Shooting for the Stars

The Art Museum launches its new Perelman satellite with a retrospective Stieglitz exhibit.


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Published: Sep 19, 2007

Photo By: Michael T. Regan

Considering the number of artists and art students living in Philadelphia, Kate Ware is excited to offer them a chance to come face to face with the work of Alfred Stieglitz.

"They can see his work not in a book, but in the form of the actual prints," she says.

Walking through a gallery containing more than 50 career-spanning works by the pioneering photographer, Ware, curator of photography at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, says that paring down the museum's collection of nearly 600 Stieglitz images into a single exhibit was no simple task. It was a matter of dividing his work into eras and themes, finding images in, say, his early series of cityscapes, that complemented later meditations on New York shot from the Shelton Hotel.

The resulting Alfred Stieglitz and the Philadelphia Museum of Art — one of three inaugural exhibits at the PMA's new Perelman Building — presents a cross section of the photographer's career and life.

"His work is really the foundation of our photo collection," Ware says, noting that a donation of hundreds of his prints by his widow Georgia O'Keeffe in 1949 was one of the first large-scale photography acquisitions the museum made.

"We loan it out all the time," she says. "These prints have been all over the country, all over the world. But this is the first time they've been shown at home."

From the walls of the Julian Levy Gallery, the images seem to take on a life of their own. The vintage cityscapes, bathed in the deep tea-colored tone of gravure printing, give off an air of bustling antiquity, smoky street corners, a swelling metropolis. The Equivalents series, which depicts the movement of clouds across the skies at Lake George, is wispy and breezy.

It's evocative work, but for those who might prefer something more provocative than Equivalent — people who can view Stieglitz's atmospheric abstractions and still find the man stuffy and uninteresting — we recommend making a simple 180-degree turn to the wall behind them. First, view the series of intimate images he shot of O'Keeffe: the strained sexuality of Hands and Horse Skull and the curious portrait where she appears as a headless nude. Then turn the corner to find an equally sensual study of his friend and lover, Philadelphia artist and activist Dorothy Norman, which also finds a focal point in her hands.

"I was interested in particular to see that repetition, that return to his visual preoccupation," Ware says.

Nuanced imagery is part and parcel of Stieglitz's legacy as a photographer. Along with colleagues Edward Steichen, Gertrude Käsebier, Clarence White and Alvin Langdon Coburn — members of the Photo-Secession collective — he was instrumental in elevating photography from a simple tool for formal portraiture into an accepted form of fine art by experimenting with printing techniques such as gum bichromate, as well as challenging established visual conventions. Does a portrait-sitter need to appear so rigid? Couldn't a photographer convey someone's personality more through a candid shot, the subject standing uncouth in their own environs? The most striking portrait in the exhibit shows Lake George caretaker Richard Menshausen in front of a barn, appearing somewhat grizzled, face wrinkled and mouth opened midsentence. It's not as formal as the other portraits, but much more full of life.

Stieglitz's photo-advocacy continued through a series of short-lived New York galleries (291, Intimate and An American Place) and his publication of the influential journal Camera Work, but his own photography remained a constant undercurrent.

The serial imagery of poplar trees taken year after year in the 1930s, also at Lake George — Ware says his shooting "essentially ended up going back and forth between the country and city" — show how a single subject can be viewed a variety of ways. The changing state of the trees, as well as Stieglitz's own slight compositional alterations, create a metamorphosis over time. To make a simplified comparison, it echoes what Monet did with his Japanese bridge some 40 years before.

Likewise, the shots from his apartment on the 30th floor of the Shelton also frame the city from a fixed perspective and record its changes at different times of the day, seeing shadows completely blanket an adjoining building in the afternoon only for the building to take center stage when the sun is down.

The portraits of O'Keeffe and Norman are also serialized to a degree, in that they both rely on repeated themes of cropped faces and hands at work. Both are shot in profile, eyes averted to the distance and both find fingers manipulating tools of some craft — O'Keeffe handles thimbles, Norman her twin-lens camera.

It is tempting to dissect those subtle differences in the series' imagery with Stieglitz's relationship to both women in mind. O'Keeffe is presented in darker, robust palladium prints from 8-by-10 negatives, Norman appears in brighter prints taken from a Graflex camera. O'Keeffe looks to the right, Norman to the left.

But aside from visual variety, these distinctions don't seem to contain any underlying significance; the story is more to be found in the chronology. The majority of Stieglitz's O'Keeffe portraits on display were shot in 1918 and 1919, with some extending into the 1920s. In 1929, though, O'Keeffe began taking extended travels in New Mexico, while Stieglitz remained in New York. Around this time, his imagery of her becomes more distanced and stoic, appearing almost bored in one shot after her return to New York. This is also the time — early 1930s — where Stieglitz befriended Norman, photographing her with the same delicacy and care with which he once captured O'Keeffe. It's as though, during this period of estrangement, he saw in Norman what he'd seen in his wife 15 years prior.

Subtexts like this are indicative of the levels at which this exhibit works; on a similar note, Ware is fond of looking at the evolving self-portraits on display, the ways in which Stieglitz altered his dress and facial hair to manipulate his public persona over the years.

"You can view this as an overview of Stieglitz's [photography]," Ware says. "But also as a narrative of his life."

In a sense, viewers aren't just coming face-to-face with Stieglitz's work, but with Stieglitz himself.

(j_vettese@citypaper.net)

Alfred Stieglitz and the Philadelphia Museum of Art, runs through Jan. 31, 2008, Perelman Building, 2525 Pennsylvania Ave., 215-763-8100, www.philamuseum.org.