Abstract
The Metropolitan Museum of Art (MMA) holds a significant portion of the personal art collection of Alfred Stieglitz (1864-1946), photographer, publisher, gallery dealer and champion of photography. The Department of Photographic is home to 733 photographic objects by Stieglitz and artists whose work he collected, and 349 publications from Stieglitz's library, including his personal set of Camera Work, a journal he conceived published, and edited from 1903 to 1917. This thesis is an applied project that focuses on cataloguing Camera Work in The Museum System (TMS), the MMA's collection database system. The 191 prints and photographs in the Stieglitz Collection, which are associated with reproductions in the journal, are cross-referenced within the newly created bibliographic records. The thesis provides background information on Stieglitz, his collection at the MMA and Camera Work, along with detailed description of the project, cataloguing methodology, and an illustrated appendix listing and illustrating each of the 191 collection objects with their respective issues and reproduction methods.
Highlights
INTRODUCTIONThe photographer, publisher, gallery dealer, and champion of photography Alfred Stieglitz (1864-1946) donated his library, his own work, and that of other painters, sculptors, and photographers to the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City (MMA)in a series of donations in 1922, 1928, and 1933
While there are more than seven hundred photographs in the Department of Photographs from the Stieglitz Collection, this thesis focuses only on a portion of these: the photographs accessioned in 1933 and 1949, and the set of Camera Work that came to the museum in 1953; the 191 photographs in the collection that were reproduced or are associated with reproductions in the periodical Camera Work
There are additional photographs in the MMA collection, which are not part of the AS Collection, that appear in Camera Work, but in an effort to limit the scope of this project I chose to focus only on Stieglitz's personal collection
Summary
The photographer, publisher, gallery dealer, and champion of photography Alfred Stieglitz (1864-1946) (figs. 1 and 9) donated his library, his own work, and that of other painters, sculptors, and photographers to the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City (MMA). Unique qualities of the photographic medium, which had been seen by Pictorialists as inherent limitations During this time, Stieglitz's personal view of what constituted art photography had shifted toward this modernist approach, and nothing is more evident of this shift than the fact that the final issue of Camera Work was entirely devoted to the photographs of the young modernist photographer Paul Strand (1890-1976). The Department of Photographs at the MMA is fortunate in that there are two complete sets of Camera Work in the collection, one reserved for exhibition purposes and one used for research, each of which came from Alfred Stieglitz's personal collection
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