Alfred Stieglitz: Photographs from the J. Paul Getty Museum

From Booklist
It's hard to imagine what another book about Stieglitz, the most written-about figure in American photography, could contribute. Well, this one offers some unfamiliar images and, more notably, an essay arguing that Stieglitz did his best work late in life at his family retreat at Lake George, New York. Photographic curator and historian John Szarkowski is responsible for the latter, which advances a Stieglitz who in the late work turned from public themes and public life to personal symbols (clouds and dying poplar trees) and to sweetly human descriptions of friends, young women, and, of course, his fascinating wife, Georgia O'Keeffe. Whether these late pictures are Stieglitz's best is really still an open question. Contradicting the self-mythologizing of his earlier work, however, these 93 photographs, full of a heartfelt directness, show him to be a man like other men, who appreciated beauty, the weather, family, friends, and home. Gretchen Garner

Book Description
This latest volume in the acclaimed In Focus series examines the life and work of Alfred Stieglitz, concentrating on the Getty Museum's considerable holdings of the work of this American master. In his studies of his wife, Georgia O'Keefe, in his portraits of the urban scene, and in his pictures of natural form, Stieglitz defined the modern movement on photography. In his periodical Camera Work he championed photography as an art form; in his famous gallery "An American Place," he promoted the work of other American modernists. Fifty reproductions with commentaries by Weston Naef, the Getty's curator of photographs, represent both the range of the Getty's collection and the importance of Stieglitz's contribution. The book also includes an edited colloquium on Stieglitz's life and work. Participants included Emmit Gowin, photographer, Sarah Greenough, curator of photographs at the National Gallery, Charles Hagen, critic for the New York Times, John Szarkowski, former curator of photographs at the Museum of Modern Art, and Weston Naef.


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