Clarence White took up photography while working as a bookkeeper in Newark, Ohio. Self-taught, he participated in the First Philadelphia Photographic Salon in 1898, only to serve on the jury himself the very next year, alongside Gertrude Käsebier and F. Holland Day. He soon joined the American circle of Pictorialist photographers.

White’s most frequent subjects were his family and friends, whom he roused out of bed for early-morning photography sessions before his workday began, when he could capture a unique quality of light. In 1904 he devoted himself to his art full-time, and two years later he moved his family to New York, in part to be closer to Stieglitz and other members of the Photo-Secession. Yet skyscrapers, trains, and other elements of the urban milieu never appear in his resolutely tranquil oeuvre.

Stieglitz included White’s photographs in six issues of Camera Work and devoted the entirety of the July 1908 publication to him. White was also featured, alongside Käsebier, in the third exhibition at 291, in 1906. But, like many others, he became disillusioned with Stieglitz’s authoritarian leadership of the Photo-Secession and in 1916 joined Käsebier and Alvin Langdon Coburn in founding the Pictorial Photographers of America as a more inclusive organization. He also taught photography classes, opening the Clarence H. White School of Photography in 1914. There he mentored many modernist photographers of the next generation, including Anton Bruehl, Dorothea Lange, Paul Outerbridge, and Margaret Bourke-White.

Paul Strand became known for practicing what was referred to as straight photography, made “without tricks of process or manipulation.”[1] After first visiting the Little Galleries of the Photo-Secession at the age of seventeen, he eventually befriended Stieglitz and showed him his early, Pictorialist-inspired work. Stieglitz advised Strand to move away from the soft-focus style and use a smaller lens aperture to create sharper photographs. Combined with the influence of Cubism and abstract art, this would lead to a breakthrough in Strand’s work, resulting in a remarkable series of abstract photographs.

In 1916, Stieglitz gave Strand a solo exhibit at 291, after abstaining from showing any photographs but his own in the years following the influential Armory Show of 1913. He also devoted the last two issues of Camera Work to Strand’s photographs, praising them as “the direct expression of today” and devoid of any “-ism.”[2] Later, Stieglitz would show Strand’s work at Anderson Galleries and the Intimate Gallery, including him in the group of American painters he championed in the 1920s and 30s.

Strand’s experiments in abstraction would never again be as “pure” as the photographs reproduced in Camera Work or shown at 291. Instead, he sought to apply the formal rules he had learned to works that reflected his leftist political views. These included a series of “portraits” of towns and regions published as photobooks, as well as a handful of films addressing labor concerns.

Strand, who was also mentored by Clarence White and Gertrude Käsebier, was a member of the younger generation of photographers promoted by Stieglitz. He was friends with many of the artists shown at 291, and he wrote prolifically on photography and painting, including on the work of John Marin. Strand and his first wife, Rebecca “Beck” Salsbury Strand, were close friends with Stieglitz and O’Keeffe, and Beck modeled for Stieglitz in the autumn of 1922.

[1] Paul Strand, “Photography,” Seven Arts 2, 524–25 (Aug. 1917), reprinted in Camera Work 49–50 (June 1917), p. 3.

[2] Ibid., p. 36.

Through his own photographic work over the course of a half century, the journals he edited and published, and the exhibitions he mounted at his influential New York galleries, Alfred Stieglitz played a crucial role in establishing photography as an integral part of modern art in America. A founder of the Photo-Secession, a Pictorialist group of photographers, he elevated the discourse and practice of photography, forming key connections between American and European movements. Later, he embraced straight photography, linking its potential for modern expression with that of avant-garde painting and sculpture.

Stieglitz’s early photographs and writings served as arguments for photography’s acceptance as an art form on par with painting. Studying in Europe, he made picturesque scenes with great technical skill, winning prizes for his large carbon prints. Upon his return to New York, he turned his camera to the streets and buildings of that rapidly changing city, printing his images as photogravures in order to emphasize the atmospheric effects and lend them a softening tone.

Beginning around 1910, Stieglitz shifted away from the painterly approach of the Pictorialists and toward a more direct, straightforward depiction, which was echoed in his use of photographic papers such as platinum, palladium, and later, gelatin silver prints. In his portraits of the many artists in his circle he probed new psychological depths, and an extended, “composite” portrait of Georgia O’Keeffe marked a new form of photographic description. Starting in 1922, Stieglitz made his first nearly abstract photographs with a series of cloud studies he called Equivalents, arguing that photography could assume the same nonrepresentational qualities as music. In his later work, he would continue to think in metaphors, whether depicting the construction of New York City skyscrapers or the dying poplars at his family estate in Lake George. Toward the end of his career, Stieglitz would revisit earlier negatives—reprinting and reinterpreting them with the crisp, cool tones of gelatin silver contact prints, demonstrating that his sensibilities had, even from the beginning, been thoroughly modern.

Stieglitz’s formidable activity as a publisher and a gallerist paralleled that of his work as an artist. After serving as the editor of Camera Notes, he published Camera Work, which evolved from a showcase for the Photo-Secession to a forum for international modern art of all media. At his galleries—the Little Galleries of the Photo-Secession, later known as 291; the Intimate Gallery; and An American Place—he introduced the European avant-garde and promoted a new generation of American painters, all while advocating for photography’s place among the other fine arts.

As a teenager growing up in Milwaukee, Edward Steichen first encountered art photography in the pages of Camera Notes, the journal Stieglitz edited for the New York Camera Club. In 1901, on his way to Paris to pursue the artistic life, Steichen stopped in New York to show Stieglitz his portfolio. Stieglitz promptly purchased three of the young man’s photographs, and this short interaction was the beginning of a fruitful collaboration.

Upon his return from Paris in 1902, Steichen became Stieglitz’s deputy in the Photo-Secession, designing the cover of Camera Work and overseeing the installation of the first shows organized under the group’s auspices. Steichen was the most prominent photographer in Camera Work, with 65 of his images reproduced during the journal’s run.

The works that Stieglitz collected by Steichen date from a time when Steichen pursued both photography and painting. His photographs maintain a careful balance between the sharp, focused details of the camera’s lens and the painterly forms made possible by manipulating the emulsion during the gum bichromate printing process, as seen in Rodin—Le Penseur and Self-Portrait with Brush and Palette. Steichen eventually turned away from Pictorialism in favor of modernist aesthetics and a successful career as a commercial photographer—a decision that caused a permanent rift between him and Stieglitz. His portraits and fashion photographs were often featured in Vogue and Vanity Fair, and he served as curator of photography at the Museum of Modern Art, New York, from 1947 to 1962.

Click here to learn more about Steichen’s time in the American Expeditionary Forces via a unique album of World War I–era aerial photographs from the Art Institute’s collection.

A collector and supporter of the arts, the Boston socialite Sarah Choate Sears was also an artist herself, having trained as a painter. Her friend F. Holland Day encouraged her to pursue photography, and she began exhibiting her work in Boston venues in the late 1890s; in 1900 Day included five of her prints in the show he organized in London, The New School of American Photography. Sears was a member of both the Linked Ring and the Photo-Secession. She seems to have largely abandoned photography after her husband died in 1905, although she did later return to painting.

Sears’s photographs, which were favorably received by critics and members of the Photo-Secession, include floral still-lifes, studies of children, and portraits of some of the most prominent artists and collectors in Boston. Stieglitz reproduced two of her photographs in the April 1907 issue of Camera Work, including the portrait of Julia Ward Howe, the author of “The Battle Hymn of the Republic,” which is part of the Stieglitz Collection at the Art Institute of Chicago.

An avid nature photographer, Eliot Porter helped to pioneer technologies of color printing and fought to have color photography recognized as art. He graduated from medical school and began a career in biophysics research, but quit to pursue photography full-time after being given a solo show at Stieglitz’s An American Place in 1938. In the pamphlet accompanying the exhibition, Stieglitz wrote: “For four years I have been watching the work of Eliot Porter. In the very beginning I felt he had a vision of his own. I sensed a potentiality. These photographs now shown I believe should have an audience.”[1]

Though that exhibition featured black-and-white prints, Porter is best known for vibrant three-color dye imbibition prints of nature scenes and cultural landmarks published in books and portfolios in partnership with the Sierra Club. He traveled the world in search of subjects, photographing in Africa, Antarctica, Asia, and South America.

Porter was among the last American photographers to be mentored by Stieglitz; he was introduced by his younger brother, painter Fairfield Porter, in the early 1930s. In 1979 the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, devoted an exhibition, Intimate Landscapes, to Porter’s work—the museum’s first solo show devoted to color photography.

[1] An American Place, Eliot Porter: Exhibition of Photographs, exh. cat. (An American Place, 1939), n.p.

Heinrich Kühn was a vocal advocate for photography as an art form, held membership in a variety of camera clubs, and passionately explored new photographic techniques and processes.

Kühn belonged to the so-called Viennese Trifolium, a trio of photographers who took up gum bichromate printing after its rediscovery just before the turn of the century, and in 1896 he was the first to exhibit gum bichromate prints in Germany. Kühn was a deliberate photographer, sketching out his compositions beforehand and posing his children in a special “photo wardrobe” of black-and-white clothing. He developed a custom soft-focus lens and a hybrid gum-gravure process, which allowed him to produce the soft, textured prints favored by Pictorialists. He was also an enthusiastic adopter of the autochrome, an early color photography process.

Stieglitz and Kühn had known of each other’s work since at least 1894, when Stieglitz praised Kühn’s photographs in a review of the Milan International Exhibit. After finally meeting in 1904, they became fast friends. Stieglitz later exhibited Kühn’s work at 291 and featured 15 of his photographs in the January 1911 issue of Camera Work. Although the two remained close, their aesthetic interests diverged. As Stieglitz gravitated toward straight photography—an approach that eschewed painterly effect and manipulation in favor of sharper pictures that emphasized the camera’s mechanical attributes—Kühn remained a Pictorialist, continuing to perfect handcrafted images of pastoral and family scenes.

Gertrude Käsebier started pursuing photography in middle age and was soon praised by Stieglitz as “beyond dispute the leading portrait photographer in this country.”[1] In 1897 she opened a portrait studio catering to the upper crust of New York society, commanding high prices for her work thanks to her “artistic” approach. Instead of formulaic poses, Käsebier sought to “make likenesses that are biographies,” as she put it, by spending hours with her subjects.[2] She was also known for her heartfelt, often allegorical images of mothers and children, which had an air of unposed authenticity even when staged for the camera. Käsebier experimented continually with photographic papers and processes and took full advantage of the painterly effects of gum bichromate.

Despite the fact that her thriving portraiture business put her at odds with the proudly “amateur” status of Pictorialist photographers, Käsebier was a core member of the Photo-Secession, and Stieglitz chose her over Edward Steichen to be featured in the first issue of Camera Work (January 1903). But after a period of increasing tension starting in 1908, due in part to Stieglitz’s disdain for commercially successful photographers and his shift toward straight photography, Käsebier definitively broke with Stieglitz in 1912, resigning her membership from the Photo-Secession in a tersely worded letter. Her friendships with other Pictorialist photographers remained strong, however, and she would go on to teach at Clarence White’s school and serve as honorary vice-president of the Pictorial Photographers of America, an organization founded by White and Alvin Langdon Coburn.

[1] Alfred Stieglitz, “Our Illustrations,” Camera Notes 3 (July 1899), p. 24.

[2] Mary Fanton Roberts [Giles Edgerton], “Photography as an Emotional Art: A Study of the Work of Gertrude Käsebier,” Craftsman 12 (April 1907), p. 88.

One of the most important collaborations in the history of photography began when the Scottish artist David Octavius Hill, hoping to make a grand commemorative painting, enlisted Robert Adamson—who possessed technical knowledge about the then-nascent art of photography—to help with portrait studies. The duo worked together for only five years, from 1843 to 1847, but they were prolific, producing more than fifteen hundred portraits, including images of local gentry and the men and women of the fishing village of Newhaven. Their photographs—salt prints made from paper negatives—were admired for their artistic composition, following a fashion for masses of form over vulgar or boring detail, and were likened in their day to the style of Rembrandt.

As did many in his circle, Alfred Stieglitz considered Hill one of the few nineteenth-century photographers working in a truly artistic mode (Adamson was overlooked at the time but has since come to be recognized as a crucial partner); in his writings Stieglitz regularly referred to Hill as “the father of pictorial photography.”[1] He included Hill and Adamson’s images in Camera Work on three separate occasions—in 1905, 1909, and 1912. He also exhibited their photographs at the Little Galleries of the Photo-Secession, alongside work by Frederick Evans and James Craig Annan, in 1906, the only time he showed nineteenth-century photography in his gallery, which would become known for promoting the avant-garde. And when Stieglitz mounted the comprehensive International Exhibition of Pictorial Photography at the Albright Art Gallery in Buffalo, New York, in 1910, the work of Hill and Adamson—with forty prints on view—was better represented than that of any living photographer.

The photographer and printer J. Craig Annan was the most energetic champion of Hill and Adamson’s body of work. After gaining access to their archive through family connections, he made original prints available for exhibition and produced new photogravures and carbon prints from the paper negatives. The carbon prints in Stieglitz’s collection were probably made by Annan or his father, Thomas.

[1] See, for example, Stieglitz’s “Letter to the Members of the Photo-Secession,” Photo-Era 15 (October 1905), reproduced in Richard Whelan, ed. Stieglitz on Photography: His Selected Essays and Notes (Millerton, NY: Aperture, 2000), p. 178.

Best known for painstakingly planned and printed images of cathedral interiors, Frederick H. Evans was a friend of F. Holland Day and a member of the Linked Ring, an English society of art photographers. He also served as a bridge between British Pictorialist photographers and the Photo-Secession.

Evans practiced what he called “the straightest of the straight photography,” aiming to expose negatives so perfectly that no darkroom manipulation would be needed.[1] Unusually for a Pictorialist, he disdained the presence of visible brushstrokes in his prints, writing, “Photography is photography; and in its purity and innocence is far too uniquely valuable and beautiful to be spoilt by making it imitate something else.”[2] He preferred to print on rough platinum paper, which offered a rich tonal range while obscuring any slight defects in the negative.

In 1905 Evans was hired by the London-based magazine Country Life to photograph country churches, an assignment he would parlay into a longstanding, open-ended commission to provide the publication with images of architectural subjects. Evans also frequently wrote on photography, and his articles appeared in Camera Work and various British photography journals.

Stieglitz admired Evans’s cathedral images and devoted the fourth issue of Camera Work (October 1903) to them, writing that “of the thousands who have photographed cathedrals, none has imbued his pictures with such poetic qualities coupled with such masterful treatment.”[3] In 1906 Stieglitz showed Evans’s work alongside that of David Octavius Hill and Robert Adamson and J. Craig Annan in an exhibition of British photographers at his gallery 291.

[1] Frederick H. Evans, quoted in Beaumont Newhall, Frederick H. Evans: Photographer of the Majesty, Light, and Space of the Medieval Cathedrals of England and France (Aperture, 1973), p. 9.

[2] Frederick H. Evans, “An Art Critic on Photography,” Amateur Photographer 39, 1024 (May 1904), pp. 625–26.

[3] Alfred Stieglitz, “Our Illustrations,” Camera Work 4 (Oct. 1903), p. 25.