Biography (Courtesy of Christian Peterson)
 
Stieglitz was the fountainhead of American artistic photography, about whom much is published. He produced iconic images, promoted the work of others, published periodicals, and ran galleries. He started as a naturalistic photographer in the 1880s, turned into a pictorialist around the turn of the twentieth century, and then worked as a modernist from the time of World War I.
 
Alfred Stieglitz was born on January 1, 1864, in Hoboken, New Jersey, but from the time he was seven lived primarily in New York. In 1881, he went with his family to Europe and a few years later began studying photography in Berlin. He soon was writing technical articles for the photographic press and in 1887 won his first prize for a photograph. Stieglitz returned to America in 1890 and for the next five years helped run the Photochrome Engraving Company, where he learned about printing.
 
In 1891, he joined the Society of Amateur Photographers of New York, commencing a long period of activity with fellow camera workers. He edited the American Amateur Photographer for a few years and then helped found the Camera Club of New York in 1896. He presented a one-person exhibition of his work at the club in 1899 and founded and edited its quarterly Camera Notes (1897-1903).
 
Stieglitz organized and ran the Photo-Secession, an elite group of creative photographers, and its allied periodical and gallery. After the group’s inaugural exhibition in 1902, he began publishing Camera Work (1903-1917), the world’s most beautiful magazine of photography. In 1905, with the help of Edward Steichen, he opened the Little Galleries of the Photo-Secession, later known as 291 for its address on Fifth Avenue. Here, Stieglitz presented not only the work of advanced pictorial photographers like Gertrude Käsebier and Clarence H. White, but also the then little-known art of European painters such as Cézanne, Matisse, and Picasso. He was responsible for numerous large, museum-sponsored exhibitions of artistic photographs and was involved in the important 1913 Armory Show of modern art.
 
After closing 291 in 1917, he ran two additional galleries in New York. The first was the Intimate Gallery, in the late 1920s; the second was An American Place, from 1929 until his death. The exhibitions at both galleries focused on a small group of American modernist painters, including John Marin, Marsden Hartley, and Georgia O’Keeffe, whom he married in 1924. During this time, Stieglitz was making both photographic portraits of O’Keeffe and a series of cloud pictures he termed Equivalents, two of his most important bodies of work.
 
Late in life, he gifted his own photographs plus his collection of the work of many pictorialists to the Metropolitan Museum of Art. After Stieglitz died on July 13, 1946, his ashes were buried at Lake George, in upstate New York, where he and his family had summered much of his life.
 
Christian A. Peterson Pictorial Photography at the Minneapolis Institute of Arts (Christian A. Peterson: Privately printed, 2012)
 
This biography is courtesy and copyright of Christian Peterson and is included here with permission.
 
Date last updated: 1 June 2013.
 
Biography provided by Focal press
 
The 20th century's greatest champion of photography as an art form. Editor of Camera Notes, the journal of the Camera Club of New York, Stieglitz soon became leader of the Pictorialist movement in New York, co-founder of the Photo-Secession in 1902, and editor and publisher of the masterful periodical Camera Work from 1903 to 1917. With Steichen's assistance, his Little Galleries of the Photo-Secession, later called 291, then The Intimate Gallery (1925-1929), and An American Place (1929–1946) first showcased in America the new modern art from Europe by Picasso, Matisse, Braque, Cézanne, Brancusi, and Rodin and introduced American painters O'Keeffe, Marin, Hartley, and Dove. Exhibiting painting with photography, his gallery showed photographers Clarence White, Coburn, Strand, Steichen, Adams, and Porter. Abandoning the soft-focus aesthetic of Pictorialism by World War I, Stieglitz became a staunch advocate of straight photography, adopting less self-conscious methods to depict the fast-paced cacophony that defined modern life, and simplifying his compositions to clarify light and form. His highly regarded images using a hand-held camera of the streets of New York City, portraits of his wife, the painter Georgia O'Keeffe, and his "equivalents" series of cloud studies that were analogs for emotional experience, helped realize the profoundly metaphorical possibilities of the medium.
 
(Author: GW)
 
Michael Peres (Editor-in-Chief), 2007, Focal Encyclopedia of Photography, 4th edition, (Focal Press) [ISBN-10: 0240807405, ISBN-13: 978-0240807409] (Used with permission)
 
Wikipedia
 
Alfred Stieglitz (; January 1, 1864 - July 13, 1946) was an American photographer and modern art promoter who was instrumental over his 50-year career in making photography an accepted art form. In addition to his photography, Stieglitz was known for the New York art galleries that he ran in the early part of the 20th century, where he introduced many avant-garde European artists to the U.S. He was married to painter Georgia O'Keeffe.