Alfred Stieglitz

Alfred Stieglitz spent fifty years insisting that photography was an art and then, having won, spent the rest of it showing painting instead. He trained as an engineer in Berlin, took up photography there, and came back to New York determined to drag American practice out of the hands of the camera clubs. He founded the Photo-Secession with Edward Steichen in 1902 and the journal Camera Work, which is still among the most beautifully produced periodicals ever made - hand-pulled photogravures on tissue, fifty issues, and he destroyed the unsold copies rather than discount them. The gallery at 291 Fifth Avenue then did something he had not planned: from 1908 it gave America its first sight of Rodin, Matisse, Cezanne, Picasso, Brancusi and African sculpture, mostly on Steichen's advice from Paris. His own late work abandoned the soft Pictorialism he had championed - The Steerage of 1907, and the Equivalents, hundreds of photographs of clouds made to show that a picture could carry feeling with no subject at all. He met Georgia O'Keeffe in 1916, exhibited her, left his wife for her, married her, and photographed her over three hundred times in a composite portrait that is either the great record of a marriage or a long act of appropriation, depending on who is writing. He was still exhibiting at eighty. He never sold a photograph for money in the ordinary way and priced his prints to discourage buyers he disliked. Camera Work ended in 1917 with an issue devoted to Paul Strand. He ran two further galleries, the Intimate Gallery and An American Place, until 1946.

• Lived: 1864 CE – 1946 CE
• Nationality: American
• Roles: artist