The kind of approach to art Stieglitz developed in his photographs, and
helped to foster in the artists associated with him, was based on his
belief in sharply focused photography. As has been already pointed out, he
recognizcd from the very first that the camera's primary merit was that it
was capable of reproducing reality with absolute fidelity. But because the
camera will record all things without discrimination, it is in itself no
more a source
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Alfred Stieglitz, Dancing Trees (1921) [click
above for a larger image]
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of art than is paint. A painter can use his materials very much in
whatever way he wants; the creative process to which be is committed is
not limited in time or space: if be so wishes he can spend years on a
single painting. He can therefore afford to analyze his subject while be
is painting. But an unretouched photograph is the record of a moment, its
image is fixed in an instant of time. Stieglitz therefore argued that it
is the photographer's role to seize the moment in terms of its most
opportune structure. He must select the single image which will represent
the object under his scrutiny most effectively. The photographer,
therefore, more than any other artist, must be perfectly alert to the
materials of the visible world. He is entirely dependent on what exists to
the eye; he must see, before he can create. He must, before all, in the
most literal sense of the word, be a seer. Stieglitz probably became aware
of these implications of photography when he began to use the "snapshot"
camera with which he took his earliest pictures of New York. This
discovery influenced his approach to the world in an absolute sense,
creating the laws on which his further artistic life was based: "The
moment dictates for me what I must do," he said. "I have no theory about
what the moment should bring. . . . I simply react to the moment.... I am
the moment."" The materials of the "living moment" are the things seen.
"Beauty is the universal seen," be emphasized, and "in one's way of seeing
lies one's way of action."" The basis for all that is meaningful in life
is man's capacity to see the objective world. "I detest," Stieglitz said,
"superstitions that go against life, against truth, against the reality of
experience, against the spontaneous living out of the sense of wonder -of
fresh experience, freshley seen and communicated.""'
Very early Stieglitz discovered that a photographer must not only be
capable of seeing sharply and precisely in order to capture the living
moment, but must be unusually selective as well. A photograph representing
a complex scene can be effective, but most often the larger the number of
objects depicted, the more diffuse the impact of the picture. Hence
Stieglitz progressively reduced the visual field presented-by his
photographs.
It was Stieglitz who, for Williams as well as for the painters, provided
the essential example of the means by which the artist could reach out to
a new, more accurate mode of representing the world of experience. If
Stieglitz was a pioneer in American art, it was primarily because he
established the basis for a non-metaphoric art in America. Until Stieglitz
began to emphasize the object in his photographs, the artists in this
country had been overwhelmingly concerned only with those qualities in
reality which were representative of indirect experience.