29.3.2023 Steerage by Alfred Stieglitz

The Steerage, Alfred Stieglitz, 1907

Alfred Stieglitz himself described when he photographed his famous picture The Steerage, a scene that brings (and merges) two different worlds literally on one ship, and in one image as if it gave him a choice.

The possibility of escape resides in a mystical identification with the Other: “I longed to escape from my surroundings and join these people.” I am reminded of Baudelaire’s brief fling as a republican editorialist during the 1848 revolution. The symbolist avenues away from the bourgeoisie are clearly defined: identification with the imaginary artistocracy, identification with Christianity, identification with Rosicrucianism, identification with Satanism, identification with the imaginary proletariat, identification with imaginary Tahitians, and so on. But the final Symbolist hideout is in the Imagination, and in the fetishized products of the Imagination. Stieglitz comes back to his wife with a glass negative from the other world. (Sekula, 1982, p. 465).

Reference

Sekula, A. (1982) On the Invention of Photographic Meaning. Macmillan Publishers Limited.