biography
pronunciation:
[steeglits]
| sex:
| male
|
| lived:
| (1864–1946)
|
| biography:
| Photographer and curator, born in Hoboken, New Jersey, USA. He travelled to Berlin in Germany (1881) to study mechanical engineering and returned to New York in 1890. A photographer and admirer of avant-garde art, he became a partner in a photogravure business (1890–5), continued taking photographs, and edited Camera Notes for the Camera Club (1897–1902). In 1902 he left to found the photo-secession movement to express his belief that photography was an art form, equal to painting. As editor of Camera Work, he opened the ‘291’ gallery (its name merely the address on 5th Avenue) to exhibit art from Europe (1905–17). In 1917 he met and began photographing the artist Georgia O'Keeffe, whom he married in 1924. Although he had started out in the 1890s as a leader of the ‘pictorialist’ approach to photography - achieving painterly effects by working at night, sometimes in the rain and snow - by 1910 he was an advocate and practitioner of ‘straight’ photography, making sharp-focused photographs of everyday subjects. Winner of 150 awards for his own photography, he championed the careers of artists and photographers at the American Place Gallery (1929–46). |
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