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Perhaps best known for his discovery of and marriage to the great American painter, Georgia O'Keefe, Alfred Stieglitz was an artist of no small importance himself. Born on New Year's Day, 1864, in Hoboken, New Jersey, he showed an early interest in photography when he was able to observe a photographer at work in his dark room. He ultimately became one of the most influential voices in Modernist Art.
He studied engineering and photography in Berlin. When he was able to purchase a camera there, the small instrument became a driving obsession which led him to become a leader in the field of photography. His work was different from the retouched and stiff photographs of the period. He let the subject matter determine it's own degree of refinement. There is an essence of movement in his photographs which was absent in most works of the time, often due simply to the operation of the cameras that were available. Stieglitz's tenacity was apparent when some of the shots he took required hours of standing in inclimate weather to achieve the results he sought. He was an early fan of the hand held camera. Most period cameras were mostly bulky things which required mounting on a tripod.
Stieglitz is believed by some to have been the most significant promoter of photography as an art form on par with other visual arts. It bothered him that his fellow artists and collectors alike clearly admired his work, but considered it less worthy than art that was created in what were then more traditional ways- primarily with a brush and paint. This gave him the impetus to work toward making the camera an honorable artists' tool.
The 291 was a prominent gallery in New York, and it was owned by Alfred Stieglitz. It was he who discovered Georgia O'Keefe, and he who launched her career in a showing of her work at 291 in the year 1916. O'Keefe was reclusive, but Stieglitz guided her through the necessary gauntlet of public life to create and maintain her success.
Steglitz married Georgia O'Keefe in 1924. He was thirty years older than she, and their relationship was unusual by most accounts. Both were prone to having extramarital affairs, and they spend much of their marriage living apart- he preferred New York and she preferred the southwest. It seems that neither person was easy to live with. However, Stieglitz and O'Keefe remained important to one another despite their years of separation. As he aged she returned regularly to spend periods of time with him. Stieglitz took over five hundred photographs of O'Keefe, a testament to their long relationship. They remained married until his death. O'Keefe slipped back into her reclusive nature after his death.
Alfred Stieglitz died on July 13, 1946 at the age of eighty-two. He left a remarkable legacy in the art world, especially in the medium of photography, where he was a dominant force.
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