Alfred Stieglitz

La obra de Georgia O´Keeffe, pionera del modernismo estadounidense, es objeto este año de una gran retrospectiva que viajará por España, Francia y Suiza gracias al esfuerzo de 35 museos. Hasta el 8 de agosto permanecerá en el Museo Nacional Thyssen-Bornemisza de Madrid, España.
Con 90 de sus obras más representativas, la muestra retrospectiva permite examinar a fondo el concepto de O´Keeffe que la hizo ocuparse de lo ordinario en la naturaleza con simplicidad, su aporte a la vanguardia modernista y su influencia posterior, según el crítico de arte, Juan Carlos Flores Zúñiga, que escribe sobre la misma para Ars Kriterion E-Zine.

Published in the exhibition catalogue "Man Ray, African Art, and the Modernist Lens," published in 2009. This chapter examines practices by photographers from the Stieglitz circle to the Harlem Renaissance that demonstrate the range of interest in African objects and the diversity of approaches taken in translating them into Modernist photographic expressions. These photographs illustrate what Roland Barthes calls the rhetoric of the image, the embedded messages and significations that inflect the way we read and understand photographs. Also demonstrated in these examples is the manner in which issues about race, gender, identity, and difference were inextricably interwoven into the many faces of American Modernism, ultimately contributing to perceptions of and shifting attitudes toward African art.

Eğer bir beyazlık varsa odur:
Georgia O’Keeffe

Tuvallerine sığmaya çalışan zarif ve kırılgan dev çiçeklerin ressamı Georgia O’Keeffe, ilk sergisinden 100 sene sonra TATE Modern’de açılan retrospektifiyle gündeme oturdu. Sanatçının verimli sanat serüveninden yaklaşık 100 önemli resmin yer aldığı serginin daha sonra Viyana ve Kanada’ya gitmesi planlanıyor.

This essay appeared in a special issue of Tribal magazine published in conjunction with the 2012 exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, "African Art, New York, and the Avant-Garde." It discusses how African objects became tied not only to vanguard artistic practice but also implicitly linked to the legitimization of photography as a modernist art form. How African art and photography became fundamentally intertwined within the dynamics of American modernism is illuminated through text and reproductions of images by a range of photographers.

BC: Before Concrete focuses on two centers where the modern visual poem developed, Paris and New York City.  This an overview of  individuals adding to the wider development of Latin and Cyrillic alphabets’ visual poem types and movements by individuals associated with the early stage development of modern visual poetry and the field of visual text arts.  Centered in the discussion is the controversy surrounding the Poeme Simultané first developed by Henry-Martin Barzun and the contribution by members of the Stieglitz Circle to the visual poem, painted word and painted symbol. Visual text art types, movements and individuals covered or mentioned include, visual poetry, concrete poetry, Abbaye de Creteil, Guillaume Apollinaire, Henry-Martin Barzun, Blaise Cendars, E E Cummings, Stuart Davis, Robert Delaunay, Sonia Delaunay, Charles Demuth, Arthur Dove, Albert Gleizes, Marsden Hartley, J. B. Kerfoot, Adon Lacroix, Mina Loy, Agnes Ernest Meyer, Francis Picabia, Torres Palomar, Man Ray, Katharine N. Rhoades, Pamela Colman Smith, Alfred Stieglitz, the Stieglitz Circle, Jose Juan Tablada, Max Weber, Marius de Zayas, Poeme Simultané, Ideogramme, Calligramme, Orphism, Painted Word, Psychotype and machine portraitures, Camera Work, and 291 magazine.

Examines the December 1914-January 1915 exhibition of Picasso and Braque's work at Alfred Stieglitz's 291 Gallery.  As the first New York exhibition of 1912-13 Cubism, with its new combination of a spare linear scaffolding and collaged elements, this elicited a mixed reception from New York critics, some incredulous, others surprisingly perceptive about the artists' goals.

Leader of the French school of pictorial photography, Robert Demachy was very fond of British and American culture. Having been raised in an anglophile environment, he was perfectly fluent in English and, in 1893, he married Adelia Delano, the daughter of a major industrialist from Detroit and a distant cousin of the Delano-Roosevelt family. Although he never travelled to America himself, his photographic works did, and on a very wide scale. Therefore, at the turn of the 20th century, he was undeniably one of the most famous French photographers in America. This fame was achieved through...

From the start, Alfred Stieglitz planned to make "Camera Work" an international endeavor. This ambition is not surprising considering his keen and prior interest for European works and his conception of pictorial photography as a global undertaking. This paper examines the making of "Camera Work" from a European perspective through the case study of the French school. How French pictorial photography came to be included in "Camera Work"? How and why...

""The Midwife to Ideas": Alfred Stieglitz and the building of pictorial photography’s memory"
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L’influence considérable de la figure d’Alfred Stieglitz sur la photographie américaine dans la première moitié du XXe siècle n’est plus à démontrer. Pas plus que son rôle décisif dans le remarquable développement du pictorialisme américain. Partant de ces deux constats, notre intervention souhaite étudier la manière dont les différentes actions menées par Stieglitz pour promouvoir la photographie artistique aux États-Unis au tournant du XXe siècle lui ont permis de façonner la mémoire du mouvement pictorialiste en en écrivant une certaine histoire dont le récit fut par la suite repris et canonisé par les historiens du médium. Ce qu’on a retenu du pictorialisme...

The International Society of Pictorial Photographers was founded in 1905 at the instigation of Alfred Stieglitz, charismatic leader of the Photo-Secession, from an idea developed a few years before by Robert Demachy, leader of the French school of pictorial photography. This new structure gathered the main leaders of international pictorialism selected from five countries that had been considered as the most involved and advanced in this new branch of the medium: Great Britain, The United States,
France, Austria and Germany. On the paper, the goal of this pictorialist federation was...

One does not look at rain, one is in rain. The tangibly detectable effect of rain is more difficult: the wet landscape or the drenched child is not a direct index for ‘rain’. To this we must add that rain is far more difficult to depict in technical-visual terms: rain cannot be rendered accurately, as it occurs in nature. One is forced to rely on lines for the effect of a deluge, or on atmospheric watercolours for damp mist. This dichotomy – graphic versus pictorial – makes rain a medium-subject par excellence. In this article, I treat three pivotal moments in the visual history of rain as a medium, namely the medium of moisture in the work of William Turner (1775-1851), Alfred Stieglitz (1864-1946), Agnes Martin (1912-2004) and Woody Allen (°1935). “Across natural-cultural times and tales, rain, never still, relates this uncomfortable message clearly distilled: that exposure is our greatest risk and greatest potential at once. To listen to the rain is to hear the stories that rain tells, literary re-marks that reflect the physical marks the rains made on flesh and page, raindrops sprinkled on skin (L. Ducker, For All Waters).”

L’article explore, dans la perspective de la sémiotique néoclassique, la possibilité d’appliquer au domaine de certains genres photographiques des concepts clés de la sémiotique comme le rapport entre manifestation et signifiant, entre topic et focus, entre figure et abstraction, entre référent et sens, entre l’imprévisible et la réplique d’un modèle. Le champ de l’expression photographique se révèle si important qu’il nous conduit parfois jusqu’à considérer les limites mêmes du «sémiotique».

Known as the quintessential painter-photographer in his early career, Edward Steichen (1879–1973) combined artistically renowned compositions with excellence in technique and experimentation. He often created multiple versions of a print in order to test out the subject matter, using different combinations of color and effect. Two prints of a moonlit scene by Steichen in the collection of the Art Institute of Chicago demonstrate his experimental attitude. Though they appear to have been printed from the same negative, each displays unique characteristics, color palettes, orientations, and titles. To understand the individual elemental and material variations within these prints, and to compare known processes to those described by the artist in correspondence from the time, x-ray fluorescence and Fourier transform infrared spectroscopy were performed. Elemental analysis detected platinum, chromium, iron, and lead, with FTIR spectroscopy clearly identifying the characteristic signal for Prussian blue. One of the works also showed clear signs of an applied varnish, which was traditionally applied to paintings. This article proposes a timeline for the creation and alteration of the works, whose understanding has been significantly expanded due to the combination of material analysis and art historical research into these objects.

Photographs of artists reside in an ambiguous space between subject and object: they are at once a document, a printed record of an artistic act by the photographer (a work of art), and an image, a tonal rendering of a body that once was there (an artist). The artists represented within the unique sub-genre of “photos of artists by artists” are similarly marked by ambiguity, dually positioned as subject and object, maker and image. Yet unlike in other media, such as painting or sculpture, where the surface of the model is always reinterpreted through the hands of the artist, in the photograph the subject dictates their own representation, in that the camera captures a momentary look, flinch, or gesture produced solely through their actions. The photographer may direct, but ultimately the subject determines his or her own performance, which shifts the position of authorship and raises the question: is the photograph a work of art by the photographer (the labor of making) or by the artist in the photograph (the labor of posing)? I suggest that it is both, for the game of photography changes when the subject in front of the lens also identifies as an artist; the institutional binary of artist/model no longer holds. The question is further complicated when viewing photographs of female artists taken by male artists, a relationship already steeped in a long art historical tradition of men making images (out) of women. For example, Man Ray’s photographs of Méret Oppenheim have been read as pure visual objectification of the female artist, as have Alfred Stieglitz’s photographs of Georgia O’Keeffe. Yet this narrow interpretation denies agency to the women artists represented in the work. I aim to position the photographs of Oppenheim and O’Keeffe closer to Robert Mapplethorpe’s photograph of Louise Bourgeois, which exudes a sense of confidence and self-knowledge by a woman who has determined her own performance not solely as object, but also as subject.

L’article explore, dans la perspective de la sémiotique néoclassique, la possibilité d’appliquer au domaine de certains genres photographiques des concepts clés de la sémiotique comme le rapport entre manifestation et signifiant, entre topic et focus, entre figure et abstraction, entre référent et sens, entre l’imprévisible et la réplique d’un modèle. Le champ de l’expression photographique se révèle si important qu’il nous conduit parfois jusqu’à considérer les limites mêmes du « sémiotique ».

Straight fotoğraf, yapay ışığın, öznelerin poz vermesinin, sahne dekoru oluşturmak için eşya, aksesuar kullanımının olmadığı ve karanlık odada herhangi bir manipülasyonun kullanılmadığı fotoğraf tarzıdır. Çoğunlukla siyah-beyaz çalışılan bu tarz teknik olarak, çoğunlukla keskin odak kullanımıyla birlikte, detayların ayrıntılı biçimde yansıtılmasını, tonların belirginliğim ve geometrik tarzda oluşturulan kompozisyonları içerir. Amerikan sanat fotoğrafında straight yaklaşımının oluşumunu hazırlayan etmenler arasında, fotoğraftaki teknik gelişmeler, Pictorialist fotoğraf hareketinin üyelerinin gerçeklikten uzak konulan resmin etkisinde oluşturması sonucunda fotoğraf gibi fotoğraflar değil de resim gibi fotoğraflar üretmeleri, modernist sanatta geometrik tanımlamalarla oluşmaya başlayan soyutlamacı yaklaşımlar, I.Dünya Savaşı'nın ve gelişen kapitalizmin yaşam koşullarım olumsuz etkilemesi ve fotoğrafçıların gerçeği olduğu gibi yansıtarak bağımsız bir fotoğraf estetiği yaratma düşüncesi sayılabilir. Bu somut koşulları değerlendirip Amerikan sanat fotoğrafında değişimi başlatan isim, avant-garde sanatın ülkede tanınmasına da büyük katkıları olmuş olan Alfred Stieglitz'dir. önceki sanat fotoğrafı anlayışlarından farklı olarak, straight fotoğraf örnekleri gerçekçi ve doğrudan kayıt örnekleridir. Straight fotoğrafta anlam, fotoğrafçının bir konuyu seçtiği teknik ve estetik kodlar aracılığıyla kurması ve izleyicinin de bu fotoğrafı önceki görsel tecrübeleri, kültürel düzeyi ve dünyaya bakış açısının da etkisiyle yorumlamasıyla oluşmaktadır. 20.yüzyılın ilk çeyreğinde oluşan Amerikan straight fotoğraf örneklerini bugün incelediğimizde, bu görsel kayıtlar, o dönemde ülkede yaşanan hızlı değişimin çarpıcı imgeleridir ve hem düzanlamsal hem de yananlamsal açıdan güçlü bir etkiye sahiptirler. Fakat straight tarzda çalışan fotoğrafçılardan f/64 grubu üyeleri, nesneleri ve birimleri soyutlamacı bir yaklaşımla ve çarpıcı bir yalınlıkta kaydetmeyi tercih ederek farklı bir yönde ilerlemişler, anlamı daha çok metaforlarla ve simgelerle oluşturmuşlardır.
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Straight photography is a method where there is no use of artificial light, objects, or accessories to compose a scenery, where any manipulation in the darkroom is not used, and where subjects do not pose. This method which is most commonly practiced as black-white technically includes the reflection of the details, the clarity of the tones, and the composition formed geometrically through the usage of sharp focus. The pictorialist photography movement members producing of photographs like a picture rather than photographs like a photograph as a result of composing the subjects far away from reality under the impression of the picture, the abstractive approaches which is generated by the geometrical description in the modernist art, the negative effects of I. World War and the developing capitalism on the living conditions and the idea of creating an independent photography aesthetics by reflecting the reality as is, might be considered as the factors which prepare for the formation of the straight approach in the American Art. The person who starts the change in American photography art by evaluating these concrete conditions is Alfred Stieglitz who is also known as the one who has played a crucial role in the introduction of avant-garde art in the country. Different from the previous artistic photography understanding, straight photography examples are realistic and direct examples of record. In the straight photograph, the meaning is formed by the way the photographer develops their subjects through the technical and artistic codes and by the way the audience interprets the photograph through his/her previous visual experience and point of view. When we observe the examples of the American straight photographs composed in the first quarter of the 20th century, these visual records are the striking images of the rapid changes the country was faced with, and they used to have a strong effect both denotatively and connotatively. But among the photographers working with the straight photography method, the f/64 group members, have improved themselves by preferring to record the objects and units both by an abstractive approach and a striking simplicity and they have created meaning through metaphors and symbols.