#3 Nevertheless, we should go back to Stieglitz photographic production. If art suppose a active process of naming of the world, then Stieglitz witnessed artistically the birth of the giant city and its transformation from a sleeping urban context marked by horse-drawn trolleys, coaches and bodywork to a turbulent synonym of a modern and cruel mechanical metropolis traced by the emblems of the new age. In the context of the American redefined culture, “his images celebrate the openness and possibilities of a new age, including urban life”6F. Stieglitz captures the city as an emerging urban centre whose emblems such as steam, smoke, fog, shadows and drowning lights are joining the image of the city life. Thus, he will keep in his perception the memory of the time when his city was covered by trees and rocks and will cultivate the perception of the radical evolution that New York city has stand (The Flat-Iron, the City of Ambitions). In fact, the huge urban transformation will change New York from a big maritime and bank centre to a giant metropolis where not only the skyscrapers are going to be build, but as well the artistic and the intellectual bohemian life will arise in a tremendously fast way.
Alfred Stieglitz did not avoid the essential influence from the old European art rules and he did not even tried to respect them because they engulfed him. It is true that he introduced the European modern art in America, but it is true though that he liked moreover being an interpreter of the new emerging modernism in New York which, basically was his town and his cultural womb. Hoffman recognizes in his light-textures an old Europe influence or even some traces of the old gothic structure architecture in the new representation of the new urban modern emergence. She calls this light, a beginning light.
Still, Stieglitz’s efforts as a photographer, collector, curator, writer, and publisher had one goal: to secure photography’s role as a legitimate medium of fine art. But his efforts extends far beyond his photographic work given that he influenced generations of photographers, painters, and sculptors both directly and indirectly. In 1905, with the young photographer immigrated from Luxembourg in the State of Michigan in 1879, Edward Steichen, he founded the Little Galleries of the Photo-Secession at 291 Fifth Avenue in New York, which later became known simply as 291. He organized various photographic exhibitions and elevated photography’s status to the level of painting and sculpture.
Although it may seem historically a little bit early to say, still the collaboration with Steichen, was marked by the emergence even of some post-modern allusions: the infinite reproductions and repetitions were a serious proof. For example, the Flat-iron building was seen by both authors as a paradigm of the vertically vertiginous expansion of the urban collective culture. The mysterious building that was erected on 23rd street at the junction of the Fifth Avenue and Broadway, was named by the New Yorkers the Fuller building or the Flat-Iron building because of its modern, aggressive and mechanical shape.
#4 Still, Stieglitz saw it differently: he once said that the Flat-iron building “appeared to be moving toward me like the bow of a monster steamer–a picture of a new America still in the making”7F. For example, even though his wife O’Keeffe and his father did not like this contradictory representation of New York, Stieglitz said: “It is to America shat Parthenon was to Greece”8F. Beyond its architectonical marks of the rise of the metropolis, in Stieglitz’s photography this building, in its cityscape, is opposed with the normal shape of a tree in its landscape. Their silhouettes are confused in the on two separate levels overlapping one on top of the other. As we will see later on, this soft flattening of the space can be recognized in the influence of Japanese wood-block prints. Also the sophisticated grow of snow between the two branches of the tree contrasted to the fragile white carpet underneath the city bench is a clear allusion to the Japanese
aesthetic. The tiny figure of the tree simulates the virtual human presence drowned under the surge of the Flat-iron building. Like in the Japanese stamps, in Stieglitz photographs, human presence is, often dwarfed by trees, or by some huge constructions. In New York, indeed buildings make people seem small.
In this insight, the building seems unreal and virtual, almost suppressed by the silent end involving nature on the first level of the photograph. The first tree seems like a fracture in the urban sight: it splits, shakes and shivers the quite winter fantasy. Even though Stieglitz was familiar chronologically to the process of the construction of this building, this image remained anyhow unique in his art perception. Other photographs such as Edwards Steichen, Alvin Langdon Coburn shoot some sights of the Flat-iron building but, as Hoffman will remark, their images “tended to be more concerned with the building as a part of city life: the building dominates their photographs more fully and the viewer is more aware of traffic on the city street”9F. While in Stieglitz photograph of the Flat-iron building there is no trace of human presence and everything seems so virtual and filled with absence, in Edward Steichen photograph of the same building in the first plan of the image there is a shape of a man. This is a strong allusion to the character and to the time determination of the city evolution: the man with a hat is on the top of a coach driving in the rise of an early evening drifted by the shimmering lights. It is no more winter time, the feelings of ice are being melted in the mirroring street and the rainy evening. The Steichen’s Flat-iron is not what it is in the Stieglitz metaphysical representation: here it is just an insight of the urban life, and moreover a shadow, or a background. What, still remains the same, is the tiny shape of the tree branches that are witnessing metaphorically the human solitude in the metropolis.
No human presence in Stieglitz’s photographs indicates a lack of signs of identity: just a flow or flux of fog and shadows between the emerging buildings. Where there does exist, then the human presence is surrounded by fog and mist. In the huge metropolis, Steiglitz eliminates the human figure in order to leave place for the geometrical expansion of the new architecture. That is to say, this process simulates the new and various human movement and inter-migration that has occurred in New York. One of the identities of any big city is, actually the loneliness of the shape.
#5 In New York from Shelton, the ugly, weird and almost four-dimensional erection of the high buildings simulates in an explicit way the Stieglitz’s perspective where the rise of the machine building is simulating the totally cyber and modernistic expansion of the city of New York in the beginning of the 20th century. The clear shape of the sun-lighted building arises from the depth of that black shadow where perhaps there is a flux of human movements and traffic sounds but we don’t see nor here them. On the top of the roofs and of the veil of black sphere, three geometrical cubes have broke through in another more abstract sphere where there is no sign of urban life but only a virtual fluctuation of this strange window-shape form called simply skyscraper. This photography is an image of a concrete fact – the arrivals and the departures in the promised city where dreams becomes reality – that gains its abstract quality in the lighting. As Caffin notes, “if a profusion of detail is allowed, the figure will necessarily obtrude itself, without, however, necessarily gaining separate importance, for the general confusion distracts”10F, in this photograph the buildings have lost their quality of being buildings: they are a grey decoration of the cruel urban insight. Stieglitz is breaking through modernity because he is testing the limits and the measures of the photography possibilities: he writes light and darkness, he uses shape and form as an expressive medium and he fills them with another meaning. We may though recognize a Mondrian’s geometrical size of cube in the representation of the skyscraper. Thus, we may also compare the cycle with clouds called Equivalents to the atmospheric harmony of the buildings composition in The City of Ambition. They both contain the chaos and they claim implicitly to represent the chaos and in the same time the order of the world in its relation to the realistic and to the abstract things. How could it be possible to put on a same level the abstract movement of the air on the sky and the naturalistic air convulsion from the chimney in The City of Ambition? Actually, Stieglitz made it possible by giving them both the idea of being cut out from the real context and realized on a higher level of the modern art construction.
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6. HOFFMAN, Kaherine, Stieglitz: a beginning light, Yale University Press, New Haven and London 2004. P. 195
7. Cit. in: Idem, p. 211.
8. Idem, p. 210.
9. Idem, p. 212.
10. CAFFIN, Charles H., Photography as a fine art, Morgan & Morgan, New York 1971, p. 187.