After the Ruins, 1906 and 2006: Rephotographing the San Francisco Earthquake and Fire (San Francisco: Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, 2006); and Robert Polidori, After the Flood (London: Steidl, 2006). 46. I would be less than honest if I did not add my own photographic work to this group. See Jason Francisco, Far from Zion: Jews, Diaspora, Memory (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1996). 47. Peter Galassi, Before Photography (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1981), 12. 48. Allan Sekula, Fish Story (Düsseldorf: Richter Verlag, 1995), 202. 49. Bergson, Creative Evolution, 4–5. 50. For a pithy argument on this point, see Errol Morris, “Liar Liar, Pants on Fire,” New York Times, July 10, 2007, http://morris.blogs.nytimes.com. Several people assisted Jason Francisco in his work: Mary Catherine Johnson, who provided excellent administrative support of many kinds; Craig Weiss, whose deep technical knowledge yielded important insights into Stieglitz’s camera and working process; Charlotte Watts, who secured the rights and reproductions; Faith McClure, who compiled the index; Miriam Francisco, his now-thirteen-year-old daughter, whose careful observations of the model of the Kaiser Wilhelm II in the Deutsches Museum in Munich led to an important breakthrough in his thinking. Anne McCauley would like to thank Françoise Heilbrun, who first invited her to give a talk about Stieglitz and Europe for a colloquium organized in conjunction with a Stieglitz exhibition at the Musée d’Orsay in 2004, which developed into this essay; Sarah Greenough of the National Gallery of Art; Klaus-Peter Kiedel of the Deutsches Schiffahrtsmuseum, Bremerhaven; Brigitta Höppner, who hosted her in Hamburg; the staff of the Beinecke Library, Yale University; Stephanie Fay, formerly at UC Press; and the Spears Fund of the Department of Art and Archaeology, which supported the costs of illustrations and research travel.

Index

Page numbers in italics refer to illustrations. 291 (gallery), 1 291 Magazine, 57 Adams, Robert, 109 agency, 85–87 Albright Art Gallery International Exhibition, 51, 121n76 Alfred Stieglitz Photographing on a Bridge, 71, 72 American Photography, 2, 4 American Place, 1 Anderson Galleries, 60 anti-Semitism, 46–47, 119nn62,63 Antliff, Allan, 120n64 Artlover, 2 Austen, Alice, 100; Hester Street, Egg Stand, 101 authorship: according to Talbot, 85; based on medium, 85; as interpretive authority, 80–82, 88 Balázs, Béla, 91 Bamberger, Jacob, 44 Barney, Tina, 107 Baruch, Bernard, 43, 119n62 Bergson, Henri, 67, 71, 76, 83, 88, 91 Belmont, August, 43

Bleuler, Paul Eugen, 123n92 Blind Woman (Strand), 103, 107–8, 108, 132n44 Bourgogne, 26, 27 Brandenberg, Broughton, 35, 37, 38, 39, 41 Brigman, Anne, 21 Brill, Abraham A, 122n92 Camera Notes, 1 cameras: Brownie, 25; Graflex, 18, 25–26, 30, 116n24; Kodak, 25–26, 35, 116n25 Camera Work, 1, 2, 4, 20, 50, 51, 52, 56, 57, 77, 79, 88, 103, 121n72, 129n23 Cézanne, Paul, 1 City of Ambition (Stieglitz), 52 Coburn, Alvin Langdon, 25–26 Corey, William Ellis, 24 Craven, Thomas, 123n93 creative act, 82; according to Emerson, 89; according to Stieglitz, 89; image-event, 85; inner world, 76, 82, 87, 89, 90–91, 112; photo as art, 90–91; transfixed state, 82 Crewdson, Gregory, 109 Cubism, 8, 80 Dell, Floyd, 123n92 de Zayas, Marius, 8, 51, 55, 56, 57–58, 122n90 DiCorcia, Philip-Lorca, 109 135

Index

136

Diner, Fanny, 41 Dodge, Mabel, 123n92 Dreiser, Theodore, 123n92 edge: Ettinger, 132n39; in photos, 70, 92, 93; Kaiser Wilhelm II, 70 Emerson, Peter Henry, 89 Emigrants Coming to the “Land of Promise” (Rau), 100, 105 Encke, Fedor, 118n50 Espionage Act, 61, 124n95 Eugene, Frank, 50 Evans, Walker, 109 Ezekiel, Moses, 118n50 Faurer, Louis, 107 feeling, 76, 81, 90 Feininger, Andreas, 109 Ferry Boat (Stieglitz), 95, 97 Five Points, New York (Stieglitz), 93, 96 Flatiron (Stieglitz), 19 Flaubert, Gustave, 114n6 Fort, Jeff, 129n21 Frank, Robert, 107 Frank, Waldo, 123n92 freedom, 87; according to Bergson, 88; dependent, 83; relational, 90–91 Freud, Sigmund, 122n92 Galassi, Peter, 110 Gedney, William, 107 Gerson, Julius, 118n50 Goetz, Fritz, 64 Going to the Start (Stieglitz), 19 Goldman, Emma, 120nn64,65 Goldman, Marcus, 43 Graflex: camera body, 71; technical capabilities, 71, 126n10, 127n11; with Stieglitz, 72. See also cameras Guggenheim, Meyer, 43 Hahlo, Stieglitz, and Co., 43 Hand of Man (Stieglitz), 52

Haviland, Frank Burty, 51 Haviland, Paul, 8, 51, 57–58, 121n76 Heath, Dave, 107 Heise, Lisa, 114n6 Heliochrome Company, 44 Hendrick, Burton J., 39 Hermann, Frank Sime, 26, 27 Herzl, Theodor, 44 Hester Street, Egg Stand (Austen), 100, 101 Hine, Lewis, 100, 120n64, 132n42 Hinkle, Beatrice, 123n92 Hoboken, 24, 28, 43, 61–62, 123nn93–95 Hoover, J. Edgar, 61 “How The Steerage Happened,” 4, 5–10, 76– 77, 79–81, 82–83; and Cubism, 80; as dependent freedom, 83; as fable, 77; and influence of European modernism, 80–81; as interpretation, 4, 81; as magical thinking, 80 immigrants: German, 42–43, 118nn51,52; history, 39–41; illnesses of, 117n44; in New York Times, 69; rejected, 117n43; representations of, 18, 33, 35–36, 37, 38; on steerage, 68, 74–75; tailors, 69–70 Immigrants on an Atlantic Liner (Levick), 100, 104 inconclusiveness, 75, 82, 88, 92, 111 Intimate Gallery, 1 intuition: according to Bergson, 89; in making The Steerage, 76–77, 80; primal discovery, 82 Jelliffe, Smith Ely, 123n92 Jessen, Peter, 56–57, 64 Jews, in America, 39–40; attitudes toward immigrants, 42; stereotypes of, 46 Jung, Carl, 17, 20, 122–23n92 Kahn, Otto, 43 Kaiser Wilhelm II: class divisions on, 31; floor plan, 33, 34; history, 21–22, 115n15, 116n26; model of, 12, 13, 14; passengers, 22, 24, 115n13; reading and writing room, 23; Stieglitz location on, 11; Stieglitz trips on, 17–18, 25, 28, 30–31, 67, 71, 81, 86, 125n8; strike, 24–25

Index

137

Kant, Immanuel, 88 Keiley, Joseph, 21, 51, 115n12 Keppler, Joseph, 118n50 Klett, Mark, 109 Königliche Technische Hochschule, 78 Kropotkin, Peter, 47, 120nn65–67 Kühn, Heinrich, 21, 50, 55 Landing (Stieglitz), 92–93, 94 Lauer, Clara, 17, 28, 29, 62 Lazarus, Emma, 18 Lê, An-My, 109 Lehman, Henry, 43 Levick, Edwin, 100; Immigrants on an Atlantic Liner, 104 Levinstein, Leon, 107 light: according to Talbot, 85, 129–30n29, 131n32; atmosphere, 89 Linthicum, Lotte, 26, 27 Little Gallery of the Photo-Secession, 1, 2 Loeb, Morris, 118n51 Loeb, Solomon, 43 Looking Northwest from the Shelton, New York (Stieglitz), 99 Lower Manhattan (Stieglitz), 98 Malraux, André, 114n6 Man and Child in Street (Zoller), 100, 102 Mann, Parker, 26, 27 Matisse, Henri, 1, 51, 55 Matthies-Masuren, Fritz, 56 Mellquist, Jerome, 114n3 Mid-Ocean (Stieglitz), 26, 31 Miller, Henry, 114n6 Misrach, Richard, 109 Model, Lisette, 107 Modica, Andrea, 107 Morris, Wright, 109 Naumberg, Margaret, 123n92 Nearing Land (Stieglitz), 31, 32 Newhall, Beaumont, 19, 28 New York City: media on steerage-related

issues, 68; Paul Strand, 103; photographic work, 83, 92–93, 95; Stieglitz’s home, 68 New York gallery, 69; art world, 103 New York harbor, 95 New York Herald Tribune, 2 New York Times: steerage conditions, 69, 125n2 Norman, Dorothy, 18, 114nn4,5 Ogg, Frederic Austin, 39 O’Keeffe, Georgia, 83, 122n92, 124n101 On the Ferry Boat (Stieglitz), 19, 31, 95, 97 ontology: of painting, 83–84; of photography, 83–85, 87; of realism, 86 Oppenheim, James, 123n92 Outlook, 2 Outward Bound (Stieglitz), 26, 31 Palmer, Mitchell, 61 People in Steerage on Deck of Ocean Liner, 106 Pershing, General John, 62 Pfahl, John, 109 photographic language: literal, 84, 129n27; metaphoric, 131n33 photography as art, 76, 83–85, 87–88, 90– 91, 103, 112 Picabia, Francis, 58, 123n101 Picasso, Pablo, 1, 51, 52, 53, 55, 122n90; and photography, 56, 60. See also Cubism Picturesque Bits of Old New York and Other Studies (Stieglitz), 57 Polidori, Robert, 109 Pratt, George D., 55 psychoanalysis, 122n92 Rau, William, 100; Emigrants Coming to the “Land of Promise,” 105 Ray, Man, 119n64 realism: and illusion, 85; and ontology, 86; and resemblance, 86; and The Steerage, 90; and trace, 86–87, 130nn31,32 Rembrandt van Rijn, 48, 49, 120n69

Index

138

Riis, Jacob, 100, 132n43 Rilke, Rainer Maria, 114n6 Roosevelt, Theodore, 40–41, 45, 47, 117n38 Rosenfeld, Paul, 64–65, 123n101 Rosenwald, Samuel, 43 Sachs, Emanie, 45 Sachs, Samuel, 43, 45 Sand, George, 114n6 Saturday Evening Post, 2 Schiff, Jacob, 42, 43, 44, 118nn46,48 Sekula, Allan, 18, 81; Fish Story, 110, 115n7, 129n24 Seligman, James, 118n51 Seligman, Jefferson, 118n51 Seligman, Jesse, 44 Seligman, Joseph, 43, 46 Seligmann, Herbert J., 18, 114n6 Senate Immigration Commission, 69 Shahn, Ben, 84, 129n26 Shore, Steven, 109 Snapshot—From My Window—Berlin (Stieglitz), 31 social body, 70, 92, 93, 95, 99–100 social photography, 99–109 Sontag, Susan, 86, 130n32 steerage: descriptions of, 31, 33, 35, 39–41, 68, 69, 70, 106, 116nn33,34, 125n3; Durand, 69; legislation, 40; as part of ship, 68; passenger conditions, 68–69; Stieglitz’s narrative, 76; Stieglitz’s relationship, 68, 70, 74; women, 69, 125n4; in the work of William Rau, 100, 103, 105 Steerage: 3; as accident, 89; as art, 87–88, 90; contextual work, 92–99; critical reception, 2–3, 18, 19, 50–52, 55–59, 103, 115n7, 122nn87,90; depth of field in, 73–74, 127n12; exposure of, 78–79; failure, 78–79, 128n19; formal qualities, 2, 11, 19, 33, 71, 73–76, 79, 126–27n11; iconic status, 2, 110; metaphorical space in, 74–75; negative of, 77– 79, 128n20; as photo-text, 15; subject matter

of, 39–41, 74–75; vantage points, 11, 74–75; within photo history, 103 Steichen, Edward, 50, 77, 80, 121n76 Steiner, Edward, 33, 36, 39, 46 Sternfield, Joel, 107 Stieglitz, Alfred: 72; account of making The Steerage, 5–10, 17–18, 20, 25, 28, 30–31, 59– 60, 62–65, 80–82, 114n3, 115n7, 116n27, 122n87; anarchist interests, 47–48, 119n64; attitudes toward immigrants, 41–42, 61; autochromes, 50, 121n72; Beginnings and Landmarks exhibition, 52, 54; character, 1, 67, 70, 125nn1,8; The City of Ambition, 52; curatorial work, 129n23; early visits to Europe, 21, 26, 116n31; Five Points, New York, 93, 96; The Flatiron, 19; Going to the Start, 19; The Hand of Man, 52; individuality, 92; Jewishness, 43, 45–46, 59, 123n93; Lake George visits, 47; Landing, 92, 93; Looking Northwest from the Shelton, New York, 99; Lower Manhattan, 98; marriage with Emmeline, 21; Mid-Ocean, 26, 31; Nearing Land, 31, 32; On the Ferry Boat, 19, 31, 95, 97; Outward Bound, 26, 31; photogravures, 50–51, 122n87; Picturesque Bits of Old New York and Other Studies, 57; quoted, 89; relation to Germany, 118n50; scientist, 78, 128n18; sexuality, 124n101; Snapshot—From My Window—Berlin, 31; snapshot photography, 25–26, 28; social class, 69–70, 76; The Terminal, 52; training, 78; urban views, 52 Stieglitz, Edward (Ephraim), 42–44, 118n53 Stieglitz, Emmeline, 21, 27, 28, 29, 47, 60, 62, 119n63 Stieglitz, Katherine (Kitty), 17, 27–28, 29, 62 Stieglitz, Leopold, 41–42, 44 Stix, Louis, 44 Strand, Paul, 103, 107–8, 132n44; Blind Woman, 108 Straus family: H. Grant, 44; Isidore, 44; Nathan, 44; Oscar, 40, 44–46, 119nn54–58

Index

139

Sultan, Larry, 107 Sulzberger, Cyrus, 119n55 Talbot, William Henry Fox, 85, 129n28 Terminal (Stieglitz), 52 Terry, James S., 115n7 Tice, George, 109 tiered visual space, 70, 75, 95, 125n7 Trace, 86–87 Trachtenberg, Alan, 120n64 Twice a Year, 4, 11, 18

Ferry Boat, 95; Steerage, 68, 74–75, 100, 95; West Street, 92 Vogel, Hermann Wilhelm, 78 Walkowitz, Abraham, 55 Wall, Jeff, 109 Weber, Max, 51, 80, 121n76 Weichsel, John, 120n64 West Street (Stieglitz), 93 Weyhe Gallery, 18, 58 White, Clarence, 20–21 Wolff, Adolph, 119n64

Underwood and Underwood, 33 U.S. Agamemnon, 62, 63

Yavno, Max, 109

Vanity Fair, 2 vantage point: Five Points, New York, 93; Landing, 92–93; Nearing Land, 95; On the

Zangwill, Israel, 45 Zigrosser, Carl, 114n6 Zoller, Charles, 100; Man and Child in Street, 102

University of California Press, one of the most distinguished university presses in the United States, enriches lives around the world by advancing scholarship in the humanities, social sciences, and natural sciences. Its activities are supported by the UC Press Foundation and by philanthropic contributions from individuals and institutions. For more information, visit www.ucpress.edu. Every effort has been made to identify the rightful copyright holders of material not specifically commissioned for use in this publication and to secure permission, where applicable, for reuse of all such material. Credit, if and as available, has been provided for all borrowed material either on-page, on the copyright page, or in an acknowledgement section of the book. Errors or omissions in credit citations or failure to obtain permission if required by copyright law have been either unavoidable or unintentional. The author and publisher welcome any information that would allow them to correct future reprints. University of California Press Berkeley and Los Angeles, California University of California Press, Ltd. London, England © 2012 by The Regents of the University of California Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Francisco, Jason. The Steerage and Alfred Stieglitz / Jason Francisco, Elizabeth Anne McCauley. p. cm. — (Defining moments in American photography ; 4) ”Published with the assistance of the Getty Foundation.” Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-0-520-26622-3 (cloth : alk. paper) — ISBN 978-0-520-26623-0 (pbk. : alk. paper) 1. Stieglitz, Alfred, 1864–1946—Travel. 2. Photographers—United States—Biography. 3. Passenger ships—United States. 4. Stieglitz, Alfred, 1864–1946. Steerage. 5. Photographs. I. McCauley, Elizabeth Anne. II. Title. TR140.S7F73 2012 770.92—dc23 [B] 2011038379 Manufactured in the United States of America 21 20 19 18 17 16 15 14 13 12 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of ansi/niso z39.48–1992 (r 1997) (Permanence of Paper).

Text: 10.75/14 Granjon Display: Interstate Compositor: Integrated Composition Systems Prepress: iocolor Printer and binder: Thomson-Shore, Inc.