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The Beginning
Born January 1, 1864, in Hoboken, New Jersey, the legacy began. Work by Alfred Stieglitz. -
Early Education
In 1871 Stieglitz was sent to the Charlier Institute, at that time the best private school in New York. He enjoyed his studies but rarely felt challenged by them. During the fetid, and un-air conditioned summers in New York city, his family (like most upper class families) would leave the New York and travel to Lake George in the Adirondack Mountains, during the six to eight weeks of semi-tropical heat and humidity of the city. -
Continuation of Education
A year before he graduated, his parents sent him to public high school so he would qualify for admission to the City College CCNY where his uncle taught. as he and his father found the classes at the high school were far too easy to challenge him, and his father decided that the only way he would get a proper pre-college education was to enroll him in the rigorous schools of his German homeland. -
Mechanical Advancement
Stieglitz began studying mechanical engineering at the Technische Hochschule in Berlin. He received the then enormous allowance of US$1,200 a month and spent much of his time going around the city in search of the same type of intellectual discussions he enjoyed back home. -
Articles...Massive!
In 1887 he wrote his very first article, "A Word or Two about Amateur Photography in Germany", for the new magazine The Amateur Photographer. Soon he was regularly writing articles on the technical and aesthetic aspects of photography for magazines in England and Germany. -
First Business, Then Glory
By this time Stieglitz already considered himself an artist with a camera, and he refused to sell his photographs or seek employment doing anything else. His father, who was ever doting on his first-born son, helped Stieglitz by buying out a small photography business where he could indulge in his interests and perhaps earn a living on his own. -
First Prtable Camera
Sometime in late 1892 Stieglitz bought his first hand-held camera, a Folmer and Schwing 4x5 plate film camera. Prior to this he had been using an 8x10 plate film camera that always required a tripod and was difficult to carry around. He was invigorated by the freedom of the new camera, and later that winter he used the new camera to make two of his best known images, Winter, Fifth Avenue and The Terminal. -
Together FOREVERRRRR
During this period Stieglitz's parents began pressuring him to settle down and get married. For several years he had known Emmeline Obermeyer, who was the sister of his close friend and business associate Joe Obermeyer. On 16 November 1893, when she turned twenty and Stieglitz was twenty-nine, they married in New York City. Stieglitz later wrote that he did not love Emmy, as she was known, when they were first married and that their marriage was not consummated for at least a year. -
Maybe not FOREVERRR
After staying together and raisinig a child, Stieglitz decided to call it quits due to Georgia O'Keeffe realizing they were completely inseparable. -
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Exhibits Exhibits
In 1920 Stieglitz was invited by Mitchell Kennerly of the Anderson Galleries in New York to put together a major exhibition of his photographs. He spent much of that year mounting recent works, and in early 1921 he hung the first one-man exhibit of his photographs since 1913. Of the 146 prints he put on view, only seventeen had been seen before. -
Show Time
In 1922 Stieglitz organized a large show of John Marin's paintings and etching at the Anderson Galleries, followed by a huge auction of nearly two hundred paintings by more than forty American artists, including O'Keeffe. Energized by this activity, he began one of his most creative and unusual undertakings – photographing a series of cloud studies simply for their form and beauty. -
A New Beginning
In 1924 Stieglitz's divorce was finally approved by a judge, and within four months he and O'Keeffe married. It was a small, private ceremony at Marin's house, and afterward the couple went back home. There was no reception, festivities or honeymoon. O'Keeffe said later that they married in order to help soothe the troubles of Stieglitz's daughter, who at that time was being treated in a sanatorium for depression and hallucinations. -
Era of Progress
Stieglitz was invited by the Anderson Galleries to put together one of the largest exhibitions of American art that had ever been organized, and he responded with his typical exuberance and showmanship. The title of the show says more than any summary can offer: Alfred Stieglitz Presents Seven Americans: 159 Paintings, Photographs, and Things, Recent and Never Before Publicly Shown by Arthur G. Dove, Marsden Hartley, John Marin, Charles Demuth, Paul Strand, Georgia O'Keeffe and Alfred Stieglitz. -
Looking Back...
Stieglitz mounted a forty-year retrospective of one hundred twenty-seven of his works at The Place. He included all of his most famous photographs, but he also purposely chose to include recent photos of O'Keeffe, who, because of her years in the Southwest sun, looked older than her forty-five years, next to portraits of his young lover Norman. It was one of the few times he acted spitefully to O'Keeffe in public. -
Death of a Groundbreaker
In the summer of 1946 Stieglitz suffered a fatal stroke. He remained in a coma long enough for O'Keeffe to finally return home. When she got to his hospital room Dorothy Norman was there with him. She left immediately, and O'Keeffe was with him when he died.
