The Last Joke, Bellagio, also known as The Good Joke, is a black and white photograph taken by Alfred Stieglitz during a Summer travel to Italy in 1887. He was then living and studying in Germany and decided to travel through several cities of Italy at the Summer.
Stieglitz visited, among other places, Bellagio, on Lake Como, Lombardy, where he took several photographs, often depicting landscapes and folk scenes. This one was part of the group that he took while at Bellagio. The picture depicts a scene taken from the natural, without any artificiality, and depicts several children and youngsters of both genders laughing apparently at a joke that a woman in the fountain just said. It is closely cropped, focusing on the children, with architectural arches in the background providing a stage set for the image. [1]
Stieglitz sent twelve photographs that he took during this travel to the magazine The Amateur Photographer's Photographic Holiday Work Competition. This picture appeared at the 25 November 1887 issue, and was considered the only spontaneous work in the competition, judged by British photographer Peter Henry Emerson, where it won the first prize. [2]
There are at least three prints of this photograph kept at the collections of the National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C., the Museum of Modern Art, New York, and at a private collection. [3]
Georgia Totto O'Keeffe was an American modernist painter and draftswoman whose career spanned seven decades and whose work remained largely independent of major art movements. Called the "Mother of American modernism", O'Keeffe gained international recognition for her meticulous paintings of natural forms, particularly flowers and desert-inspired landscapes, which were often drawn from and related to places and environments in which she lived.
Alfred Stieglitz was an American photographer and modern art promoter who was instrumental over his 50-year career in making photography an accepted art form. In addition to his photography, Stieglitz was known for the New York art galleries that he ran in the early part of the 20th century, where he introduced many avant-garde European artists to the U.S. He was married to painter Georgia O'Keeffe.
291 is the commonly known name for an internationally famous art gallery that was located in Midtown Manhattan at 291 Fifth Avenue in New York City from 1905 to 1917. Originally called the "Little Galleries of the Photo-Secession", the gallery was established and managed by photographer Alfred Stieglitz.
Gertrude Käsebier was an American photographer. She was known for her images of motherhood, her portraits of Native Americans, and her promotion of photography as a career for women.
Clarence Hudson White was an American photographer, teacher and a founding member of the Photo-Secession movement. He grew up in small towns in Ohio, where his primary influences were his family and the social life of rural America. After visiting the World's Columbian Exposition in Chicago in 1893, he took up photography. Although he was completely self-taught in the medium, within a few years he was internationally known for his pictorial photographs that captured the spirit and sentimentality of America in the early twentieth century. As he became well known for his images, White was sought out by other photographers who often traveled to Ohio to learn from him. He became friends with Alfred Stieglitz and helped advance the cause of photography as a true art form. In 1906 White and his family moved to New York City in order to be closer to Stieglitz and his circle and to further promote his own work. While there he became interested in teaching photography and in 1914 he established the Clarence H. White School of Photography, the first educational institution in America to teach photography as art. Due to the demands of his teaching duties, his own photography declined and White produced little new work during the last decade of his life. In 1925 he suffered a heart attack and died while teaching students in Mexico City.
Camera Work was a quarterly photographic journal published by Alfred Stieglitz from 1903 to 1917. It presented high-quality photogravures by some of the most important photographers in the world, with the goal to establish photography as a fine art. It has been called "consummately intellectual", "by far the most beautiful of all photographic magazines", and "a portrait of an age [in which] the artistic sensibility of the nineteenth century was transformed into the artistic awareness of the present day."
Dorothy Norman was an American photographer, writer, editor, arts patron and advocate for social change.
Myra Albert Wiggins (1869–1956) was an American painter and pictorial photographer who became a member of the important early 20th century Photo-Secession movement.
The Steerage is a black and white photograph taken by Alfred Stieglitz in 1907. It has been hailed as one of the greatest photographs of all time because it captures in a single image both a formative document of its time and one of the first works of artistic modernism.
There were men and women and children on the lower deck of the steerage. There was a narrow stairway leading to the upper deck of the steerage, a small deck right on the bow with the steamer.
To the left was an inclining funnel and from the upper steerage deck there was fastened a gangway bridge that was glistening in its freshly painted state. It was rather long, white, and during the trip remained untouched by anyone.
On the upper deck, looking over the railing, there was a young man with a straw hat. The shape of the hat was round. He was watching the men and women and children on the lower steerage deck...A round straw hat, the funnel leaning left, the stairway leaning right, the white drawbridge with its railing made of circular chains – white suspenders crossing on the back of a man in the steerage below, round shapes of iron machinery, a mast cutting into the sky, making a triangular shape...I saw shapes related to each other. I was inspired by a picture of shapes and underlying that the feeling I had about life."
Equivalents is a series of photographs of clouds taken by Alfred Stieglitz from 1925 to 1934. They are generally recognized as the first photographs intended to free the subject matter from literal interpretation, and, as such, are some of the first completely abstract photographic works of art.
Wall Street is a platinum palladium print photograph by the American photographer Paul Strand taken in 1915. There are currently only two vintage prints of this photograph with one at the Whitney Museum of American Art and the other, along with negatives, at the Philadelphia Museum of Art. This photograph was included in Paul Strand, circa 1916, an exhibition of photographs that exemplify his push toward modernism.
The practice and appreciation of photographyin the United States began in the 19th century, when various advances in the development of photography took place and after daguerreotype photography was introduced in France in 1839. The earliest commercialization of photography was made in the country when Alexander Walcott and John Johnson opened the first commercial portrait gallery in 1840. In 1866, the first color photograph was taken. Only in the 1880s, would photography expand to a mass audience with the first easy-to-use, lightweight Kodak camera, issued by George Eastman and his company.
Winter, Fifth Avenue is a black and white photograph taken by Alfred Stieglitz in 1893. The photograph was made at the corner of the Fifth Avenue and the 35th Street in New York. It was one of the first pictures that Stieglitz took using a more practical hand camera after his return from Europe.
Spring Showers, the Coach is a black and white photograph taken by Alfred Stieglitz in 1899–1900. The picture was published in the Camera Notes journal in January 1902. Sometimes it is incorrectly presented as being taken in 1902.
Steel: Armco, Middletown, Ohio is a black and white photograph taken by American photographer Edward Weston in 1922. The picture has the dimensions of 23 by 17,4 cm.
From the Back Window - 291 is a black and white photograph taken by Alfred Stieglitz in 1915. The picture was taken at night from a back window of his 291 gallery in New York. Its one of the several that he took that year from that window, including at a snowy Winter.
Georgia O'Keeffe - Hands, also known as Georgia O'Keeffe (Hands), is a black and white photograph taken by Alfred Stieglitz in 1919. It is part of a large group of more than 300 photographs that he took of the painter Georgia O'Keeffe, from 1917 prior to their 1924 marriage, through 1937.
Georgia O'Keeffe - Torso, also known as Georgia O'Keeffe - Nude, is a black and white photograph taken by Alfred Stieglitz in 1918. It is one of the more than 300 photographs that he took of his future wife, the painter Georgia O'Keeffe.
Bowls, also known as Abstraction, Bowls, is a black and white photograph taken by Paul Strand in 1916. The photograph has elements of cubism and abstractionism, and exemplifies his style at the time.
The White Fence, also known as The White Fence, Port Kent, New York, is a black and white photograph taken by American photographer Paul Strand, in 1916. The picture was published in the magazine Camera Work, in June 1917, whose editor was Alfred Stieglitz, where it was highly praised by him, specially for its "abstract qualities". It would be later published as part of Paul Strand: Portfolio Three (1976-1977).