Alfred Stieglitz American Gallery

The Terminal, 1893 (printed 1911). Creator: Alfred Stieglitz (American, 1864-1946)

The Terminal, 1893 (printed 1911). Never modest, Stieglitz declared this work to be a milestone, ushering in a "new era of photography, of seeing." The subject is a mundane, gritty scene of a streetcar driver watering his horses at the end of the line. Stieglitz rejected hard, mechanical detail, instead employing snow, steam, and the frozen breath of the horses to create atmosphere. Wandering lower Manhattan in the aftermath of a blizzard, he captured not only a document of the rapidly changing modern city, but also a record of his own emotions manifested in the world around him. A leader of the Pictorialist movement, Stieglitz organized major exhibitions and published the journal Camera Work from 1903 to 1917

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