Stieglitz: Camera Work (25th
Anniversary Special Edtn)
Wonderful History Of Stieglitz And Early American Photography
Photographer, writer, publisher, and curator Alfred Stieglitz (1864-1946)
was a visionary, far ahead of his time. Around the turn of the 20th century
he founded the Photo-Secession, a progressive movement concerned with
advancing the creative possibilities of photography, and by 1903 began
publishing Camera Work, an avant-garde magazine devoted to voicing the
ideas, both in images and words, of the Photo-Secession. Camera Work
was the first photo journal whose focus was visual, rather than technical,
and its illustrations were of the highest quality hand-pulled photogravure
printed on Japanese tissue. This book brings together a broad selection
from the journals 50 issues.
Personal Review: Stieglitz: Camera Work (25th Anniversary
Special Edtn)

As expected, Taschen Publishing has done a wonderful job of filling in
some of the many information gaps in the history of photography. Any
serious collector of photography has heard of the most famous of the early
American Photography Journals--"Camera Work" named after the
photographers who were at that time usually referred to as "camera
workers."
This nearly three pound, 552 page beautifully printed collection of
photographs is a "must have" book for the true collector or student of
photography, but I'm afraid much of the general public will look at the
images and wonder what the big deal was with this almost legendary
photography magazine. I've often heard "Camera Work" referred to but this
is the first time I was able to see all the photographs that were included in
the 50 issues and one special issue that were published over a 14 year
period from 1903 to 1917.
By the time Stieglitz decided to cease publication, the magazine had
morphed into more of an art journal featuring modern art with some issues
not including any photographs. Never the less "Camera Work" made a
very important contribution to the development of American Photography.
While this book doesn't include any of the journal's articles or essays or
reproductions of the artwork that filled it's last editions, it did introduce the
world to American photographers of the "Pictorialist School" and the work
of the "Photo-Secessionist Movement." It helped promote photography as
an independent art form. However, the "Pictorialist School" of photography
was so limited and stylized that during the fourteen years he edited,
published and financed "Camera Work" even Stieglitz became bored with
the style while he moved into Modernism. His personal collection of his
photographer friend's work included many original prints by one of his chief
competitors of the era, F. Holland Day, and after a fire in Day's Boston
Studio, Stieglitz had the only prints of some of Day's best work. "In 1933,
he gave his collection of over 600 photographs by members of the Photo-
Secessionists and other pictorial photographers to the Metropolitan
Museum of New York. By this time he had come to see little value in this
style of photography, a style he had almost single-handedly nurtured in
America, and now wanted to be rid of it."
The book includes an excellent introductory essay by Pam Roberts
about Alfred Stieglitz and his two photography journals. His earlier
magazine was "Camera Notes." The book contains 559 beautifully
reproduced copies of Photogravure, Half tones and even a few of the
earliest examples of Tricolor photographic images. Master photographer
"Walker Evans could only remember one Paul Strand image from the 559
reproductions. Ansel Adams and Eliot Porter recalled Strand, Stieglitz and
Steichen, but the mass of pictorial work seemed to them from another era,
as indeed it was."
The book contains many "firsts" or near-firsts in photography history.
There are lots of nudes, my favorites by far, powerful pictures of the
Industrial Revolution, early action and sports subjects, and lots of portraits
of groups and individuals. Some famous personages are shown, but there
are also lots of average people who helped people like Clarence H. White
by getting up before dawn in order to pose for him at exactly the moment

the light and weather was perfect for White's desired image. They also had
to devote time to making costumes and rehearsing the desired poses
before the day of the actual shoot. I didn't care for all of the reproductions,
but I could at least appreciate why they were there. Since art is in the eye
of the beholder, there will be pleasing images for any viewer contained in
this one-volume encyclopedia of early American photography. One of the
few questions I had after reading the book was if this book is a smaller
sized version of the original journal. The book is 7.7 inches by 5.6 inches,
but that does not seem to be the same format ratio as the photographs of a
couple of the actual publications pictured across from the book's table of
contents. That's not enough to make me not appreciate the contribution
Taschen has made to photography by republishing all the original pictures
included in the pioneering work at a really inexpensive price.
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