Modernism: Pure and Straight Photography

 

Modernism: Image Analysis Task 

Stieglitz's approach to photography is typically modernist and as such a constant emphasis is on clarity, tone and form rather than context. 

Alfred Stieglitz, The Steerage, 1907 

He said of this image ''A round straw hat, the funnel leaning left...round shapes of iron machinery, a mast cutting into the sky, making a triangular shape..I saw a picture of shapes'' 

We can see then that Steiglitz didn't snap the shutter release to capture the rejected poverty of hundreds of immigrants refused entry into the United States. Similarly he was not concerned with the very physical manifestation of separating the rich journeyers from the poor steerage. Neither was he concerned with sociological perspectives.

He made this image because he was drawn to documenting formal photographic elements, composition and line seem to play heavily in this image, he is glorifying the subject for what it is physically, it's aesthetic form and so when viewing this image one must detach oneself from the specifics and look upon the scene technically and as a whole.

''Stieglitz speaks as a formalist...the entire scene is described as a composition... which bears no relationship to the facts of the scene itself''. {Graham Clarke, The Photograph as Fine Art, 169}

The tone of the image to me rather contrived and formal, typical of a modernist approach, it is a glimpse of life captured by a detached observer.