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
I have all but killed myself for Photography. My passion for it is greater than ever. It's forty years that I have fought its fight... I am not fighting to make a 'name' for myself. Maybe you have some feeling for what the fight is for. It's a world's fight... All that's born of spirit seems mad in these days of materialism run riot.
As I hold the future well-being of photography very dear I must see to it that these forces which militate against it be opposed and destroyed.
I was born in Hoboken. I am an American. Photography is my passion. The search for Truth my obsession.
Let me here call attention to one of the most universally popular mistakes that have to do with photography - that of classing supposedly excellent work as professional, and using the term amateur to convey the idea of immature productions and to excuse atrociously poor photographs.
I detest tradition for tradition's sake; the half-alive; that which is not real. I feel no hatred of individuals, but of customs, traditions; superstitions that go against life, against truth, against the reality of experience, against the spontaneous living out of the sense of wonder-of fresh experience, freshly seen and communicated.
Everything is relative except relatives, and they are absolute.
Before the people at large, and for that matter, the artists themselves, understand what photography really means, as I understand that term, it is essential for them to be taught the real meaning of art.
The fight for photography became my life.
I have a vision of life, and I try to find equivalents for it in the form of photographs.
All I want is to preserve that wonderful something which so purely exists between us.
There is nothing so wrong as accepting a thing merely because men who have done things say it should be so.
My aim is increasingly to make my photographs look so much like photographs [rather than paintings, etchings, etc.] that unless one has eyes and sees, they won't be seen - and still everyone will never forget having once looked at them.
For that is the power of the camera: seize the familiar and give it new meanings, a special significance by the mark of a personality.
If you can imagine photography in the guise of a woman and you’d ask her what she thought of Stieglitz, she’d say: He always treated me like a gentleman.