Alfred Stieglitz does not need the Lens blog to enhance his reputation.
So there is no real point in urging readers to see the exhibition “Alfred Stieglitz New York” at the Seaport Museum, whose curator describes it as the first show of the master’s collected New York photographs in 78 years. We know that if you can see this show, you will.
And if you can’t see the show in person, you can buy the accompanying book, written by Bonnie Yochelson, the curator of the exhibition, and published by Skira Rizzoli at the attractive price of $25.
Rather than dwell on Stieglitz himself, then, let’s take a look at the design craft that went into making the show even more appealing. Dr. Yochelson is our guide, but she gives a lot of credit to Sandy Hirshkowitz and Casey Maher of the design company Rack & Pinion.
A visitor might first be struck by the Auto Graflex camera in the display case that opens the show. This monster passed for portable a century ago. It is easy to cultivate new respect for the compositional skills and steady hands of photographers at the turn of the 20th century.
“Stieglitz was a street photographer,” Dr. Yochelson said, “but people have no idea that a handheld camera was something like this.”
Around the corner, the first gallery opens, covering Stieglitz’s work from 1892 to 1917. The room has been divided by a temporary wall with a portal at its center, to evoke as closely as possible the proportions of the Little Galleries of the Photo-Secession at 291 Fifth Avenue, better known simply as “291,” which were designed by Edward Steichen. Steichen turned the lease over to Stieglitz in 1905.
The installation doesn’t mean to slavishly imitate the Arts and Crafts original. But it does have a chair rail, as the original galleries did, to which the captions have been affixed instead of being placed on the walls. That compels a visitor to confront the image before getting wrapped up in its provenance.
“You spend time looking and feeling what you see, instead of being satisfied with what some art historian tells you and moving on to the next thing,” Dr. Yochelson said, in an admirably candid assessment for an art historian to make.
Another subtle but critical step in eliminating distraction around the images is the uniformity of frames. When you think about it, it’s astonishing that they are consistent, since the prints came from more than a dozen lenders, including the Philadelphia Museum of Art and the Metropolitan Museum of Art.
It’s not that they allowed the Seaport Museum to reframe their artwork. Instead, Dr. Yochelson explained, the Seaport Museum sent the frames out to the lending institutions, which remounted the pictures themselves before shipping them.
A triptych in the first gallery offers an instructive view of how mutably Stieglitz regarded his own work. The first print of “Winter, Fifth Avenue,” shows it as a vertical scene focused on a horse-drawn carriage. The second print has been retouched to eliminate elements like railroad ties in the foreground. The final version is a contact print showing that the original image was horizontal, with boys shoveling snow on either sides of the avenue; a much different composition.
The adjoining gallery displays Stieglitz’s work from 1930 to 1937 (there was a long interval between his early and late picture making in New York) and is meant to recall his gallery, An American Place, at Madison Avenue and 53rd Street. In an especially pleasing trompe-l’oeil moment, it appears — in a mural-sized enlargement of an Ansel Adams photo — as if Stieglitz himself is working intently in one corner of the gallery.
The final gallery embraces the work of Stieglitz’s contemporaries in prints, books, magazines and documentary films, helping place the master’s work in context. It is an invigorating way to leave the little
temples of art that preceded it and a marvelous segue into the adjoining exhibition on the fabled ocean liner, the Normandie.
“Alfred Stieglitz New York” runs through Jan. 10, 2011, at the Seaport Museum New York, 12 Fulton Street in Lower Manhattan, which was known until recently as the South Street Seaport Museum.
