‘Beauty is the universal seen’: objectivity as trained vision in Alfred Stieglitz’s experimental aesthetics

Abstract

A pioneer of avant-garde photography and a former student of the German chemist August Wilhelm Hofmann, Alfred Stieglitz is an instructive example of how artists related to, and challenged, the status of photographic representations at the turn of the twentieth century. I examine Stieglitz’s contributions to photography in the light of his early engagement with experimental science and claim that his scientific training shaped his experimental aesthetics. I frame my discussion around the theoretical considerations that informed – and still inform – aesthetic debates around the supposed objective status of photography and argue that Stieglitz’s approach, in its connection with science, offers a fruitful way of thinking about objectivity as trained vision.