Alfred Stieglitz
Alfred Stieglitz
Alfred Stieglitzwas an American photographer and modern art promoter who was instrumental over his fifty-year career in making photography an accepted art form. In addition to his photography, Stieglitz is known for the New York art galleries that he ran in the early part of the 20th century, where he introduced many avant-garde European artists to the U.S. He was married to painter Georgia O'Keeffe...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionPhotographer
Date of Birth1 January 1864
CountryUnited States of America
When I make a picture, I make love.
My picture, Fifth Avenue, Winter is the result of a three hours' stand during a fierce snow-storm on February 22nd 1893, awaiting the proper moment. My patience was duly rewarded. Of course, the result contained an element of chance, as I might have stood there for hours without succeeding in getting the desired pictures.
There are many schools of painting. Why should there not be many schools of photographic art? There is hardly a right and a wrong in these matters, but there is truth, and that should form the basis of all works of art.
If you place the imperfect next to the perfect, people will see the difference between the one and the other. But if you offer the imperfect alone, people are only too apt to be satisfied by it.
The scene fascinated me: a round straw hat; the funnel leaning left, the stairway leaning right; the white drawbridge, its railings made of chain; white suspenders crossed on the back of a man below; circular iron machinery; a mast that cut into the sky, completing a triangle.
Beautiful dreams - if the world were more beautiful they would come true - But the world is relentless & cruel - people are - they must be, I suppose, or they could not live.
The goal of art was the vital expression of self.
To demand the portrait that will be a complete portrait of a person is as futile as to demand that a motion picture be condensed into a single still.
The ability to make a truly artistic photograph is not acquired off-hand, but is the result of an artistic instinct coupled with years of labor.
My photographs are a picture of the chaos in the world, and of my relationship to that chaos. My prints show the world’s constant upsetting of man’s equilibrium, and his eternal battle to reestablish it.
The arts equally have distinct departments, and unless photography has its own possibilities of expression, separate from those of the other arts, it is merely a process, not an art.
The great geniuses are those who have kept their childlike spirit and have added to it breadth of vision and experience.
All art, like all love, is rooted in heartache.
My cloud photographs are equivalents of my most profound life experiences, my basic philosophy of life. All art is an equivalent of the artist’s most profound life experiences.