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I was sad to leave Europe in 1890, after my student days in Germany... But then, once back in New York, I experienced an intense longing for Europe, for its vital tradition of music, theatre, art, craftsmanship... I felt bewildered and lonely. How was I to use myself?

Alfred Stieglitz

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Alfred Stieglitz
Age: 81 †
Born: 1864
Born: January 1
Died: 1946
Died: January 1
Exhibition Curator
Photographer
Photography Critic
Publisher
Hoboken
New Jersey
Alfred Steiglitz
Students
Germany
Leave
Loneliness
Days
Intense
Craftsmanship
Use
Theatre
Bewildered
Felt
Lonely
Vital
Art
Tradition
Student
Back
York
Experienced
Music
Europe
Longing

More quotes by Alfred Stieglitz

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The camera was waiting for me by predestination and I took to it as a musician takes to the piano or a painter to canvas. I found that I was master of the elements, that I could work miracles.
Alfred Stieglitz
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We had many books and pictures... my parents' way of life doubtless left a lasting impression on me. They created an atmosphere in which a certain kind of freedom could exist. This may well account for my seeking a related sense of liberty as I grew up.
Alfred Stieglitz
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Snow. White, white, white, soft and clean, and maddening shapes, with the whole world in them.
Alfred Stieglitz
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My photographs are a picture of the chaos in the world, and of my relationship to that chaos. My prints show the world’s constant upsetting of man’s equilibrium, and his eternal battle to reestablish it.
Alfred Stieglitz
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All art, like all love, is rooted in heartache.
Alfred Stieglitz
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Beautiful dreams - if the world were more beautiful they would come true - But the world is relentless & cruel - people are - they must be, I suppose, or they could not live.
Alfred Stieglitz
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The arts equally have distinct departments, and unless photography has its own possibilities of expression, separate from those of the other arts, it is merely a process, not an art.
Alfred Stieglitz
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I have a vision of life, and I try to find equivalents for it in the form of photographs.
Alfred Stieglitz
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The goal of art was the vital expression of self.
Alfred Stieglitz
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If you can imagine photography in the guise of a woman and you’d ask her what she thought of Stieglitz, she’d say: He always treated me like a gentleman.
Alfred Stieglitz
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Standing up here on the hill away from all humans - seeing these Wonders taking place before one's eyes - so silently... watching the silence of Nature. No school - no church - is as good a teacher as the eye understandingly seeing what's before it. I believe this more firmly than ever.
Alfred Stieglitz
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In photography there is a reality so subtle that it becomes more real than reality.
Alfred Stieglitz
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I do not object to retouching, dodging or accentuation as long as they do not interfere with the natural qualities of photographic technique.
Alfred Stieglitz
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My ideal is to achieve the ability to produce numberless prints from each negative, prints all significantly alive, yet indistinguishably alike, and to be able to circulate them at a price not higher than that of a popular magazine, or even a daily paper. To gain that ability there has been no choice but to follow the road I have chosen.
Alfred Stieglitz
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Photography is my passion.
Alfred Stieglitz
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Technically perfect, pictorially rotten. (Stieglitz's standard comment on photographs he rejected for publication in The American Amateur Photographer.)
Alfred Stieglitz
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Several people feel I have photographed God. May be.
Alfred Stieglitz
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I detest tradition for tradition's sake the half-alive that which is not real. I feel no hatred of individuals, but of customs, traditions superstitions that go against life, against truth, against the reality of experience, against the spontaneous living out of the sense of wonder-of fresh experience, freshly seen and communicated.
Alfred Stieglitz
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To demand the portrait that will be a complete portrait of a person is as futile as to demand that a motion picture be condensed into a single still.
Alfred Stieglitz
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Before the people at large, and for that matter, the artists themselves, understand what photography really means, as I understand that term, it is essential for them to be taught the real meaning of art.
Alfred Stieglitz