Alfred Stieglitz At Lake George [Hardcover]

John Szarkowski (Author), Alfred Stieglitz (Photographer)

Book Description

Publication Date: July 2, 2002

For more than a decade before World War I, Alfred Stieglitz lent much of his formidable energy to his public career as an editor, publisher, proselytizer, and art dealer. In the 1920s and 30s, he turned again to his own photography, exploring his personal world at Lake George, in the Adirondack mountains of New York, where he spent summers at a family farmhouse. He photographed the things around him--the landscape, the clouds overhead, the intimate life he led with family and friends, including Georgia O'Keefe, Waldo Frank, and Paul Rosenfeld. This body of work, radical and private, is the essential aspect of Stieglitz's achievement as a photographer, and has nowhere else been published as a coherent whole.

Editorial Reviews

About the Author

Perhaps no other person has done as much to legitimize the art of photography as did Alfred Stieglitz. Born in 1864 in Hoboken, New Jersey, Stieglitz studied mechanical engineering in Berlin but was always drawn to taking pictures. He won the first of his 150 photography prizes at age 24 in a British competition judged by P.H. Emerson. Returning to New York in 1889, Stieglitz began writing on photography and exhibiting his own work, the most celebrated of which include The Terminal (1893) and The Steerage (1907). In 1902, Stieglitz founded the Photo-Secession group and opened his first gallery, 291, where he exhibited American photographers of the Pictorialist movement, and painters and sculptors including Matisse, Braque, Rodin, and Georgia O'Keeffe, whom he married in 1924. That same year he began publishing the quarterly Camera Work. Stieglitz ran two other art spaces, the Intimate Gallery and An American Place, and continued to photograph until his death in 1946, leaving behind hundreds of studies of O'Keeffe, photographs of Lake George, and New York City views.

Product Details

• Hardcover: 112 pages
• Publisher: The Museum of Modern Art, New York (July 2, 2002)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 087070138X
• ISBN-13: 978-0870701382
• Product Dimensions: 10.3 x 9.3 x 0.6 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.9 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 4.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (1 customer review)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,718,005 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars The Private Stieglitz, March 15, 2000

By 

Tom Rand - See all my reviews

This review is from: Alfred Stieglitz at Lake George (Hardcover)

The name Stieglitz conjures up many images that helped define modern photography. With his publications of Camera Notes and Camera Work, numerous awards, and a tenacious drive to promote photography as a serious art, Alfred Stieglitz shaped our awareness of photography like no other. Although earlier photographs such as The Steerage, The Hand of Man, Spring Showers, The Terminal and others are indelibly linked to Stieglitz, it is his later work that is just as important to this oeuvre. With the publication of "Stieglitz at Lake George" we see a man content with his craft, to the point where some of the images have a snapshot quality, like vacation pictures taken by a master seer. The images show Stieglitz relaxed yet still in control, as he records the surroundings at Lake George. Both formal and informal, the portraits taken of O'Keeffe are some of Stieglitz's strongest depictions of the artist. Ellen Koeniger and Rebecca Strand elicit both playful and erotic poses for the camera, while others are photographed chatting, playing, or simply wandering around the grounds of Lake George. Many will see the photographs in direct contrast to Stieglitz's urban images. Although this is apparent in most of the photographs, the images of poplar trees stand out like the skyscrapers Stieglitz photographed later in his career. Even the elegant automobile found on the last page is clearly an urban image - a reminder that eventually one must leave Lake George and its quiet calm, for the city further down the road.