Photography Becomes Art Essay Example

the ship (Remy, 2014). It is at this point that he took a photo that has been a subject of discussion for years.

The steerage was regarded as the cheapest and lowest class in a boat of the ship, and it’s the easiest way that the poor people used to travel since they could not afford the first class. It was characterized by overcrowded conditions with little or no privacy, and most of the occupants of the steerage were the peasant immigrants and the poor people. The direct quote that was used by Stieglitz is that people in the steerage were convenient ‘positively packed like cattle’. This is to say that the traveling conditions of the people in the steerage were very uncomfortable and pathetic, to say the least. In comparison to the people traveling in the first class, the conditions were the exact opposite.

As pertains to the historical position of the steerage it was seen that civilization had not taken place as is evidenced by the poor immigrants who were the slaves for the rich at that time. The mention of the immigrants in the steerage creates a picture of colonization through the social displacement of the people hence making the steerage have a historical frame that can be attached to it. The immigrants who were poor were the forgotten and marginalized section of the society during the colonial and civilization period as is the case during the taking of the phenomenal photograph by Stieglitz.

The composition of the people in the steerage was men women and children. There was the invasion of personal space for the passengers in the steerage. This scene mesmerized Stieglitz as

all he could see different shapes due to the way the people were crowded. As regards to Cubism, the style of the composition of elements is similar to that in the steerage.

Cubism was the invention of Pablo Picasso besides Georges Braque in the early 1900’s. The similarity comes in the sense that both are pieces of art, and they adopt the traditional strategies of points of view, foreshortening, and modeling. Both the cubism and steerage were works of art that were undergoing a struggle for them to be considered as pieces of art and to be incorporated into fine art into galleries and museums (Kelsey, 2015). Similarly, cubism was made more appealing through the use of different painting of images, particularly in two -dimensional approaches. During the pictorialism era that Stieglitz was instrumental in advancing its agenda, the photos used to be enhanced by the use of different paints to make them more pleasing to look at. However, this changed at the end of pictorialism era.

Alfred Stieglitz was an American photographer and also a contemporary art supporter who was key over the fifty- year career that he had in making photography be recognized as an art. He was born on the 1st of January in 1864, and died July 13; 1946. He was married to Georgia O'Keefe. Stieglitz studied at the City College of New York (Ruchel, 2015). Stieglitz had also schooled in Germany as an engineer. In the final decades of his years, he majorly concentrated his time in managing his gallery as his deteriorated he could not make as many photographs as he did before. He is also regarded as the father of

photography due to the enormous achievements he accomplished in the art and photography world.

References

1. Remy, P. (2014). The Art of Fashion Photography. Munchen: Prestel.
2. Kelsey, R. (2015). Photography and the art of chance.
3. Ruchel-Stockmans, K. (2015). Images performing history: Photography and representations of the past in European art after 1989. Leuven: Leuven University Press.