Alfred Stieglitz

Alfred Stieglitz was the most prominent spokesperson for photographers who embraced the painterly style known as Pictorialism. The image here by Stieglitz is from Camera Work, a journal founded by Stieglitz in 1903 as part of his larger campaign to establish photography as a fine art. Many of the images published within its pages, such as this, are photogravures meticulously printed from the artists’ negatives on Japanese papers. In this early example of Stieglitz’s work, his heroic portrayal of a worker in the field recalls a subject popular in European painting since the mid-19th century.