The pioneering photographer Alfred Stieglitz was best known for his atmospheric cityscapes, portraits, and studies of clouds. As a gallery owner, publisher, writer, and tireless promotor of modern art, he was one of the leading creative figures of the 20th century. Stieglitz also shot what critics consider to be the most important photograph of his era—titled The Steerage—and he was an early advocate of photography as a fine art on the same level as painting and sculpture.
One of Stieglitz’s lesser-known works is a photographic series of 19th-century fishing vessels working under sail along the coast of Katwijk, Netherlands. He created the images in 1894 while on honeymoon in Europe with his first wife. At the Dutch seaside village of Katwijk aan Zee, he spent multiple days shooting large format glass-plate negatives of fishermen beaching their boats at the end of each haul. The result is a remarkable record not only of early fine-art photography but also of a bygone era in which coastal regions worldwide relied on sailing vessels and expert seamanship to sustain their communities.
Early Days in Europe
Born in 1862 in Hoboken, New Jersey, Alfred Stieglitz moved with his family to Germany when he was only 17. He studied mechanical engineering at the Technical Institute of Berlin. While taking a chemistry class, he learned about the chemical processes for developing photographs, a revelation that would guide the rest of his career.
When his family moved back to America in 1884, the 20-year-old Stieglitz stayed in Europe to travel and photograph the countryside of Holland, Italy, and Germany with his first camera, a tripod mounted large-format device. As Stieglitz photographed the laborers and landscapes of Europe, he began to develop artistic ideas that would come to define the photography movement known as pictorialism.
The pictorialists, including Stieglitz, insisted that photography could be a fine art rather than mere documentation. To prove their point, they experimented with lighting, composition, focus, development processes, and printing to emphasize the emotion of their photographs instead of the simple reproduction of a scene. During this period, Stieglitz also began writing magazine articles about photography and winning awards for his images.
The Katwyk Series
When Stieglitz returned to America in 1890, he was thoroughly dedicated to his craft yet refused to sell his work. His father, a wealthy businessman, set him up with a photography printing business so that he might earn a living with his chosen craft. Despite Stieglitz’s growing reputation as an artist, his photography enterprise made little profit.
In 1893, he entered a reportedly loveless marriage to a 20-year-old brewery heiress named Emmeline Obermeyer. During their honeymoon in Europe, Stieglitz found himself captivated by the fishermen of Katwijk and their daring beach landings.
Each day Stieglitz observed the ships as they sailed ashore under the stoic watch of family members and neighbors. At high tide, the shallow-draft vessels sailed as close as possible. Then men on horseback waded out to meet the ships, grab their anchor lines, and transfer the lines to shore crew. As the tide receded, the boats remained beached, and horse-drawn carts rolled into the shallow surf to unload each day’s catch. When the tide came back in, the boats floated and headed out to sea once again.
In His Own Words
Stieglitz described this scene in the late 19th-century periodical The Photographic Times:
“An hour distant from Amsterdam, the spires of the Casino at Scheveningen within sight, yet as far off as if hundreds of miles separated Katwyk from the capital city of Holland and its most famous watering place. As Gutach lives off its land Katwyk lives off the ocean. Fishermen and their boats, and the houses built to resist rude storms, are the themes here on which artists frame their poems, and the people are like the phase of nature that surrounds them. Immense in stature, hardy, brave beyond belief, stoical from long habit, seeing brother, father, son and husband leave on their perilous fishing trips far out in the North Sea, not knowing when or whether at all they will return, welcoming them with a simple handshake, no embrace, no tender kiss for the returning hero, for hero he is.”
The Vessel Types
The vessels in these photographs are a type of Dutch workboat known as a bomschuit (pl. bomschuiten). Their conspicuously rounded hulls featured a flat bottom that allowed them to be dragged ashore and beached. They have leeboards rather than traditional keels, making for a bulky but shallow-draft work boat that was popular along shorelines of the 19th-century Netherlands. Stieglitz was not the only artist captivated by this windswept drama. The Dutch artist Hendrik Willem Mesdag is famous for featuring bomshuiten in his paintings, and the coastline of this region figures in the work of many well-known artists, including Vincent van Gogh.
Meanwhile, back in America
As his reputation continued to grow, Stieglitz focused on promoting photography as a fine art. He was one of the first two Americans elected to join the elite British photographic society called The Linked Ring, and he served as vice-president of the Camera Club of New York. Stieglitz converted the club’s newsletter into a magazine called Camera Notes, which was soon recognized as the world’s foremost photography publication. He later founded his own periodical called Camera Work, the first photography publication to be primarily visual.
In 1905, he founded an internationally famous gallery known as 291, but it was financially sluggish. In 1907 he made less than $400 off his photographs and the gallery, but that was also the year he took one of the most important images of all time.
The scene is titled The Steerage and it captures the conditions of lower-class passengers—many of them likely immigrants who had been turned away from the United States—sailing back to Europe as middle-class passengers look on from above. By then he was shooting a hand-held 4 x 5 plate camera, and his seemingly simple composition is considered the first photograph to constitute both a statement of its time as well as a work of early modern art. In short, it was the first modern photograph.
Stieglitz, O’Keefe, and Modern Art
Through his galleries, writing, and promotional efforts, Stieglitz went on to introduce European modern art to America. He helped pave the way for an avante-garde movement that, most famously, included his future wife, the abstractionist painter Georgia O’Keefe. Their first meeting, however, was less than amorous.
In 1916, unbeknownst to O’Keefe, Stieglitz presented a collection of her early charcoal drawings at his 291 gallery that he had acquired through a mutual acquaintance. O’Keefe confronted Stieglitz and chastised him for displaying her work without permission. But Stieglitz, 23 years her elder, was infatuated with the young artist, and eventually, their initial confrontation bloomed into a romance.
A “Collusional” Affair
In 1924, Stieglitz divorced his wife, Emmy, and within four months he married O’Keefe. She became the muse he had always wanted, and many of his most famous works are portraits and nudes of O’Keefe. Over the years, however, their relationship became increasingly strained by his infidelity, the age gap, personal turmoil, and differing artistic visions. Stieglitz spent most of his time in New York attending to his gallery enterprises and promoting his wife’s work, while O’Keefe retreated to the desert southwest for its solitude and inspiration.
Despite the tumult and estrangement, their marriage endured until 1946, when Alfred Stieglitz suffered a stroke and fell into a coma. O’Keefe traveled to New York and was with him when he died at the age of 82.
After his death, O’Keefe assembled what she believed to be her late husband’s best images and, in 1949, donated them to the National Gallery of Art. She referred to this collection of Stieglitz’s early pictorialism photographs as the Key Set. In 1980 she made a second donation of his later, more modernist work. The beach landings at Katwijk are part of the first Key Set. They are republished here with permission from the National Gallery of Art.
