1900s
20th century
A01=Elizabeth Anne McCauley
A01=Jason Francisco
academic
aesthetics
american photographer
Author_Elizabeth Anne McCauley
Author_Jason Francisco
Category=AJCD
coffee table book
ellis island
eq_art-fashion-photography
eq_bestseller
eq_isMigrated=1
eq_isMigrated=2
eq_nobargain
eq_non-fiction
essay collection
europe
famous photograph
immigrant experience
immigration
modernist art
modernist photography
passenger ship
photo historian
photograph
photographs
photography
scholarly
social problems
social studies
stieglitz
the steerage
Product details
- ISBN 9780520266230
- Weight: 272g
- Dimensions: 152 x 203mm
- Publication Date: 13 Mar 2012
- Publisher: University of California Press
- Publication City/Country: US
- Product Form: Paperback
Secure
checkout
Fast Shipping
Easy returns
When, in 1907, Alfred Stieglitz took a simple picture of passengers on a ship bound for Europe, he could not have known that "The Steerage", as it was soon called, would become a modernist icon and, from today's vantage, arguably the most famous photograph made by an American photographer. In complementary essays, a photo historian and a photographer reassess this important picture, rediscovering the complex social and aesthetic ideas that informed it and explaining how over the years it has achieved its status as a masterpiece. What aspects of Stieglitz's ideas and sometimes-murky ambitions help us understand the picture's achievements? How should we assess the photograph in relation to Stieglitz's many writings about it? The authors of this book explore what "The Steerage" might mean in at least two senses - by itself, as a grand and self-sufficient work, and also ineluctably bound up with the many stories told about it. They make the photograph, today, what Stieglitz himself made it over the years - a photo-text work.
Jason Francisco is an acclaimed photographer and the Chair of the Visual Arts Department at Emory University. He is the author of Far From Zion: Jews, Diaspora, Memory (Stanford, 2006). Elizabeth Anne McCauley is David H. McAlpin Professor of the History of Photography and Modern Art at Princeton University and the author of Industrial Madness: Commercial Photography in Paris 1848-71 (Yale, 1994).
