One day in 1907 Alfred Stieglitz was strolling along the upper deck of a luxury liner headed for Europe when he saw something that stopped him. Below, in the steerage section, a number of unremarkable forms visible in the crowd — a passenger’s straw hat, circular chains, a drawbridge, a staircase — intersected in such a way that made him run back to his room and grab his camera.
When he returned, he was glad to see little in the scene had changed. He quickly released the camera’s shutter, capturing in that instant an image that as an older man he considered his finest. “I saw a picture of shapes,” he later wrote, “and underlying that the feeling I had about life.”
Many of Stieglitz’s contemporaries, including Pablo Picasso, praised “The Steerage,” which became recognized as a pivotal work that helped secure photography’s stature as a fine art. Today the photograph serves as the starting point for two ambitious exhibitions at the Catherine Edelman Gallery and Carol Ehlers Gallery that separately illustrate its importance in the major movements of pictorialism and modernism.
The significance of “The Steerage” to both styles is striking given their fundamental differences. While pictorialism emphasized emotion over form in evocative scenes, modernism encouraged taut, highly detailed images. Both galleries give the long view, showing the movements not only in their original incarnations but also in their influences on later generations of photographers. The exhibitions make up part of Chicago’s fourth annual Absolut Vision art event, which includes 25 gallery shows and continues through Sept. 3.
When Stieglitz published “The Steerage” in 1911 in the magazine Camera Work, he had little indication it would mark the cusp of outgoing pictorialism and incoming modernism, which went on to dominate the 20th Century. At the time he was a true believer and practitioner of the former movement. In 1902 Stieglitz had founded a society called the Photo-Secession whose members passionately advocated pictorialism in national and international exhibitions as well as in Camera Work, which was published from 1902 to 1917.
The exhibition at Edelman shows the rise and heyday of pictorialism, which had its roots in English photography of the late 1880s. A photographer named Peter Henry Emerson coined the term “pictorial” in a speech railing against the stale, academic portraits and mawkish landscapes churned out by commercial photographers of the day. He argued that photography was more than a mere recorder of the factual world. He also asserted that rather than being just a cheap imitation, photography was capable of reaching the same artistic levels of painting and sculpture.
“Painting was the medium at that time,” Edelman observed. “(Photographers) figured if they aligned themselves with what people knew and recognized as art, perhaps it would be more acceptable.”
Emerson advised photographers to shoot their images slightly out of focus and keep their subjects uncomplicated to heighten their emotional impact. Clearly, many photographers took his advice to heart; the vast majority of pictorialist images made in the next two decades featured soft-focus, simple compositions. Pictorialists stayed within a pretty narrow range of subjects — figure studies, landscapes and genre scenes. More important than what was pictured was the way it was pictured.
The 46 photos at Edelman show the pervasiveness of pictorialism in the early 20th Century. Edward Steichen’s cover design for a 1906 issue of Camera Work shows the dramatic, full-length figure of a woman in a black dress holding a shining sphere with an Art Nouveau-inspired border. The image is misty and enigmatic, achieving the romantic atmosphere that pictorialists sought. Consuelo Kanaga’s impressionistic “Portrait of Alice Rohrer” is another prime example, with the subject’s dreamy, rather melancholy expression and languid pose.
In just a few years Stieglitz and his fellow Photo-Secessionists succeeded in gaining international recognition for pictorialism. They managed to convince audiences of photography’s aesthetic potential and in doing so put the United States at the forefront of that art form.
Then pictorialism faded into obscurity for about 40 years, overtaken by the modernists’ sharper images.
But, as Edelman illustrates, pictorialism has returned in contemporary photography to a certain extent. In fact, the second half of the show is given to examples of today’s photographers working in pictorialism’s idealized manner. Artists such as Robert Stivers, Dick Arentz and Sally Mann have adopted a soft-focus approach, often in ways more extreme than the early pictorialists. For instance, the images in Stivers’ “Portrait of Woman” and Bill Jacobson’s “Songs of Sentient Beings 1583” are so blurred as to be almost indistinguishable; one is left with a mere impression of the subjects.
“The early practitioners paved the way for people working today,” Edelman said. “There’s no debate anymore whether photography is a fine art or not, nor how a subject should be rendered. Today everybody comes at it differently.”
In between the original and later bookmarks of pictorialist influence in the 20th Century, however, modernism reigned. The photographer generally credited with ushering in modernism is Paul Strand, who, like Stieglitz, has works in both shows. Clues to a major shift in photographic sensibility can be seen at Edelman’s gallery; in particular, Strand’s “New York” of 1916, which appeared in Camera Work, looks slightly out of place among the romantic images. The dynamic photo captures an instant in time in a much more direct, realistic manner than was usual in pictorialism.
Another Strand image, 1915’s “New York (Wall Street),” is one of the first 69 images on view at Ehlers Gallery. The photo depicts a commonplace scene — pedestrians walking on a wide sidewalk by a monolithic building — but a strong sense of place emerges through the rhythm of architectural elements and peoples’ shadows. Strand and successive modernists believed that only through direct photography could truth and artistry be reached.
Ehlers’ exhibition presents a virtual catalog of the century’s best-known photographers, whose modernist works she grouped by unifying elements rather than chronologically. The photographers range from Edward Weston, Lewis Hine, Imogen Cunningham and Walker Evans to Bob Thall, Terry Evans and Jay Wolke. Joining the photographers over decades is their belief in the camera’s ability to capture scenes from the world around us and give them new meanings.
“These works show us what life is like through patterns,” Ehlers said. Although the works record the contemporary world, “there’s a difference between photojournalism and modernism,” she noted. “With journalism you’re telling a story, but with (modernism) you’re also getting the artists’ perspectives.”
Ehlers devoted entire walls to particular themes, such as city streets, rural landscapes and buildings within landscapes, that can jump decades from image to image. One wall contains both Arthur Siegel’s 1939 “Right of Assembly,” depicting a demonstration in Detroit, and Lee Friedlander’s “New York City” from 1964. The former relates the crowd’s energy from above through a mass of figures while the latter bristles with seemingly random visual fragments.
“One of the issues in the late 1960s and early ’70s is a different sense of time compared to Stieglitz’s and Strand’s,” Ehlers said. “Their time is an eternal, frozen moment in which truth is held. In Friedlander time is layered, which gives the effect of collage.”
Modernist photographers can shed light on contemporary life with uncomfortable honesty. Robert Adams’ two photos from the 1970s series “What We Bought” present a deserted strip mall under a huge expanse of sky and a station wagon parked in front of a ranch-style house at dusk. With these lonely images Adams poses some existential questions about how we live in the late 20th Century.
Given the scope of both exhibitions, most viewers will find something to which they can relate. Ehlers summed up the images’ wide-ranging appeal this way: “Photography is one of the great languages of the 20th Century. Because we’ve used it to communicate for so long, it’s everybody’s native language.”
