Steerage

Alfred Stieglitz - The Steerage

This image by Alfred Stieglitz is a straight photo, showing Stieglitz’s ideas of what photography should be. Clearly a photography, rather than the pictorial like images of prior, Stieglitz has created an image that is more about the formal elements. He is trying to move away from pictorialism because pictorialism is trying to be stylistic, he wants his photography to be its own entity and have its own style. This break from pictorialism at the time would have been a breath of fresh air and also a big leap forward in ideas of what a photograph should be and this adds a real exciting element to this image.

Stieglitz is a formalist so he often uses shapes in his images.  Graham Clarke, in his book The Photograph, has wrote about how much of a contrast Stieglitz is from photographer Lewis Hine. Hine’s images are often comments on society and his imagery often has underlying points within it. In stark contrast Stieglitz cared more about form than that of the social aspects in his imagery (Clarke, 1997, 169).

Although not meant to be, this image really does show an insight to the culture at the time. You can tell by the clothes people are wearing in the image, hats on the top deck and shawls on the bottom, that there is an obvious divide between the two classes in this image.  The way Stieglitz has managed to capture this image while only thinking of form is very intriguing to say it shows such diversity. A great image indeed.