Tag: Art

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Alfred Stieglitz (1864–1946) and American Photography by Lisa Hostetler | Department of Photographs, The Metropolitan Museum of Art

Alfred Stieglitz

https://www.metmuseum.org/toah/hd/stgp/hd_stgp.htm

When I was in photography school years ago, besides learning all the facets of working with film photography, we also studied the history of photography, including the biographies of the great photographers from its roots to the present.

Of all those, I found Alfred Stieglitz one of the most fascinating. He was schooled in engineering but was a pioneer who took photography beyond the technical and just capturing images, into the aesthetic , artistic world of infinite creative possibilities. His life spanned a time of significant geopolitical events and modernization that changed the world. His life with Georgia O’Keefe helped further assimilate photography into an expressive art from. He was a skilled photographic technician but also excelled in whatever genre and style of photography he chose to work in.

If anyone enjoys art, photography, history and a good story as much as I do, but is not aware of the life and work of Alfred Stieglitz, then I would suggest you take a look at the brilliant legacy he left behind to enrich our lives.

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Photography – The Creative and Technical

Photography combines the creative with the technical. That was true with film and now with digital. This is one reason I enjoy photography and how it can blend both together so well when creating an image. While it may seem that one prevails over the other more in some photographs, I find that upon deeper examination that it becomes apparent both are always present, one could not exist alone without the other although the weight of each can shift and predominate depending on how an image is examined. This goes beyond photography and into some age-old art vs. science dichotomous type of discussions. One of the favorite books I read in my youth and again more recently, decades later is “Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance: An inquiry into Values” by Robert M. Pirsig. Any discussion about the creative and technical brings thoughts of that book to mind without fail. When I shoot and during post-processing images, it comes to mind when I seem to get bogged down and lose focus. It is when that divide between the creative and technical disappears that I seem to come forth with some of my best images.