Alfred Stieglitz, The Steerage, 1907, photograph, 33.34 x 26.51 cm (includes black border), Museum Library Purchase, 1965 (LACMA M.65.76.1) A conversation with Eve Schillo, Assistant Curator, Los Angeles County Museum of Art and Beth Harris
[0:00] [music]
Dr. Beth Harris: [0:06] We’re in the LACMA Study Center for Photography and Works on Paper, looking at probably one of the most important photographs of the 20th century, “The Steerage,” by Alfred Stieglitz.
Eve Schillo: [0:17] He came upon this image on a trip with his wife and daughter. They were not coming to America, but rather going to Europe. They were lucky enough to be in first class. This image is of the steerage, where the cheapest seats would be.
[0:31] So these are not, as is often perceived, immigrants coming to America but actually Europeans, some rejected at Ellis Island, some who came just on a worker visa.
Dr. Harris: [0:41] This has come to symbolize the experience of immigrants at the beginning of 20th century, and even the figure wearing a shawl has been understood as a Jewish figure wearing a prayer shawl. None of that is true.
Eve: [0:54] Analyzing a photograph has many other layers perhaps than traditional painting, where you know that that image came from the artist’s mind. This image, in the same way, came from the artist’s mind, [but] there’s some ambivalence I think, on his part, about where he fit in this scenario as a first-generation German Jewish American.
Dr. Harris: [1:14] At the bottom of the image, we see the steerage. Above, an observation deck that includes all types of people. It’s clear from Stieglitz’s later writings that he did feel somewhat ambivalent about traveling first class.
[1:30] He didn’t grow up in circumstances that would have allowed him normally to travel that way, and seemed to have felt stifled by it, and left that part of the ship to seek out different kinds of people in different circumstances. We do have this sense of this modern world, of people of all types coming together, of movement, of immigration.
[1:52] Yet, when Stieglitz talked about this image, he tended to emphasize the formal aspects of the photograph, the relationship of the shapes and lines to one another, and not the subject matter, the very thing that has drawn so many of us to it.
Eve: [2:09] That goes to his role as one of the fathers of photography. He really put this image out there. He was the one who was successful in making it appear in numerous magazines beyond its first iteration. In his own journal, “Camera Work” — this was a very influential photography journal — pushing forward the doctrine that photography could be fine art.
Dr. Harris: [2:30] Stieglitz himself said that “If all my photographs were lost and I’d be represented by just one, ‘The Steerage,’ I’d be satisfied.” What is it about this that meant so much to Stieglitz, who had such a long and important career?
Eve: [2:47] It was a turning point for him from pictorialist photography into modern photography. Pictorialism was a term that was used by photographers practicing at the same time who wanted their work to be accepted as fine art, but leaned on painting and drawing. Photographers were trying to blur the edges, have wonderful additional toning, so that it looked like everything other than a photograph.
[3:14] Stieglitz is ready to move on and to embrace all the inherent wonderfulness that comes through the camera. By having a mechanical tool as your device, photographers were, for a long time, not considered fine artists.
Dr. Harris: [3:29] Modern life being characterized by the machine and not turning away from that but embracing it.
Eve: [3:36] This is not a direct quote, but he would have said that the camera was the device to be used to document modern life.
Dr. Harris: [3:42] Stieglitz was especially interested in that oval shape of the straw hat.
Eve: [3:48] That directs you, but you start to see that geometric shape repeat and then you start to see other geometric shapes repeat. It’s satisfying for the eye, but it simultaneously does represent the swirl of modern life.
[4:00] Everything’s moving faster, people are going back and forth from one continent to another regularly enough that we have something called the steerage, and the pace of life is different. So the pacing within a composition changes too.
Dr. Harris: [4:13] It’s important to remember that he saw this, recognized it as a compelling composition that said something that he wanted to say, went to his cabin, got the camera, came back, and took this photo.
Eve: [4:29] His heart just beat faster, hoping when he came back that the specific start point in the composition, the straw hat at the upper deck, was still going to be in place.
Dr. Harris: [4:38] This is such an important photograph in the history of American photography, and it’s no surprise that contemporary artists look back to it and do their own versions of it.
Eve: [4:49] One of those photographers who’s tackled this iconic image is Vik Muniz. [He] started his career re-appropriating existing imagery and making us look at it anew. He would work with materials such as dirt, dust, gold.
Dr. Harris: [5:04] And here, chocolate sauce.
Eve: [5:06] Which can represent the darks and the lights of photography.
Dr. Harris: [5:10] And so he’s doing this as performance, remaking this work in an odd medium and then photographing it.
Eve: [5:16] Muniz is doing that kind of tongue-in-cheek, but also to point out the fact that photography has inherent mutability. The truths that are in photographs can constantly be questioned.
[5:26] [music]
Alfred Stieglitz, The Steerage, 1907, photogravure, 33.3 x 26.5 cm (Los Angeles County Museum of Art)
First class
After his 8-year-old daughter Kitty finished the school year and he closed his Fifth Avenue art gallery for the summer, Alfred Stieglitz gathered her, his wife Emmeline, and Kitty’s governess for their second excursion to Europe as a family. The Stieglitzes departed for Paris on May 14, 1907, aboard the first-class quarters of the fashionable ship Kaiser Wilhelm II.
Although Emmeline looked forward to shopping in Paris and to visiting her relatives in Germany, Stieglitz was anything but enthusiastic about the trip. His marriage to status-conscious Emmeline had become particularly stressful amid rumors about his possible affair with the tarot-card illustrator/artist Pamela Coleman Smith. In addition, Stieglitz felt out of place in the company of his fellow upper-class passengers. But it was precisely this discomfort among his peers that prompted him to take a photograph that would become one of the most important in the history of photography. In his 1942 account “How The Steerage Happened,” Stieglitz recalls:
How I hated the atmosphere of the first class on that ship. One couldn’t escape the ‘nouveau riches.’ […]
On the third day out I finally couldn’t stand it any longer. I had to get away from that company. I went as far forward on the deck as I could […]
As I came to the end of the desk [sic] I stood alone, looking down. There were men and women and children on the lower deck of the steerage. There was a narrow stairway leading up to the upper deck of the steerage, a small deck at the bow of the steamer.
To the left was an inclining funnel and from the upper steerage deck there was fastened a gangway bridge which 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. Only men were on the upper deck. The whole scene fascinated me. I longed to escape from my surroundings and join these people.
Detail, Alfred Stieglitz, The Steerage, 1907, photogravure, 33.3 x 26.5 cm (Los Angeles County Museum of Art)
In this essay, written 35 years after he took the photograph, Stieglitz describes how The Steerage encapsulated his career’s mission to elevate photography to the status of fine art by engaging the same dialogues around abstraction that preoccupied European avant-garde painters:
A round straw hat, the funnel leading out, the stairway leaning right, the white drawbridge with its railings 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 stood spellbound for a while, looking and looking. Could I photograph what I felt, looking and looking and still looking? I saw shapes related to each other. I saw a picture of shapes and underlying that the feeling I had about life. […]
Spontaneously I raced to the main stairway of the steamer, chased down to my cabin, got my Graflex, raced back again all out of breath, wondering whether the man with the straw hat had moved or not. If he had, the picture I had seen would no longer be. The relationship of shapes as I wanted them would have been disturbed and the picture lost.
But there was the man with the straw hat. He hadn’t moved. The man with the crossed white suspenders showing his back, he too, talking to a man, hadn’t moved. And the woman with a child on her lap, sitting on the floor, hadn’t moved. Seemingly, no one had changed position.
[…It] would be a picture based on related shapes and on the deepest human feeling, a step in my own evolution, a spontaneous discovery.
Hindsight
With this account, Stieglitz argues with the benefit of more than three decades of hindsight that The Steerage suggests that photographs have more than just a “documentary” voice that speaks to the truth-to-appearance of subjects in a field of space within narrowly defined slice of time. Rather, The Steerage calls for a more complex, layered view of photography’s essence that can accommodate and convey abstraction. (Indeed, later photographers Minor White and Aaron Siskind would engage this project further in direct dialogue with the Abstract Expressionist painting.)
Stieglitz is often criticized for overlooking the subjects of his photograph in this essay, which has become the account by which the photograph is discussed in our histories. But in his account for The Steerage, Stieglitz also calls attention to one of the contradictions of photography: its ability to provide more than just an abstract interpretation, too. The Steerage is not only about the “significant form” of shapes, forms and textures, but it also conveys a message about its subjects, immigrants who were rejected at Ellis Island, or who were returning to their old country to see relatives and perhaps to encourage others to return to the United States with them.
Detail, Alfred Stieglitz, The Steerage, 1907, photogravure, 33.3 x 26.5 cm (Los Angeles County Museum of Art)
Ghastly conditions
As a reader of mass-marketed magazines, Stieglitz would have been familiar with the debates about immigration reform and the ghastly conditions to which passengers in steerage were subjected. Stieglitz’s father had come to America in 1849, during a historic migration of 1,120,000 Germans to the United States between 1845 and 1855. His father became a wool trader and was so successful that he retired by age 48. By all accounts, Stieglitz’s father exemplified the “American dream” that was just beyond the grasp of many of the subjects of The Steerage.
Moreover, investigative reporter Kellogg Durland traveled undercover as steerage in 1906 and wrote of it: “I can, and did, more than once, eat my plate of macaroni after I had picked out the worms, the water bugs, and on one occasion, a hairpin. But why should these things ever be found in the food served to passengers who are paying $36.00 for their passage?”
Still, Stieglitz was conflicted about the issue of immigration. While he was sympathetic to the plight of aspiring new arrivals, Stieglitz was opposed to admitting the uneducated and marginal to the United States of America—despite his claims of sentiment for the downtrodden. Perhaps this may explain his preference to avoid addressing the subject of The Steerage, and to see in this photograph not a political statement, but a place for arguing the value of photography as a fine art.
