Article
The Steerage, Alfred Steiglitz
Stieglitz, an accomplished American photographer, gallery owner, and promoter of international modernism, wrote the following description of the the Steerage, a picture widely considered his greatest artistic achievement, showing working-class passengers observed on one of his many transatlantic voyagers:
The scene fascinated me: A round straw hat; the funnel leaning left, the stairway leaning right; the white drawbridge, its railings made of chain; white suspenders crossed on the back of a man below; circular iron machinery; a mast that cut into the sky, completing a triangle. I stood spellbound for a while. I saw shapes related to one another‚—a picture of shapes, and underlying it, a new vision that held me: simple people; the feeling of ship, ocean, sky; a sense of release that I was away from the mob called "rich." Rembrandt came into my mind and I wondered would he have felt as I did‚—¶. I had only one plate holder with one unexposed plate. Could I catch what I saw and felt? I released the shutter. If I had captured what I wanted, the photograph would go far beyond any of my previous prints. It would be a picture based on related shapes and deepest human feeling‚—a step in my own evolution, a spontaneous discovery.
There is much to unpack in this statement, not least concerning Stieglitz's ambivalence about his own elite economic status, which afforded him a commanding view of the human subjects in question even as he disparaged "the mob called ‚—òrich.'" By expressing fascination about ordinary people and banal visual phenomena spread across the pictorial field, Stieglitz called into question classical standards of artistic composition and value, which traditionally stipulated a hierarchical arrangement of thematic elements, wherein one‚—usually an eminent hero of human history‚—occupied the focal center, surrounded by various subsidiary figures and forms deemed less important. In making and interpreting The Steerage, Stieglitz resisted this classical tradition in two important ways: first, thematically, by placing emphasis on human subjects not historically considered exalted or heroic, and second, formally, by insisting that inanimate things such as a straw hat, railings, suspenders, circular iron machinery, and other "shapes" could leave the viewer "spellbound" by "a new vision." This modernist vision was by no means explicitly ecological in the sense understood by contemporary scientists such as Warming or Clements. Nevertheless, like other modernists at home and abroad, Stieglitz articulated a revisionist theory of value that undid classical hierarchies by democratizing subject matter, decentering aesthetic attention, and asserting the visual interest of mundane beings and things hitherto excluded from the realm of art. Obviously his statement still expressed a lingering humanism, even an element of narcissism, especially in the melodramatic adventure narrative about catching what he "saw and felt" with his last "unexposed plate"‚—a mini-drama of personal artistic achievement indicating his inability to shed classical habits entirely. But even this evidence of Stieglitz's incomplete break with tradition tells us something important about the evolving nature of art in the twentieth century as modernism realigned conventional ideas and perceptions. Modernism's break with the past, like its relation to ecology, was always complicated and inconsistent yet nonetheless meaningful and difficult to ignore. Accordingly, Stieglitz's reference to The Steerage as "a step in my own evolution" reveals this halting, metaphorical relationship with period ecological discourse, for it related his artistic development to evolution, as if aesthetic creativity were a kind of plant subject to environmental conditions of growth.
--Alan C. Braddock Ralph H. Wark Associate Professor of Art History at William & Mary
The scene fascinated me: A round straw hat; the funnel leaning left, the stairway leaning right; the white drawbridge, its railings made of chain; white suspenders crossed on the back of a man below; circular iron machinery; a mast that cut into the sky, completing a triangle. I stood spellbound for a while. I saw shapes related to one another‚—a picture of shapes, and underlying it, a new vision that held me: simple people; the feeling of ship, ocean, sky; a sense of release that I was away from the mob called "rich." Rembrandt came into my mind and I wondered would he have felt as I did‚—¶. I had only one plate holder with one unexposed plate. Could I catch what I saw and felt? I released the shutter. If I had captured what I wanted, the photograph would go far beyond any of my previous prints. It would be a picture based on related shapes and deepest human feeling‚—a step in my own evolution, a spontaneous discovery.
There is much to unpack in this statement, not least concerning Stieglitz's ambivalence about his own elite economic status, which afforded him a commanding view of the human subjects in question even as he disparaged "the mob called ‚—òrich.'" By expressing fascination about ordinary people and banal visual phenomena spread across the pictorial field, Stieglitz called into question classical standards of artistic composition and value, which traditionally stipulated a hierarchical arrangement of thematic elements, wherein one‚—usually an eminent hero of human history‚—occupied the focal center, surrounded by various subsidiary figures and forms deemed less important. In making and interpreting The Steerage, Stieglitz resisted this classical tradition in two important ways: first, thematically, by placing emphasis on human subjects not historically considered exalted or heroic, and second, formally, by insisting that inanimate things such as a straw hat, railings, suspenders, circular iron machinery, and other "shapes" could leave the viewer "spellbound" by "a new vision." This modernist vision was by no means explicitly ecological in the sense understood by contemporary scientists such as Warming or Clements. Nevertheless, like other modernists at home and abroad, Stieglitz articulated a revisionist theory of value that undid classical hierarchies by democratizing subject matter, decentering aesthetic attention, and asserting the visual interest of mundane beings and things hitherto excluded from the realm of art. Obviously his statement still expressed a lingering humanism, even an element of narcissism, especially in the melodramatic adventure narrative about catching what he "saw and felt" with his last "unexposed plate"‚—a mini-drama of personal artistic achievement indicating his inability to shed classical habits entirely. But even this evidence of Stieglitz's incomplete break with tradition tells us something important about the evolving nature of art in the twentieth century as modernism realigned conventional ideas and perceptions. Modernism's break with the past, like its relation to ecology, was always complicated and inconsistent yet nonetheless meaningful and difficult to ignore. Accordingly, Stieglitz's reference to The Steerage as "a step in my own evolution" reveals this halting, metaphorical relationship with period ecological discourse, for it related his artistic development to evolution, as if aesthetic creativity were a kind of plant subject to environmental conditions of growth.
--Alan C. Braddock Ralph H. Wark Associate Professor of Art History at William & Mary
