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WINGS December [[Image]] Permission of An American Place An oil painting by Georgia O’ Keeffe White Trumpet Flower - 1932 “difficult.” Well, of course - in the shorter view. He knows, and there is nothing more uncomfortable for the average material-intellectual-ist mind than to come up against an intuitive, knowing person. His directness of approach, his innocence of the defensive machinery of ordinary living, his certainty about the importance of the creative, are disturbing, are hurdles to common understanding. You will remember that all our American geniuses have been called - by their professional brethren - difficult, whether Whitman or Sullivan or Isadora Duncan or Frank Lloyd Wright. These people all knew (or know), from some well of knowledge nearer the soul. Not one was a successful dealer or critic or pacifier or academician. They set their works out, demanding a direct approach and response not easy in competitive journalistic age. Perhaps I have inadvertently given here an impression of Stieglitz as silent, distant, even taciturn: speaking only rarely and then through deeds. On the contrary he is one of the greatest living talkers. Go to An American Place when you (Cont. on page 26) 12 1934 WINGS Master of Photography ᐧ Fred J. Ringel “Strange indeed. There must be some fifteen million Kodakers in this country. Yet there are hardly fifteen great photographers,” remarked my friend the other day. On the seventeenth floor of an ordinary office building, we had entered a room with the unpretentious but significant sign “An American Place” and had the good fortune to talk to Alfred Stieglitz. The casual but heartfelt remark of my friend after having seen but a few of the thousands of photographs this great artist created within a span of fifty years of hard labor and inspired intensity, set me thinking. And I wondered how many of the increasing number of people who visit museums and art galleries, read books and dispute the greatness of a painting or sculpture, would set so high a standard as this for photography. Hardly another medium of expression has been popularized and commercialized as photography. Manufacturers of cameras and film have spent fortunes for advertising campaigns to persuade the public that there is nothing more to photography than “You push the button - and we do the rest!” Endless discussions, leading into abstract and theoretical channels, have centered around the question as to whether a machine is able to produce a work of art. At the same time men like Hill and Stieglitz have disproved advertising slogans and ended hollow disputes by creating pictures which have challenged the standards set in any other art medium. Few people realize that there are two kinds of photographs: the average news photo which relies on bold contrasts of black and white, expressly made for reproduction purposes - and a photographic picture which can be as delicate as the coördination of the artist’s eye with a lens of miraculous optic precision on a plate sensitive enough to record the fineness of a ray invisible to the eye. Alfred Stieglitz has created such pictures. Examples of his work have been acquired by the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. Only a few years ago the Boston Museum of Art held an exhibition of three masters: Dürer, Goya, and Stieglitz. Based on an unequalled mastery of the technique, he has imbued his photographs with a passion of vision and emotion which raises the mechanical process into the realm of living art. We know 13
