For Alfred Stieglitz: Great American photographer. Paul Goldfinger, Oakhurst, NJ © Autumn 2021
Alfred Stieglitz was a man of the arts. He excelled in photography and opened the earliest gallery to exhibit photographs. Here is a Blogfinger link about him:
Stieglitz. Photographer unknown. Lake George.In 1995 MOMA featured an exhibit devoted only to Stieglitz’s Lake George work.
The museum said, “Alfred Stieglitz at Lake George comprises 93 black-and-white photographs made between 1914 and 1936. Works include selections from Stieglitz’s portraits of Georgia O’Keeffe—a series of more than 300 photographs made over two decades—ranging from the early, intimate closeups of the painter’s face and hands to the later pictures of the liberated, mature woman.
“The exhibition includes the sky and cloud pictures known as “Equivalents,” and one of Stieglitz’s favorite late subjects, the poplars that lined the road between his house on the hill and the nearby lake. Many photographs concentrate on the house and barns on the property, trees and grasses in various seasons, and portraits of such visitors as Paul Strand and Abraham Walkowitz, and various family members.”
His Lake George work was about his private life, especially his images of his artist wife Georgia O’Keeffe.
He turned his attention to nature, and some critics believe that this period (1930’s) contained many of his greatest works.
One that I always liked was a low key view of some apples with dew. It fascinated me to see his willingness to capture such simple subject matter. It is so much different from his early work in New York City.
Apples and Gable. Lake George. By Alfred Stieglitz. 1922 from Met Museum.
“When Stieglitz sent this print to Georgia O’Keeffe at Christmas in 1939, he did not need to remind her of the moment of its making. The couple, not yet married, were together at the farm at Lake George, New York. The upward peak of the gable and the tantalizingly incumbent apples joined the symbolic national fruit with Stieglitz’s sexuality and his search for an American art. Upon seeing the photograph, the poet Hart Crane exclaimed to Stieglitz, “That is it, you have captured life.” (Met quote.)
Stieglitz introduced sensuality to some of his work, and he celebrated women. Here is one of his photographs from that period:
Stieglitz Lake George
From the soundtrack of the movie Pride and Prejudice. “The Secret Life of Daydreams.”