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The Old Wagnerian. In 1882 a young man from Hoboken named Alfred Stieglitz was in Germany studying engineering. In a Berlin shop window he saw a camera, and without hesitation went in and bought it. "Fate," he said later, "took me to that shop." He came to produce the finest body of photos yet made by a single artist. He was an accomplished technician, yet he kept insisting that technique was of minor importance. What mattered to him was art—the creation of "equivalents" for reality.
He also shaped the early work of such major photographers as Edward Steichen, Edward Weston and Walker Evans, who were to follow divergent paths. Steichen went on to become the first famed glamour photographer, with his work in the early 1930s for Vanity Fair, today is Curator of Photography at Manhattan's Museum of Modern Art. Weston pioneered sharp-focus photography of places and things, and started a naturalistic school, of which the chief disciple is Ansel Adams, regarded as perhaps the finest landscape photographer today.
Evans broke the old man's fanatically artistic spell by taking clear, cold, head-on pictures of ordinary people and things. "After Stieglitz's real work was done," says Realist Evans, "he became a very arty old man and a Wagnerian man if there ever was one—a great old fiddler and lace-maker." Evans' realistic approach has inspired a generation of photographers, among them Margaret Bourke-White, who first made her mark photographing industry, and Dorothea Lange, who photographed California's migratory pea-pickers to show the effects of the Depression. Echoing the early Weegee, Evans says: "Photography is for the record. Realism is all."
Contrived & Documentary. That realism is not necessarily all is illustrated by the retrospective portfolio of photographs (see pp. 59-66). Of the twelve shown, at least half are contrived rather than documentary. Tana Hoban used a professional model for her sun-splashed shot of a little girl. Its lighting is reminiscent of the impressionistic paintings of Renoir et al., and its atmosphere is that of a powder puff. Aaron Siskind's closeup of peeling paint is not supposed to look like paint alone; it is a faintly sinister pattern reminiscent of easel pictures by the German surrealist Max Ernst. Arnold Newman's portrait of Igor Stravinsky is heavily symbolic: its main feature is not Stravinsky, but a piano top photographed to resemble a looming note of music.
Moreover, two standout photographers now strongly for realism made their first fame as "pictorial" artists. Alfred Eisenstaedt—the master of the sharp, meaningful portrait and the photographer who stirred U.S. enthusiasm for the Leica and other 35-mm. cameras—contributed an early picture of a ballet rehearsal that owes its mothlike softness and radiance to Degas' influence. Irving Penn's evocation of a midsummer nap harks back to a 15th century Venetian, Carlo Crivelli, who also used sharply focused flies to achieve a greater illusion of depth.