The Unbroken Stieglitz Circle

In 1983 the National Gallery in Washington, DC, mounted an exhibition of images by Alfred Stieglitz, the photographer who more than anyone, before or since, helped photography establish its credentials as an art form. The exhibition was also a way of showing off only a small portion of the 1600 photographs that had been donated to the galley by the artists wife, Georgia O’Keefe. To accompany the exhibition, the gallery published a catalogue/book that is generally regarded as one of the most elegant ever devoted to a single photographer. The only thing wrong with Alfred Stieglitz: Photographs & Writings was that it sold out almost immediately, leaving behind dejected book- and image-collectors.

Now that situation has been remedied. The National Gallery and Bulfinch Press—the co-publishers of the first edition—have re-issued this superb book in its original format, with oversized pages and tritone reproductions. In this incarnation, it is no less breathtaking than when it was first published 17 years ago. Among the 73 prints are some of the most famous images in modern photography, including his earliest pictorialist views of New York, portraits of fellow artists and friends like Marsden Hartley and John Marin, his “Equivalents” (images of the infinite, abstracting look of cloud formations), and portraits, clothed and nude, of his equally famous artist wife. There are also 40 pages of his unapologetic, opinionated correspondence, along with an additional 20 pages of notes. The book is, simply, indispensable.

Stieglitz looms over 20th-century photography like a colossus, and his presence figures largely in Paul Strand: Sixty Years of Photographs, another necessary book just published as an Aperture monograph. Strand was born in New York in 1890 and had done some photography in his late teens, but it was a visit to Stieglitz’s “291” Gallery that galvanized his fascination with the medium and convinced him that he wanted to become “an artist in photography.” Stieglitz’s gallery showed not only photography, but modern art and sculpture as well, and it was here that Strand saw his first paintings by modern masters like Matisse and Picasso. While he never paid much attention to the soft-edged characteristics of pictorialism, in which photographers were trying to mimic the look of painting, he was intrigued enough to attempt abstract photographs, such as his series of interlocking bowls done in 1915. Stieglitz championed the younger photographer, exhibited his work at “291” in 1916 and also included his images in Camera Work, his influential magazine. Stieglitz actually devoted the final issue of the magazine to Strand a year later, writing in his introductory note that he was a photographer who was going to last. “These photographs,” he wrote, “are the direct expression of today.”

So they seem over 80 years later. There is a clarity and directness to the images that is astonishing, whether he’s photographing a fishing village on the Gaspé in 1929, a portrait of Stieglitz in 1939, or one of his wife in 1922. These are innocent, marvellous photographs in an age when we have come to accept that all images are constructed. As a result, the forthrightness with which he captures anything he points his camera at is oddly confusing, as if it were a trick; eye cons instead of the icons which they actually are. Strand died in 1976 at the age of 85, one of the worlds most admired photographers. This monograph, with its thorough and readable profile by Calvin Tomkins, gives the reasons why Strand is so well regarded, and why his photographs continue to captivate viewers.

Strand and Stieglitz shared an understanding about what constituted a good photograph and because of their closeness, as friends and colleagues, they also shared models. Strand had married Rebecca Salsbury in 1922, an artist who was full-bodied and sensual, as was O’Keefe. There is a striking nude of Rebecca, cropped at the head and thighs, taken by Stieglitz in 1922 and included in the National Gallery book. Stieglitz’s pronouncement that “every time I photograph, I make love” may well explain something of the intensity of this photograph; it is carnal in its gaze if not in the intimate details of its history. But the notion that the camera lens is part of the apparatus of seduction is crucial in understanding the profound influence that Stieglitz, the technological rake, had on the history of men photographing the women close to them.

Nowhere is this more apparent than in The Model Wife, one of the most original books on photography to have been published in the last decade. Written by Arthur Ollman, himself a photographer and critic of some reputation, it looks at the convergence of marriage and photography in the 20th century. Ollman considers nine photographers, beginning with Baron Adolf de Meyer, whose portraits of his exquisite Olga, Baroness, wife and bauble (Adolf was gay and whatever sexual charge the marriage had was ocular), are revelations more of fashion than psychology. The book concludes with the obsessive and problematic relationship between Seiichi Furuya, a 49-year-old Japanese living in self-willed exile in Graz, and his European wife, Christine Gossler, who committed suicide in 1985 by jumping from the ninth floor of an apartment building seven years into their marriage. The photographs he took of her are a disquieting trace of mental deterioration; the young woman we first see in 1978 is alive and open to the future; in one of the last photographs her hair is shorn, she is thin enough to be an internment camp victim and she stares into an obliterating sun as if she were a candidate for self-canonization. Gossler wanted to be an actress and by keeping her permanently alive at the age of 32, her husband has cast her in an unchanging role.

Furuya’s is the darkest of the musings between men and women in this remarkable book. Others are governed more by Eros than Thanatos. Nicholas Nixon, who has taken a photograph of his wife Bebe that can only be described as lyrically scatological, makes images that remain private despite their sexual heat; from 1947 to 1960 Harry Callahan produced images of his wife Eleanor that, for all their closeness, end up being intimate abstractions; and Edward Weston’s 1936 nudes of Charis in the Oceana sand dunes are even more famous than his voluptuous photographs of peppers and toilet bowls.

But for all their differences, these photographers accept as the point of departure for their complex investigations of model imaged and image-maker, the example of Stieglitz and his muse. Three hundred and fifty images exist of O’Keefe; they were often taken after she and Stieglitz had made love and they have about them an unmistakable hint of sex, like the paintings Picasso and Bonnard made of their respective mistresses and wives. Their range is amazing; they can focus on a part of the body and investigate it with a gaze as uninhibited as Courbet’s, or they can pull back and view O’Keefe’s body, covered only in a bathing cap, as an athletic object. They also inquire into the condition of masculinity; the weight of her breasts and the rich patch of pubic hair are countered by the masculine gaze she gives back. It’s as if Stieglitz wanted her to be a carnal Tiresias, playing with both sexes in a complicated drama that combined tension with acquiescence.

One of the 105 images included in Male/Female: 105 Photographs, a recent Aperture Foundation book, is of bodybuilder and performance artist Lisa Lyon. She is striking one of those competition poses—arms outstretched, fists clenched—that is meant to show off the upper body. The photograph was taken by Robert Mapplethorpe for a book called Lady, in which Lyon became a series of characters in a performance that concentrated on her androgynous appeal. What Mapplethorpe loved about Lyon was that she was unmistakably female at the same time that she was tidily masculine. Her image joins photographs of Frida Kahlo, Patti Smith and Claude Cahun, among many others, in the fraternity of gender ambiguity that has become an important part of contemporary identity. We are many selves and not a single self; we make ourselves up from many parts.

The images in Male/Female were chosen by Vince Aletti, the photo critic at the Village Voice. But the most interesting contribution he makes to this issue is not the photographs, which are less radical than I would have expected. Whats irresistible is an interview he conducts with Madonna, a character who has some considerable personal knowledge about the fun and the furor caused by gender-bending. His role is largely of the ‘wow, fabulous’ variety—more affective than effective. The ostensible subject of the interview is Madonna the collector, but she makes it an excursion into a number of perplexing female/male questions regarding the body, sexuality and power. It’s a romp and it makes the issue worthwhile. Elsewhere in his smart introduction to Male/Female, Aletti coins the term “icons-R-us.” A perfect phrase, leading as it does into portraits of Mick Jagger, Tina Brown, Mikhail Baryshnikov, and Andy Warhol by photographers like Cecil Beaton, Eve Arnold, Mary Ellen Mark and Annie Leibovitz, who have come to rival the celebrities for the very iconic status their images now bestow. ■

Alfred Stieglitz: Photographs & Writings, National Gallery of Art, Washington, and Bulfinch Press- Little, Brown and Company, Boston and New York, second edition, Hardcover, 248 pp., $101.00. Paul Strand: Sixty Years of Photographs, Profile by Calvin Tomkins, An Aperture Monograph, New York, Softcover, 182 pp., $35.00 (US). The Model Wife, by Arthur Oilman, Bulfinch Press-Little, Brown and Company, Boston and New York, Hardcover, 224 pp., $88.00. Male/Female: 105 Photographs, Introduction by Vince Aletti, Aperture Foundation, New York, Hardcover, 96 pp., $34.95 (US).

Robert Enright works with CBC 24 Hours in Winnipeg and will publish Alchemies of Light: Writings on Film and Photography next year.