When Photography Meets Painting

To seek artistic status, photography first appeared in the form of pictorial photography. The global voice of pictorial photography is the highest. With its picturesque side, it can indeed win the recognition of the audience to a certain extent. ALFRED STIEGLITZ, who has rich photography experience in Europe, also strongly supported pictorial photography during this period, and was committed to gaining an independent artistic status for photography.(Shiffman 245)

ALFRED STIEGLITZ has considerable talent in photography and fully demonstrates his photography potential in the skills of running this new media. 

Alfred Stieglitz-The Last Joke—Bellagio or A Good Joke1887

Size: 11.7 × 14.7 cm (4 5/8 × 5 13/16 in.) (Picture1)

Since the holiday of 1883, he has travelled with his camera, using this medium that is gradually appreciated by people and has the possibility of art to capture romantic scenery and simple rural customs. At this stage, he was mainly influenced by the soft focus of European photography(Bry 39).

In 1885, he began to contribute to the German Photography Press. In 1887, ALFRED STIEGLITZ won the first place in the "Holiday Works Competition" organized by the Amateur Photographers Association of London with "Picture 1, A Good Joke, 1887). This is also the first official recognition of ALFRED STIEGLITZ. This piece depicts a group of Venetian peasants clustered together, smiling with joy at hearing a joke. Although viewers have no way of knowing the content of the trick, from the photos, the mottled walls and children's ragged clothes are in sharp contrast to the innocent smiles on the children's faces. The viewer can immediately feel a spirit of pleasure for the people at the bottom. In this work, ALFRED STIEGLITZ selected 11 children and a lady who washed clothes and used the child as the main character to express the theme of the work. ALFRED STIEGLITZ also used a similar approach in another award-winning work (Figure 2, The Letter Box 1894). This piece represents a dynamic process of two little German village girls delivering letters to a mailbox. The two girls seemed to be sisters and sisters. Although they were neatly dressed, their faces were yellow, and the two stood barefoot near the wall, looking at the letter intently as if the message was their hope. Hartman considers the work to be "a study of style, an exploration of narrative methods that evoke special interest."(Shiffman 256)

To understand these two works by combining these words, it is to describe a picture and tell a story through the lens of a camera. From these two pictures, you can feel that ALFRED STIEGLITZ focuses on showing the real world with the actual images that the camera can capture. But what makes ALFRED STIEGLITZ famous is not this typical European-style photos, but his very personal style of photographic separation.

Next, I will introduce two masterpieces of ALFRED STIEGLITZ, The Terminal. ALFRED STIEGLITZ possesses the love of humanity that is lacking in American society. He is full of feelings of life. When encountering snowstorm on the street, a horse-drawn carriage at the end of the road, a majestic groom in the snow, this scene can turn He awakened from his low mood. He decided to shoot something deep inside--the communication between external reality and his internal emotions, which was also a key feature of his work. He photographed "Figure 3, The Terminal, 1982" as a real witness in 1892. The picture shows a street corner of Harlem, New York, with horses walking along a tram. Through the image, you can feel the sound of horseshoes and the sound of trams. The horse in front of the screen seems to be the role of ALFRED STIEGLITZ. He shows the real-time and space and the walking life segment without modification. Horses, carts, and people's postures were all discovered in an instant, and the transpiration mist floating around the subject further enhanced the real-time nature of the picture. ALFRED STIEGLITZ's photography experience has changed. He has abandoned the previous settings and interventions on scenes, people, and objects, but is loyal to the development of objective facts and real life. This sincere attitude is not only reflected in the works but also in During his shooting, and he waited for several hours in the cold station. The experimental spirit and pioneering spirit made this work regarded as his masterpiece by later generations(Stigeglitz, et al.415).

After taking this picture,Alfred Stieglitz determined to prove that photography was a medium as capable of artistic expression as painting or sculpture. As the editor of Camera Notes, the journal of the Camera Club of New York—an association of amateur photography enthusiasts—Stieglitz espoused his belief in the aesthetic potential of the medium and published work by photographers who shared his conviction. When the rank-and-file membership of the Camera Club began to agitate against his restrictive editorial policies, Stieglitz and several like-minded photographers broke away from the group in 1902 to form the Photo-Secession, which advocated an emphasis on the craftsmanship involved in photography. Most members of the group made extensive use of elaborate, labor-intensive techniques that underscored the role of the photographer’s hand in making photographic prints, but Stieglitz favored a slightly different approach in his own work(Bry 56). Although he took great care in producing his prints, often making platinum prints—a process renowned for yielding images with a rich, subtly varied tonal scale—he achieved the desired affiliation with painting through compositional choices and the use of natural elements like rain, snow, and steam to unify the components of a scene into a visually pleasing pictorial whole. This picture is picture3.