Waxenstein,

1933

In 1905, the photographer, gallerist, and publisher Alfred Stieglitz (1864–1946) opened the Little Galleries of the Photo-Secession at 291 Fifth Avenue in New York, in the former studio of fellow photographer Edward Steichen (1879–1973). Known as 291, the small space was of outsize significance in displaying the work of the Photo-Secession, a group of photographers including Steichen, Gertrude Käsebier, and Clarence White who sought to establish photography as a fine art with manipulated, often soft-focus imagery. Both 291 and Stieglitz’s later galleries, the Intimate Gallery (1925–29) and An American Place (1929–46), served as important sites for the introduction of modern European art to the United States—and, increasingly, for promoting the work of American modernists, including Ansel Adams and Marsden Hartley. Adams’s photograph offers a glimpse into Stieglitz’s final gallery and depicts a painting by Georgia O’Keeffe, one of Stieglitz’s most renowned exhibitors and, after 1924, his wife. In its fragmentary, close-cropped composition and its abstract reflections, the photograph exemplifies the modernist idiom of the group eventually known as the Stieglitz Circle.