Alfred Stieglitz
15 quotes
Biography
Alfred Stieglitz was an American photographer and modern art promoter who was instrumental over his 50-year career in making photography an accepted art form. In addition to his photography, Stieglitz was 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.
"The goal of art was the vital expression of self."
"Photography is not an art. Neither is painting, nor sculpture, literature or music. They are only different media for the individual to express his aesthetic feelings.. .You do not have to be a painter or a sculptor to be an artist. You may be a shoemaker. You may be creative as such. And, if so, you are a greater artist than the majority of the painters whose work is shown in the art galleries of today."
"to show that [the success of my portray-] photographs was not due to subject matter – not to special trees or faces, or interiors, to special privileges – clouds were there for everyone.. .I wanted to photograph clouds to find out what I had learned in forty years about photography. Through clouds to put down my philosophy of life.. .My aim is increasingly to make my photographs look so much like photographs that unless one has eyes and sees, they won't be seen – and still everyone will never forget them having once looked at them."
"I know exactly what I have photographed [in his series 'Equivalents', 1925 - 1934]. I know I have done something that has never been done.. .I also know that there is more of the really abstract in some 'representation' than in most of the dead representations of the so-called abstract so fashionable now."
"I have always been a great believer in today. Most people live either in the past or in the future, so that they really never live at all. So many people are busy worrying about the future of art or society, they have no time to preserve what is. Utopia is in the moment. Not in some future time, some other place, but in the here and now, or else it is nowhere."
"AS A KID I WAS PROMISED an America - An America I believed in - and I insist on living - and dying - in that America, even I have to create it myself."
"When I make a photograph, I make love."
"I am an American. Photography is my passion. The search for truth my obsession"
"Stieglitz, in America through photography, has shown us, as far as possible, the objectivity of our outer world. I speak of that photography in which the genius of man leaves to the machine its full power of expression. For it is only thus that we can reach a comprehension of pure objectivity. Objective truth takes precedence over Stieglitz in his work. By means of a machine he shows us the outer life."
"Then, one afternoon he turned me [Stieglitz, in 1941] loose, alone, among the several boxes of [his photo-series:] 'w:Equivalents'. He had learned to trust me.. ..A couple of hours later I came out in tears. I had been through a tremendous experience. It was like the thunderstorm I felt in my head once in Paris.. ..Music has done this to me many times, but though I already deeply loved photographs, nothing like this had happened to me before.. .Stieglitz, amused and compassionate, waited until I could speak.."
"..he persisted in following his instinctive feeling that the photographic image was more beautiful than anything the human hand could do to it. In the middle of his activities [for 'w:Photo-Secession' and 'w:291 (magazine)' ], he still found time to greet the new [20th] century with the penetrating tenderness that characterizes his work - photographs of a locomotive, an airplane, of the rising changing city, and the Steerage, that strange picture of immigrants returning to Europe, with his prophetic split organization of form."
"It seems odd to think of you at 'Lake George' tonight – I can smell the outdoors – and hear it – and see the stars – So often before I went to bed at night I would walk out toward the barn and look at the sky in the open space. There was no light little house – there were no people – there was only the night – I will never go back again – maybe to stand just for a moment where I put the little bit that was left of Alfred [Stieglitz], her husband] after he was cremated – but I think not even for that. I put him where he would hear the lake. – That is finished."
"When I make a picture, I make love."
"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."
"Photography is a reality so subtle that it becomes more real than reality."