Alfred Stieglitz: A Legacy of Light BY Katherine Hoffman (Yale University Press, 2011) From the Publisher: “Hoffman explores Stieglitz’s roles as photographer, editor, writer, and gallery director; how they intersected with his personal life — including his marriage to artist Georgia O’Keeffe — and his place in the cultural milieu of the twentieth century. Excerpts from previously unpublished correspondence between Stieglitz and O’Keeffe reveal the fervor and complexity of their relationship as well as his passion for photography and modern art and his ongoing struggle to have photography recognized as an established artistic medium. These letters, along with his work as an editor and writer of short articles, illuminate Stieglitz’s literary side, thus giving a new perspective on his total œuvre. Generously illustrated with 300 images, this intriguing, beautifully written book separates the photographer’s true personality from the myths surrounding him and highlights his lasting legacy: the works he left behind.”

Like his photographs, Alfred Stieglitz’s life moved elusively between niches. Sometimes fiction, sometimes fact, sometimes lyrical, sometimes prosaic, this protean figure of American art could be an enchanting impresario or an excruciating snob. As a businessman he was Houdini, able to cheat economic ruin by unaccountable feats of legerdemain, though through the various incarnations of his New York galleries passed some of the greatest painters, writers, and, occasionally, photographers of the early twentieth century. His belief in art’s capacity for social and personal transformation was absolute. As a lover he was ardent and fickle. He had beautiful penmanship, an impressive mustache, and a notable head of hair. A clip from critic Robert Hughes’s 1997 television series American Visions endures. The hand-cranked movie camera captures a capering Stieglitz on the sidewalk, perhaps Fifth Avenue in New York, beaming as he repeatedly approaches the camera, passes it, then skitters away in the opposite direction. The camera’s manual unevenness suggests the excitement the operator may have had, collaborating with the great man. His face lights up the screen when he doffs his distinctive crushed top, broad-brimmed hat. Turning away, the energy is dimmed, enwrapped by the signature cape that only the most stylish can carry off without irony. Stieglitz is clearly in that camp. …this protean figure of American art could be an enchanting impresario or an excruciating snob…. His belief in art’s capacity for social and personal transformation was absolute. Viewing Stieglitz (1864–1946) as a living, breathing, smiling, playfully animated person is something of a shock. A century ago this master of modern art was instrumental in preparing what many regard as the most important art event of the twentieth century in America — the 1913 International Exhibition of Modern Art, or the Armory Show, as it came to be identified by its venue. His photographs and his legacy as advocate and promoter seem almost super-human; how could a real person have had this level of influence? And, how is it that he could allow himself the time to cavort on the streets of Manhattan? Didn’t he have places to go? The two dust jacket cover images of Katherine Hoffman’s biography offer telling, if oblique, responses. On the front is a Stieglitz portrait of Dorothy Norman, a young protégé who became his lover and then the leading female figure of his last fifteen years (she oversaw the business of An American Place, the last iteration of the Stieglitz gallery lineage, and often photographed Stieglitz there as his health declined). Norman, who had scarcely met Stieglitz when the photograph was made, is turned fully away from the camera; strangely, her clothes, with buttons running down the back and a white-band collar, suggest that the wearer should be facing the viewers, and that her head and face have been obscured by a tight-fitting black cap. Thus, she assumes the female equivalency to the secretive Stieglitz in the film clip.

The turned-away Norman also testifies to Stieglitz’s desire for photographs to embrace spiritual magic and capture medium-busting meta-meanings. Again, the idea of an “equivalent,” the photograph as a vessel bearing “ur-visual” information — Hoffman’s text, with numerous references to writers both contemporary with Stieglitz and later, proves immensely informative in this area of the man’s innovative art practice. “Equivalent” was a term Stieglitz began to use for his photographs around 1927. He used it, Hoffman points out, to refer to natural subject matter that had assumed spiritual significance for the aging artist.

Stieglitz had earlier thought about his sky photographs in musical terms. The back cover photograph from 1921 shows Lake George as a ragged mottling across the lower third of the dark image field, while a cloudy occlusion commands the photograph’s upper half. This is another surprising image to choose as representative; ten years later Stieglitz was making monumentally memorable images of the sky that freed themselves from earthbound, rationalizing horizons and, in all likelihood, secured his place in the pantheon of photographic history. In “Songs of the Sky,” his goal was to create music, music such that a composer might see them and identify them as expressions of his own tonal medium. This desire is well documented, and Hoffman incorporates the evolution of this passion in persuasive fashion.

If she ennobles the man, she does it in a broad context. Her reading of Stieglitz’s ecosystem is inclusive, diligent, and respectful…

Throughout Alfred Stieglitz: A Legacy of Light, Hoffman does us this service. If she ennobles the man, she does it in a broad context. Her reading of Stieglitz’s ecosystem is inclusive, diligent, and respectful; there are references and cross-references, tangents followed from one first-person commentator to another in remarkable ways. Following the Equivalents, again, we find not only the historically familiar and perhaps all-too-obvious 1923 essay by Stieglitz entitled “How I Came to Photograph Clouds,” which lays out his sense of connection to writer Waldo Frank and composer Ernst Bloch, but also draws in relative correspondence between Bloch and photographer Paul Strand, and later writings uniting all the strands.

Just as Hoffman chose less iconic cover images to represent Stieglitz (thereby inducing us to look closer to ascertain her mission, if it is not to celebrate his high points as many have done before), she takes time and discursive space to lay out her argument and supporting evidence. Admirably, she allows Stieglitz’s brilliance to diffuse itself somewhat while simultaneously enhancing our admiration for Stieglitz’s reach. He was, after all, born in Hoboken, grew famous across the river in New York City, and didn’t care much for travel. Besides, she writes, “for Stieglitz, cars also represented an aspect of American commercialism against which he was continually fighting” (p. 200). What successful person today would reject automobiles, or the success they represent? The world, or at least a section of it, seems drawn to and revolved around Stieglitz, despite, or perhaps because of, his unorthodox attitudes toward business.

Hoffman adds a unique touch to this exploration of Stieglitz’s legacy — her own photographs of the Lake George environs, including a view from the waterside where Stieglitz’s ashes were strewn. Her commitment to the project is not only academic, it is personal, and includes notions of homage and pilgrimage. This is a commendable, multi-dimensional revisitation of a well-explored life, and a volume that offers to both newcomers and those familiar with the interwoven narratives of Alfred, Georgia, Dorothy, and the twentieth-century modernists a fresh ennoblement.