Alfred Stieglitz

She also studied under Clarence H.

White at Columbia University, who was a founding member of the photo secession movement spearheaded by Alfred Stieglitz.

So the goal of this movement was to promote photography as a fine art and not just a way to document the world around them.

Their predominant style was pictorialism, which likened a photographer to a painter, stating that the manipulation of the image was what made the image the artist's own handiwork.

And upon White's death, Stieglitz wrote his, meaning White's, pupils, women, half-baked dilettantes, not a single real talent.

And I was like, what?

Wow, Alfred Stieglitz, that is a

hot take.

Everybody's got an iPhone, everybody can upload to Instagram, and everybody can have a decent picture or two or a thousand.

And what I used to call the priesthood of photography, thinking of Alfred Stieglitz and Edward Weston et al, when the priesthood disappears, is what's left still admirable artwork? I hope so.

I like making artwork.

I like the challenge of making artwork.

This is a painting that O'Keeffe made in 1922 during one of her many, many summer stays in Lake George in upstate New York.

So O'Keeffe begins in the late 19-teens when her romantic relationship with Stieglitz begins.

She starts spending part of each year on the shores of Lake George with the Stieglitz family.

And this is a place that she grows to love, but it's also a complicated place for her.

It was very much a Stieglitz family home, and she shared the space with several generations of her partner and later husband's family.

And I think had a fair bit of frustration in those early years finding space that could be her own and spaces that she could put her stamp on.

That changed when she set her sights on an abandoned shed that was falling apart on the Stieglitz family property.

This had been built more than a generation earlier and had fallen into disrepair by the time she saw potential in it.

The one that comes to mind is Pamela Coleman Smith, who she designed the famous Rider-Waite tarot deck in 1909.

But she was before that, she was not a big name, but she was on the modernist art scene in New York she had several exhibitions of her work by the kind of modernist art promoter Alfred Stieglitz and she was kind of talked about her work was seen as a kind of anti-conservative you know the rumblings of the modernist movement going on but that she could kind of change people's minds with the kind of symbolism of her watercolours um and i think that influence came if not directly from the golden dawn then from the golden dawn membership yates especially um her kind of mystical leanings um and um the kind of synesthetic um techniques that she used to to to uh construct these paintings um may have come from kind of visionary techniques that the Golden Dawn used.

So I think she definitely had an influence that is not fully appreciated.

But then you've also got the decadent movement of the 1890s that Crowley was definitely... or he aspired to be a part of his, his, um, his boyfriend at Cambridge, uh, you know, was deep in the movement, collected yellow books, uh, was kind of parodied, parodied, parodied in a novel of, um, by EF Benson.

When photography arrived in the 19th century, artists and critics had to figure out what this mechanical image-making technology meant for painting, portraiture, and art itself.

One of the people who spent a large part of his life pushing that argument forward was Alfred Stieglitz.

He returned to New York in 1890, determined to establish photography as a medium capable of serious artistic expression.

In 1902, after disagreements with the Camera Club of New York, he and other photographers formed the Photo Secession, and he went on to edit Camera Work, and Camera Work is a publication, and operate galleries that promoted photography alongside modern art.