Volume 46, Number 13 · August 12, 1999
Evangel of the Lens
By John Updike
Alfred Stieglitz: Photographs & Writings
second edition, edited by Sarah Greenough, by Juan Hamilton, with an introduction by Sarah Greenough
National Gallery of Art/Bulfinch Press/Little, Brown, 246 pp., $75.00
Stieglitz, O'Keeffe & American Modernism Connecticut, April 16-July 11, 1999.
by Elizabeth Mankin Kornhauser, by Amy Ellis, with Maura Lyons. Catalog of an exhibition at the Wadsworth Atheneum, Hartford,
Wadsworth Atheneum, 111 pp., $22.95 (paper)
Finely produced art books, like fine prints of photographic negatives, are not easily reproduced. In 1983 the National Gallery in Washington mounted its first exhibition devoted to photography, a show of seventy-three prints by Alfred Stieglitz, curated by Sarah Greenough and Juan Hamilton. Hamilton was an assistant to Stieglitz's widow, Georgia O'Keeffe, who in 1949 and 1980 had donated to the Gallery approximately 1,600 Stieglitz photographs; the photographer had died in 1946, at the age of eighty-two. O'Keeffe, who died in 1986 at the age of ninety-nine, took a loving hand in the 1983 show, providing not only its materials and her advice and expertise, but funding for the elegant catalog, designed by Eleanor Caponigro, with its tritone reproductions. With the financial support of the Eastman Kodak Company, whose changing standards of manufactured film and stock more than once infuriated the fastidious Stieglitz, the catalog, its original edition long out of print, has been reproduced in a second edition by 'the skilled craftsmen at Stamperia Valdonega, Verona.' Some pages of acknowledgment thank the many who have enabled the moving spirits 'to realize this dream and share this beautiful publication with a new generation,' and over forty pages at the end give, in thoughtfully arranged excerpts from letters and essays, Stieglitz's thoughts on photography.
Review, 3294 words
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