Alfred Stieglitz (1864-1946) worked passionately to insure that photography be accepted as a unique art form. His unrelenting dedication to the idea that a photograph was as much an artistic expression as an oil painter's "handwork," lead him to expound on the virtues of aesthetic notions such as light, balance, inner vision, and poetry. To Stieglitz, a photograph could be a poem written in the language of photography.
At the same time that he pronounced the virtues of straight photography (a picture should be a combination of subject, just the right moment, and an artist's unique vision, rather than a product of darkroom manipulation or other painterly contrivances), he encouraged, and became mentor to, photographers who unabashedly imitated the aesthetics of painting. Stieglitz believed that "art is the only true expression of the individual in our mechanized society" (Jussim 248).
The fact that he used the medium of photography, which many artists and critics consider to be a mechanized medium devoid of handwork, is a tribute to his own artistic vision. He was capable of conjuring up tender and exquisite visions with a camera, regardless of the device's apparent objectivity. His 1902 "Spring Showers" presents the following image: rainy weather, a little city tree, and a street-sweeper at the place where Broadway crosses Fifth Avenue" (Vestal 728). The image is photographic, yet the whole is greater than the sum of its parts: the scene, in its entirety, has an emotional impact, similar to that of a poem. Stieglitz had found an objective correlative, to borrow a concept from literature, to express the emotion of tenderness.
One of the most vocal of the straight photography advocates, Stieglitz turned toward abstraction, symbolism, and mysticism. As Jussim observes in Shadow and Substance, "The cloud pictures, the "songs of the sky," are among the most beautiful, most subtle, most evocative of his creations, espe...