1. Introduction
It is difficult to limit a discussion of Alfred Stieglitz to just one profession, let alone just one artistic movement within the field of photography. He is one of the main figures in the art world in the first half of the twentieth century. In addition to his work with images, he was also an editor, collector, speaker, art dealer, gallery owner – and the husband and publicist of the painter Georgia O’Keeffe. Overall, though, he was the premier photographer of the first half of the twentieth century in the United States.
However, the main thrust of his life’s work was to promote the viability of photography as one of the fine arts, and his own work stands as a prime example of what makes collecting images such a masterful process. Not only through his own photography but through his galleries and periodicals, Stieglitz changed American photography at the dawn of the 1900s, exposing an audience already familiar with the possibilities of art the beauty possible in photography, establishing a niche for photography as one of the earnest art forms (Naef). He was also intrigued by the possibilities that the technological advances in the camera had for representation (Munson).
Through his entire career, he called for photography to be seen as equivalent in artistic value with sculpture and painting; this is why he showed photographs in direct juxtaposition with some of the most innovative works of art to make it to the United States from Europe during that time period. He even displayed his own work boldly – in one exhibition, he interspersed his own photography with reproductions of the drawings and paintings of Pablo Picasso, giving his viewers a suggestion of the potential of photography as an art form, in contrast to the assembly line work of typical portraitists of his day. His purpose was to create images that showed considerable individual expression and a discipline that would simply undress the mass produced images “of the doctrinaire, of the compromiserof the Philistine” (Stieglitz 156). It is impossible to undertake a study of American photography without running into the various movements that Stieglitz influenced or the pictures that he himself produced.
2. Background to The Steerage
The Steerage is one of the pictures that has come to define Stieglitz’s career. He took the picture in 1907 (Lee 2). At the time, he was traveling to Europe on a ship, and the picture would eventually become the image that people would associate with his artistic efforts and would become an essential part of the definition of photography as an art, at a time when this form was just beginning to pick up validity as art among the critical public (Lee 2). At the present time, The Steerage is one of the most well-known photographs taken by an American artist in the early part of the twentieth century.
One reason for the omnipresence of The Steerage is the sheer number of times Stieglitz himself published it and put it up for exhibitions. In addition, he went into considerable detail about how he developed the photograph in the first place and how the viewer should interpret it as an artwork (Homer).
He published The Steerage in his periodical Camera Work in 1911, and then put it out there again in such works as The Saturday Evening Post, American Photography and Vanity Fair (Craven). It appeared in no fewer than nine different gallery shows that he produced between 1913 and 1944, and he also made photogravure prints of on multiple occasions, each with its own tone and unique paper stock – as well as in gelatin silver as a print (Lee 4). So in addition to its own artistic merits, The Steerage grew in exposure and popularity through Stieglitz’s own efforts to promote the image.
3. Artistic Elements in The Steerage
Even so, there are many elements of this photograph that make it stand out, not only as a seminal accounting of the social realities of the time in which Stieglitz lived, but also as a guidepost of what photography as an art form represents, in contrast with picking up a camera and shooting pictures as a hobby, or as an accompaniment to tourism. The people entering the steerage compartment already have to access the boat through a separate entrance from those in the upper economic echelons of the boat.
The fact that the wealthy stand above the poor, in this picture, is a vivid reminder of the divisions that then (and still now) marked the way that American society was striated. It is clearly a cool day outside; the wealthy above are wearing hats and coats; the poor below are wearing blankets and shawls. The facial expressions above are stoic and calm; the facial expression of the woman down below, right in the center of the steerage passengers, shows a resigned exhaustion as she leans and waits. The relative disorder (blankets lying this way and that) also shows a comparative lack of attention to aesthetics, whether this is from a smaller number of attendants available to help boarding passengers below or from another cause.
In terms of viewing this photograph as a seminal art form, there are several points worth discussing. First, the photographer is an objective viewer, separate from the events going on as people are awaiting the departure of this ship. This is not a hobby photograph taken of friends who are smiling and waving. Instead, it is an attempt to represent the world as one sees it; this has been part of the artistic process since the first cave painters began picking up rocks and other objects that left distinct colors on the walls.
Second, there is an attention to line and form in the perspective that the photographer has chosen for this image. The gangway slices through the middle of the picture, moving from the left middle to the right, stopping abruptly at the deck where the higher-class passengers are awaiting departure. The chains that dangle along the sides of the gangway are there to provide safety and security for the passengers entering the upper section, so that they will not fall into the lower section and injure themselves.
Chains also represent a powerful symbol of confinement; if one of the steerage passengers were to try to mingle with one of the upper class passengers without invitation, one would not imagine the breach in social decorum to be a welcome one. In this picture, the steerage passengers appear to be in some sort of moat that is below where the rest of the passengers sit. In the upper section, the central object is the straw hat of a man looking down at the steerage passengers, as though they are some sort of curiosity rather than fellow human beings. Down below his hat, in steerage, one sees the resigned woman; the line between these two heads intersects with the gangway in the center of the photograph, making those points of separation the focal point.
Third, there is an attention to the use of light in the photograph. The print has, in general, a osft tone to it. However, that same hat, turned down with the head of the man peering at the steerage passengers, is the strongest point of light in the top half of the picture. Down below, the back of the resigned woman stands out, as does the shawl on a small child in the lower left.
The man looking down, taken with the woman and child below, brings to bear one of the central contradictions of this image. On a ship such as this, if something happens to jeopardize the seaworthiness of the craft, women and children are to be loaded into lifeboats first. It is difficult to imagine the wealthy men above allowing the poor women and children from the steerage compartments into boats before they would step into those boats themselves.
4. Critical Responses to The Steerage
The Steerage would continue to evoke a range of critical responses even decades after it first appeared. In 1995, Allan Sekula published Fish Story, which looked at the interaction between marine scenes and the growth of capitalism. Sekula found The Steerage to be “simultaneously a romantic vision of a world unto itselfan oblique confession of ‘how the sea is money,’ and a quelling of the subversive qualities of the ship’sheterotopia” (Francisco 110).
This is the problem, of course, of taking one photograph and trying to endow it with symbolic status for a generation. When one person looks at a photograph, of course, he is viewing it through an entirely different nexus of experiences and ideas than another person looking at the same image. This is the inspiration behind Roland Barthes’ suggestion that the idea of the “author” is an outmoded one, one that should instead be replaced by the idea of the “scriptor.” In his paradigm, there are no authors, readers, photographers, or viewers. Instead, everyone is a scriptor, whether they are the person who wrote the novel or shot the picture, or whether they are the one who picks up the novel to read it or who picks up the picture to look at it (or meanders in front of it at a gallery) (Barthes).
The idea, then, is that the person encountering the work adds (or subtracts) just as much meaning as the one who snapped the camera shutter, edited the film in the darkroom (or in PhotoShop, as it goes today) and then framed it. Indeed, in the world of photography, the wealth of editing tools available to everyone’s disposal turns the whole genre into a giant wiki, as anyone can take the pictures of Stieglitz (or anyone else), upload them, and then transform them as they wish.
5. Contemporary Contexts and The Steerage
What makes Stieglitz’s image so powerful is the wealth of appeals that it makes to similar statements in other artistic forms, or even other forms of communication. After all, there are a wealth of stories in American popular culture about the steamship era, although most of them seem, at least in our own time, to center around the tragedy of the Titanic. The love affair between Rose and Jack in that tale would not have been nearly so poignant had Jack been walking up behind her in a tuxedo in that scene where she wants to jump off the ship and leave her life behind.
The fact that a young woman from wealth and means is willing to cast everything aside for a young man who is literally penniless adds weight to the story (Titanic). What is important from an artistic viewpoint is that Stieglitz’s photograph appeals to so many people through so many different channels.
In the decades between the Great War and World War II, the realities of the Great Depression would have made his picture all the more poignant, as the chains on that gangway where the privileged had been allowed to walk, but sways above the heads of the poor would have become even more ponderous to the viewer, who was lost looking for some measure of social justice in the way that they observed the world.
6. Conclusion
The fact that the photograph invites so many different appeals shows that there is an artistic fullness to the picture – but the fullness ends with the creation of the picture (Francisco 110). The images in the picture are there for the viewer to negotiate, but then the images move into the various semiotic influences that dwell within the viewer – and might not dwell within any other viewer, and might not dwell within that same viewer if he came back a year later to look at the photograph again (Barthes). The artistic elements of the photograph elaborate a particular vision of the day, but the fact that one could move interpretively in so many different directions from that point means that this is not narrative, this is not invective.
Instead, it is art that has been allowed to move through the viewer freely. This is what separates Stieglitz’s photography from the rigidly intentional photography of the hobbyist; this is what separates art from craft. It is this sort of touch that makes the work of Stieglitz so foundational in the early days of photography. Without these sorts of images, there is nothing to indicate that the art form would have moved from the stuff of hobby to objects worthy of exhibition in galleries and worthy of deep consideration.
Works Cited
Barthes, Roland. “The Death of the Author.” N.d. Web. 29 March 2016.
Craven, Thomas. “Stieglitz – Old Master of the Camera.” Saturday Evening Post 216 (28), p.
15.
Francisco, Jason. “The Prismatic Fragment.”in The Steerage and Alfred Stieglitz. Berkeley,
CA: University of California Press, 2012.
Homer, William I. Stieglitz and the Photo-Secession 1902. New York: Viking Studio, 2002.
Lee, Anthony W. “Introduction.” In The Steerage and Alfred Stieglitz. Berkeley, CA:
Munson, Steven C. "The Eye of Alfred Stieglitz." Commentary 108, no. 4 (November 1999): 52.
Naef, Weston. The Collection of Alfred Stieglitz: Fifty Pioneers of Modern Photography.
New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1978.
Stieglitz, Alfred. “The Photo-Secession,” in Richard Whelan, ed., Stieglitz on Photography:
His Selected Essays and Notes. Millerton, NY: Aperture, 2000.
Stieglitz, Alfred. The Steerage. Mount Holyoke College Art Museum, 1907.
Titanic. Dir. James Cameron. Perf. Leonardo DiCaprio, Kate Winslet, Billy Zane. Twentieth
Century Fox Film Corporation, 1997. Film.
