When I first picked up Camera Work – The Complete Photographs (Taschen 2022) I didn’t think that that the soft low key pictures from the early 20th Century would have much to say to me. But they drew me in to that now remote world in which photographers from across Europe and the United States were trying to develop a new photographic language, to establish photography as an art in its own right, not a mimetic medium in thrall to painting.
The images are complemented by an essay (in English, French and German) on the development of the eponymous magazine and the central role of the complicated, difficult and visionary Alfred Stieglitz, who is rightly seen as a prophet of modernism. Stieglitz found photography soft and pictorial, widened the vision of the medium, embraced the city as a suitable subject and looked for objective reality. In the final editions (Nos 49/50, 1917) devoted to the work of Paul Strand he left it direct and hard, devoid of tricks with no attempt to confuse or mystify the viewer. It was the birth of modern, straight photography. It is a book I shall go back to, an unexpected source of inspiration.
